ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 2018
tains to the development of plant and animal species. Descent with modification, as he more often calls it, is composed of two related operations:( 1) natural selection, which is based on schedules of probabilities, and( 2) a commitment to the explanatory value of origins in the struggle for life. The former answers questions about frequency. How often? How many? At what rate? According to the latter, to understand something is to understand how it emerges.
Darwin operates with a latent metaphysics, a set of implicit expectations about what is real and what is worth studying. He brings these expectations to bear on the objects he studies, the orchids, the finches and so on. But it is when the expectations, the latent metaphysics, of later generations of authorities is brought to bear on the human species that some deficiencies are plainest. To put the point the other way around: the easiest way to detect oversights in popular or crude Darwinism is, first, to locate the major insights but, second, to locate where they are, to some degree, misspent by later generations. Such Darwinism, for its many successes and its wide influence, misses the phenomena of the human in a basic way. Darwin’ s bodies evolve so well that he, or later expositors who attempt to remain continuous with his breakthrough, overlooks the difference between a body and a person, between matter and form, and, because of the limits of his own thinking, his theory fails to self-apply. In other words, the theory of evolution refuses to evolve. I do not mean to suggest it goes unchallenged or unchanged, that what Darwin thought in the 1800s is what contemporary evolutionary biology teaches us today. Nevertheless, his scientific successes are philosophical liabilities in the wrong hands.
The popular reconstruction of Darwin has a hold on the public imagination today. Vienna’ s Cardinal Christoph Schoönborn writes an editorial for The New York Times in 2005. In it he contends that the neo-Darwinian requirement of randomness undermines traditional theological commitments. Traditionally, Catholics have held that reason helps humankind discern the purpose and design of creation and, by extension, some limited understanding of its creator. If the neo-Darwinian story is true, and the privative concept of randomness is the author of the world instead of the divine, then science is incompatible with key articles of faith.
In part I think this and other such debates depend on equivocal meanings of design. Design may refer to intelligible patterns discovered and then verified in empirical data. On this interpretation the Cardinal has less to worry about. But drawing on our religious imaginations rather than our best theology, design may stipulate an imaginable designer, creation’ s puppet-master, an old man in the clouds who offers up the rest of creation to us, for our use and projects. Never mind that the bare existence of God as a transcendent explanation is, at best, an abstruse point of contention in metametaphysics; it is the least interesting conviction among monotheistic religions as they are lived by millions of humans. Too often, at least in popular culture, we are asked to make a choice between middling science and worse religion. So the argument between advocates of neo-Darwinian evolution and advocates of intelligent design, most of whom are creationists in sheep’ s clothing, depends on semantic disagreements. Parties talk past each other with little agreement about the key concepts and terms on which their disagreement depends. Our words reflect our best understanding. As long as one group fails to reflect on the way their words are prone to misunderstanding by others,
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