Evolutionary War: The Science-Religion Divide

The Darwin debate has been a feature of cultural discourse ever since the publication of Darwin's Origin. The original critics were not fundamentalists in our sense, a group that arose a generation later. These critics pointed immediately to the problems of the theory. The persistence of the Darwin debate seems to puzzle Darwinists, a sign they have naively not understood their position, and evidently can't compete in the field of social Weltanschaungen. In fact, the debate preceded Darwin, and its earlier form was clearly visible in the changing reactions to such figures as Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. The dread specter of Jacobinism hung over ideas of 'transmutation' in the wake of the French Revolution, and the facile liberal optimism and championing of progress, not unlike the brief phase of the 'radicalism' of Adam Smith (witness the copresence of the 'classical liberal' Tom Paine) mixed with inchoate evolutionism in Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, were suddenly discredited by events, amply clocked by the appearance of the demographer as 'better they starve' reactionary, Malthus. Erasmus Darwin went out of fashion, Tom Paine died broke, and Adam Smith was rapidly recast as a conservatized icon of capitalism. The generation of the Restoration deeply conditioned debate, as it did the same to a figure such as Hegel, followed by the extreme materialistic reaction of the following generation, visible in Marx or Feuerbach. This was the period in which Darwin conceived and delayed his theory, successful finally with his cleverly conservatized theory of evolution. The debate over Malthus went on for a whole generation, and was an early precursor of the Darwin debate. This was one of the earliest cases of the brutal use of 'theory' as ideology, and was clearly noted by the seminal critic of ideology, Karl Marx, or if you like, Sismondi. Time has dealt Marxism one and the same critique and the charge of ideology has now been pinned on the radical left. But the point is clear from the sheer brazenness of Malthus. Darwin was not so crass. But Old Whig that he was, he plied an ideological thesis in disguise. Is there any difference between Darwin and Adam Smith? asks S. J. Gould in his Structure of Evolutionary Theory. The next generation after Lamarck who dies forgotten sees the tempest over Chambers' Vestiges, who in many ways prepared the way for the coming of Darwin by taking the heat off the evolution controversy. Figures such as Spencer openly, in some ways clearly and honestly and in some ways fallaciously and invidiously, thought nothing of applying evolutionary thought to sociological constructs. The trend was clear in Erasmus Darwin, betwixt and between biology, the Lunar Society of proto-Industrial Revolution innovators, and the economists: social and biological thinking was never properly differentiated. Nothing that Darwin did really resolved this issue. The point is that critique religion as we might, the substitute was corn pone and white sugar, no good. A point obvious to some, incomprehensible to others.Darwin was never especially enthusiastic about Spencer and yet the influence is direct, and very clear, as is that of Malthus. Darwin at no point was able to extricate evolution from social evolutionism, and the Social Darwinism of the next generation is a direct descendant of his confusions. Often blamed on Spencer (and the charge is also valid), this Social Darwinism was one of the factors that led to the rise of fundamentalist criticism of Darwinism, witness the clear statements by a figure such as William Jennings Bryan, correctly aware of the place of degenerate Darwinism as the early twentieth century slid into the calamity of WWI. Bryan gets little credit now for his valid concerns. The record here is disgracefully sanitized.
Darwin's theory was a species of bad software drifting into public consciousness with its primal confusions over the nature of theory. Darwin was an idiot on theory, and succeeded because he didn't know any better, where many demurred seeing all too well the problems. Spencer is equally at fault, and in any case shows plainly the way in which post-Malthusian classical liberalism is trying to write the book on sociology, and ends up entangled in Darwinism. The exact same fallacies resurface in a figure like Hayek, where themes of the 'spontaneous social order' are at work with their Smithian-Darwinian innuendoes. One should also point out the influence of the positivism of a figure such as Comte, and the onset of reductionist programs in the social sciences, creating a mindset and methodology that many have claimed was too deeply constricted to constitute a viable social philosophy. One of the persistent features of the Darwin debate is the putdown, starting with Huxley and ending with Dawkins. This is the insinuation of scientific brilliance and religious stupidity. But the reality is the enshrinement of Darwin-style stupidity. And these 'stupid fundamentalists' are laughing at Darwinists behind their backs. What does this have to do with the current Darwin debate? Everything and nothing. The point here is that Darwinism is not equipped to produce a social humanism, but tends to generate one by default, and the results have never been adequate in any sense of the term. Part of the problem is Darwin's theory itself, based on natural selection. Part of the problem is just this inability to differentiate social and biological evolutionism. Theories of Dawin and Spencer are too clumsy to solve the problem. The trick has never been managed, for the simple reason that Darwin's theory doesn't work, and many of his first critics sensed easily the reason why. The problem goes back a long way, and was clearly delineated by a figure such as Kant in his classic critiques, where the issue of the human subjectivity in the context of the physics of objectivity received its almost primordial formulation. All of this has been swept away in the tide of Darwinism, then Neo-Darwinism. The entire project of secular humanism wagered its bet on a very narrow set of conceptions. That wager is destined to fail and the chickens come home to roost in the current Darwin debate. Part of the problem can be seen by the analogous fate of Marxism, very unpopular now, but at all points an indicator of these trends of thought. The failures of Marxism are well-known, but the point that is it struggled with is precisely this issue of social evolution in relation to ideologies. It might have been a candidate for some remedy but failed crucially on that score. This example, issues of socialism apart, shows that all the pieces were in place for a new secular humanist of modernity in the early nineteenth century (witness the bizarre efforts of Hegel on that score) but the result was truly a botched job. Marx was a smart fellow, but he bungled the job, ditto for the rest. Hardly accident then that rightwing conservatives in an age of brazen neo-liberalism are flooding into the vacuum of previous failures in the era of post-Communism. In a way, it should remind those who are plagued by Creationists all over again that they should be putting their own house in order. But this they seem unable to do.In this context Ruse raises the issue of science, evolution and religion. In one way it is true that science cannot, and should not be pressed into the service of religious issues. But in another it has no choice, and yet is unable to do the job right. Thre is no mystery to this. Sociobiology on ethics is not a viable science, let alone a subtitute for religion. The genetic fundamentalism of theories of kin or group selection ought to be a joke, but such is current education that most students don't even sense a problem here.
The classic Kantian distinctions of theoretical and practical reason, however arcane they sound now, clearly attempted to harmonize the balance between science and action, even pointing to the hope for a new 'religion within the limits of reason'. However problematical Kant's thinking here, he exposed in stark clarity what the generation of the Enlightenment and its parallel generation of Romanticism sensed as the problem with modernity. One can get the whole thing in a nutshell from Rousseau, whose influence on Kant was direct. You can study Kant's Dialectic in his first critique and consider his third antinomy of determinism and freedom to see that core flaw in all scientific efforts to produce a social philosophy from a reductionist program. Kant made clear the way in which a scientific program was destined to be cursed by its inability to produce an ethical dimension to knowledge. Just at this point the correction was set to produce a new cultural humanism, theistic and/or atheistic, that would complement the scientific revolution. And yet strange to say it never happened. Between Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, and quite a few others, the football was fumbled and we are really only five or six generations from that point of crisis, still frozen in the same problem. I hold little brief for the Bible Belt, but they see one thing the geeks and nerds who think hitech culture the epitome of intelligence don't see: the failure of their project, and the failure even to take the modernist suggestions to the resolution of that failure. Small wonder they have decided to tune out altogether. That failure does not call for some postmodern termination of the project. Five or six generations is nothing. But the job has to be attempted, yet noone seems able to even address the issues.
One thing is sure, it you plan to replace religion with sociobiology the tide of greater life will rise and smite you. So my advice to the current honchos of evolutionary psychology and Darwinist fundamentalism, is 'wise up', or we are all done for.
All these problems, then, were clear long ago, and yet now such is the reign of scientism and the Darwin propaganda machine that these crucial histories of modernity are totally erased from memory, and the only social philosophy left to challenge this monolithic hegemony springs from the American Bible Belt. That's a pitiful state of affairs. Truly. The mindcontrol in Orwell's book paints a stark portrait. But the current reaity is almost more frightening because it is concealed.
Since I am not a Christian, let alone a Creationist, I find this situation very undesirable, to say the least. But I don't think that either Creationism or Intelligent Design are able to resolve any of these issues outside of their own small worlds. But armed with thinktank dollars and conservative promotional schemes they can certainly wreak havoc in the short term. Reading a book like Philip Johnson's Darwin on Trial you hear all the echoes of these original issues, coopted in oversimplifications for a conservative religious agenda and a revved up political machine.
But it is essential for those who propose some form of secular humanism to come to their senses and do something more intelligent than rehash Darwinian formulas. The first order of business is to jettison the obsession with Darwin's theory of natural selection. Full stop. If you can't figure that out, the rest is pointless. The fact of evolution is the last line of defense, and that is enought. So it was in Darwin's day, so it remains to today. After that a genuine social philosophy of modernity (or any other age) that can handle science without scientism, takes an inlelligent stance toward religion, theism/atheism, and that isn't regurgitated Spencerism or capitalist (or Marxist) propaganda for economism needs to appear to carry the day. But we can easily see that noone seems capable of such a project. It was about to be born in the late Enlightenment, but somehow the thread was lost.So it is small wonder we should debate science and religion and find the Bible Belt gloating, 'your time is up'.  Religion in its current forms cannot solve this question either, but it does generate the required response to reductionist thinking with an ethical philosophy of history. It seems impossible that modern secularist can't do better than that But the facts speak for themselves, the paralysis in frozen Darwin dogma, utilitarianism, economism, and reductionist fantasies of total science.So it is not a question of science abdicating issues of religion, as Ruse seems to suggest to Dawkins and Wilson. It is really a question of being able to produce a coherent view of man that can carry secular culture and/or a religous culture that is not stuck in the mythologies or metaphysics of the past. But it won't happen in the current environment of Darwinian fundamentalism. Bible Belt fundamentalists are no better, but at this rate we are going to get a generation's worth of this stupidity rammed down our throats.Thanks, Charles Darwin. Idiot!

John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com