APES AT EVENSONG? PROVIDENCE AFTER DARWIN

Dominic MurphyUniversity of Sydney

Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin

Why are creationist beliefs so tenacious? Because people perceive quite correctly that it threatens providentialist religion.

“the universe was created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and is especially concerned for humanity”(122-123).

(cf. Matthew 10: 29-31)

problems for providence

Suffering: "a history of life that consists of a three-billion-year curtain raiser to the main event, in which millions of sentient beings suffer, often acutely, and that the suffering is not a by-product but constitutive of the script the Creator has chosen to write" (124). 

"What a book the Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature."

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae”

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Dolichomitus_imperator_Oviposition_R_Bartz.jpg

2. The “Enlightenment Case” against Supernaturalism• Darwin has come to represent

a whole climate of thought that threatens providential religion by undercutting the case for a supernatural agent.

• Voltaire, Hume and Kant might seem equally threatening if anybody had heard of them

What does Kitcher mean by the Enlightenment Case?

• Lots of themes, but I want to quickly complain about one: Kitcher stresses the role of “source criticism” in the anti-providentialist case.

• “from the eighteenth century to the present, dedicated scholars have probed the scriptures, tried to understand the circumstances of their composition” (p.134)

But in fact, by the mid-eighteenthcentury “the authorship of the Pentateuch had become an issue on which free-thinkers felt such confidence in their opinions that they could treat it with the utmost levity” (Malcolm 2002: 385)

C17: Hobbes: LeviathanSpinoza: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Richard Simon: Histoire critique du Vieux Testament

It’s better to see Darwin as part of a distinctive nineteenth century sceptical movement that is science-based. It includes geology and the German tradition in biblical scholarship but also materialism and determinism:

“by a necessity engendered and justified by science I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence” (Tyndall, 1874)

Hardy, “God’s Funeral”

‘O man-projected Figure, of late Imaged as we, thy knell who

shall survive?Whence came it we were

tempted to createOne whom we can no longer

keep alive? ‘

“Spiritualist Religion”

• "the benefits religion promises to the faithful are obvious, and obviously important, perhaps most plainly when people experience deep distress" (155).  The fear of losing these benefits animates anti-Darwinist thinking.

• So we need religious solace without supernaturalism, or providence.

"the teachings, the precepts, the parables, and the eventual journey to Jerusalem and the culminating moment of the Crucifixion" (152) are "a symbolic presentation of the importance of compassion and love without limits" (152). 

Comforts a community of believers without coming into conflict with modern science or enlightenment rationality.

BUT

• This just leaves out providence, which Kitcher thinks is the whole point of having a religion in the first place.

• Which may not be true anyway

Some creationists are more worried about right and wrong

• Discovery Institute: “If human morality is ultimately grounded in the struggle to survive, it seems optimistic in the extreme to think that the by-product will always be something akin to traditional Judeo-Christian morality. “

Tennyson, In Memoriam

• Are God and Nature than at strife

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

Back to Providence

• The simplest form of providentialism says “everything happens for a reason.” This thinking is common even among people who are not very religious.

And in America

• There is, as well as personal providentialism, also

• national providentialism (Guyatt 2007), which includes the idea that God has purposes for nations. Those purposes explain the history of God’s chosen country (i.e. ours).

Even Without God

• It’s arguable that national providentialism lives on in American thought. (E.g. Rorty, Achieving Our Country.) This may play a role in the American demand for creationism.

• Personal providentialism lives on in the idea that life makes some sense for reasons beyond our control.

What Darwin and the other members of the materialist all-stars threaten is the idea that there is any non-human order to nature. There is no reason for which everything happens. “Spiritual” religion will do nothing to change this, since fostering community cannot, by itself, deal with the worry that life is random or senseless, signifying nothing.