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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