Alex’s Heresies - embracing a physical reality

200 years after Darwin’s birth and 150 years after the publication of On Origin of the the Species we expected press articles, new books and television shows on evolution. And, guess what, they have started and, of course, the vexed question of its relationship with religion arises.

The Church of England posted an article by Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs entitled Good religion needs good science where Brown admits some church people may have been mistaken in attacking Darwin’s ideas in the mid 19th century. However he spends most of the article attacking Social Darwinism which he implies is a natural outcome of scientific atheism through the misuse evolutionary theory to promote moral improvement through social engineering. I’ll discuss his article more below.

Also the Roman Catholic Church again acknowledges the validity of a religious version of evolution, theistic evolution, and denies the literal truth of the Genesis creation stories (articles: Roman Catholic response (via Reuters), Comment on apologies). However BBC News has an article about creationism in the UK - it may be more widespread than generally thought (British creationists - BBC News).

Back to Rev Brown’s article about good religion and good science. He equates evolution offering some sort of implicit moral progress. This is one of the great myths about evolution perpetuated by allies and opponents alike. There is no sense of progress in the evolutionary theory - all living things including humans develop through chance and adaption to the environments. As environments change, then successions of living things adapt in different ways. Chance comes from environmental changes, reproduction and mutations. Evolution unlike religious practices has no sense of intentionality - no overall purposes or goals. It is a combination of blind processes that acts like a “blind watchmaker” to use Richard Dawkin’s word play on William Paley. So there is no moral dimension to evolutionary processes nor is there any sense of progress to higher life forms nor is there any superiority of one species over any other. On the other hand I would argue that Christianity has traditionally promoted all of these ideas. Despite Brown’s claims about the easy misuse of science, most religious supporters have had no problems applying social engineering on others for the “greater good”. But, of course, this was justified as doing God’s work.

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned
(Mark 16:15-16)

Alex McCullie