Biology

Natural Sciences

Contents
Physics
Biology
Neurosciences

« Back to Atheism & Science

Post-Darwin, human beings could appeal to a powerful naturalistic mechanism for explaining apparent design. This appeared to deprive defenders of theism of one of their chief arguments, namely, the argument from design. Moreover, the ever more detailed study of nature tended incidentally to bring the natural evil of the predator-prey relation more acutely to the attention of scientists and their public.

Many atheists assume that evolution and religious beliefs are incompatible. However, there is by no means an absolute consensus on this, and both theists and atheists have denied this supposed implication. Broadly speaking, contributors to the 'evolution debates' divide according to whether they believe that evolutionary theory and religious belief are incompatible or compatible. Dawkins, Dennett and the other New Atheists fall into the former category, as well as biologists/geneticists such as James D. Watson, Lewis Wolpert, Robert Hinde, and David Sloan Wilson; however, there are also a large number of people - including eminent atheist evolutionists and philosophers of science - who fall into the latter category.

On the atheist side, the atheist (or agnostic) and eminent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould has generally denied that religious and scientific claims can contradict one another: according to Gould, they occupy 'non- overlapping magisteria' (NOMA) where scientific claims are understood to be about the empirical world and religious claims are understood to be about the world of values. The atheist philosopher Michael Ruse has also argued (although on different grounds) that evolution and religious belief are compatible.[1]

On the religious side, many nineteenth century theists, faced with the challenge of Darwinian theory, rejected the latter. However, many theists responded by embracing Darwinism, arguing that God's providence worked through natural selection. In other words, God enabled the creation to make itself. This approach continues to be supported today by many theologians, for example, the Oxford emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity Keith Ward, who argues that evolution can be seen as 'a supremely elegant process directed to goals [set by God] of instrinsic value.'[2] The Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, himself a biologist by training, has also criticised the New Atheism of Dawkins and others of supposing that Christian truth claims stand and fall with the success of an eighteenth century apologetic construal of the design argument, which is now broadly acknowledged by theologians to have been an ill-judged strategy and not representative of Christian apologetics on the whole. The Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris, for example, has put forward a subtler case for 'fine-tuning' in biology suggestive of a Designer working through evolution. In the view of Conway Morris, we are 'inevitable humans in a lonely universe'[3]

Religious supporters of evolution have nevertheless generally admitted the difficulties presented by the horrors resulting from the mechanism of evolution. However, it should be noted that the problem of suffering ('nature red in tooth and claw') has always presented the greatest problem for belief, and this is not new with Darwinism. In this sense the new biology presents no particular threat to belief which was not there before - the support for the atheist's argument against religious belief from the evidence of suffering is the common and perennial observation of suffering in nature, not science as such.

References

Conway Morris, Simon. Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Ward, Keith. Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding. Oxford: One World, 2006.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ See for example Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
[2]↑ Keith Ward, Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding (Oxford: One World, 2006), 49.
[3]↑ Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xv.

Top of Page