Lee Harris on Darwinism, Creationism, and Intelligent Design

Readers of this weblog will know my admiration of Lee Harris’s work (see here and here).

Harris has written another intelligent article, this time on the debates on Darwinism, creationism, and intelligent design. It’s a long article, but a very rewarding one and you will learn something.

Harris attempts to create a “truce” between Darwinists and their rivals, creationists and proponents of intelligent design. First, he clarifies what those terms mean. Like the Darwinists, he rejects the “science” of creationism. He argues the fundamentalists who oppose Darwinism forget that Scripture is not about physical science but about faith, and common sense as it’s formed by the narratives of a community (i.e., Scripture). Transforming Scripture into the pseudo-science of creationism is a mistake.

With that in mind, he argues that intelligent design and Darwinists have more in common than they think. In fact, not only Darwinism (or evolutionism, if you will), but the entire activity of science, depends on intelligent design. That is, it depends on the faith of the scientist that the order that he or she examines is in fact an order according to some form of design. Where that order derives from might be a matter of faith, but scientist and believer have this in common: their activity presupposes intelligent design. In other words, you just can’t believe people like Dawkins who argue that the universe is simply the result of randomness and chaos – scientific activity rejects that.

Harris has interesting things to say about Darwin on this subject. Darwin, he argues, was brought up by Evangelicals, whose belief in a compassionate God made him skeptical that such a God could have designed a brutal world as dictated by his science. Harris writes:

A good and just God would never have designed the world in which the struggle for existence dominated and ruled all of life. It was just too brutal and bloody, and no decent God would have had anything to do with it. In short, Darwin was too tenderhearted to imagine a deity ruthless enough to have designed the world as his theory revealed it.

Darwin’s tender-heartedness is evident from his autobiography.

“I had a strong taste for angling, and would sit for any number of hours on the bank of a river or pond watching the float; when at Maer I was told that I could kill the worms with salt and water, and from that day I never spitted a living worm, though at the expense probably of some loss of success.”

Then he goes on to confess the greatest act of cruelty in his life.

“Once as a very little boy…I acted cruelly, for I beat a puppy, I believe, simply from enjoying the sense of power; but the beating could not have been severe, for the puppy did not howl….This act lay heavily on my conscience….”

Based on these incidents, it is easy to credit Darwin’s assertion that “I can say in my own favor that I was as a boy humane,” yet Darwin is at pains to explain that he owed his humanity “entirely to the instruction and example of my sisters,” who, it so happened, were Evangelical Christians.

This degree of tenderhearted humanity is bound to effect a person’s concept of what God should be like. A man who cannot bring himself to inflict pain on a worm will have trouble worshipping a God who condemns all living things to a perpetual struggle for survival. Why adore a deity that is morally and ethically inferior to one’s own standards of conduct? Why revere in a god what we would despise in a man?

If Darwin’s sisters were responsible for his tenderheartedness, then this was ultimately due to their commitment to the theological ideas that were associated with Evangelical Christianity-a religion that had developed as a complete and total rejection of the harsh tenets and doctrines of Calvinism. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine two religions that more better exemplify the difference between the two fundamental “metaphysical temperaments” as described by the American philosopher William James in his book The Variety of Religious Experience, with Evangelical Christianity representing the religion of the tenderhearted, and orthodox Calvinism representing that of the tough-minded. Darwin was haunted through his life by having once beaten a puppy when he was a boy; Calvin, on the other hand, did not hesitate to burn at the stake a man whose only crime was to have a heretical theory about the trinity.

…

Yet Darwin’s theory of evolution had not suddenly revealed to the world the struggle for existence. On the contrary, as we learn in Darwin’s autobiography, the idea of the struggle for existence had come from his reading of Parson Malthus’ essay on population, and it had been taken up as a theme in the thought of the English sociologist Herbert Spencer, who also coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest.” So it wasn’t really Darwin’s theory that was incompatible with the Evangelical concept of God-it was the struggle for existence itself that was the source of the conflict. Evolution, if it did anything, actually made that hideous struggle appear to have some shred of purpose, namely, the production of human beings like Wilberforce and Darwin. Yet, even if we are willing to accept this as compensation for the bloody process of evolution, it still poses a challenge to those who wish to hold on to the idea that God is the intelligent designer of the world and that God is both good and just. How is it possible, given the struggle for existence that is wired into the biological world, for a good God to have designed such a pitiless process?

No wonder Darwin’s theology was a muddle. For Darwin was like the modern Christian fundamentalists of today; for him, God had to be loving and just and merciful. He had to be at least as good as the men that Darwin had known in his life; and these men were, by all historical standards, among the kindest, gentlest, and best human beings who had ever lived-the men who ended slavery on this planet. If the universe was ruled by someone who was not as good a man as Wilberforce, then wouldn’t it be better to worship Wilberforce instead-just as Christians have been taught to take the side of the crucified outcast in preference to that of brute force and despotic power.

In other words, scientists and fundamentalists today need to use Darwin’s skepticism as an example, but also his faith.

Read Harris’s article. And when you’re done. Read everything else he’s written.

Crossposted to Civitatensis.