by Michael Ruse
1994


CAN A THEIST BE a Darwinian? Can a Darwinian be a theist? People always
complain that philosophers are obsessed with words, and there is some
truth in that. Sometimes, however, you can avoid a great deal of
cross-talk by looking carefully, at the beginning of the discussion, at
the terms you are going to use. So. without further apology, to answer my
questions, let us start by teasing out some meanings to the terms theism
and Darwinian. I want to emphasize that I look upon this discussion as a
prolegomenon to decision-making; at no time shall I be saying what is
right or wrong, best or worst. I am simply trying to lay out the options.
I function as a bureaucrat, not as an advocate.{1}

What Do You Mean by "Theist"?

I take it that a "theist" is a person who believes in a god, a god who is
prepared to intervene in his (her/its) creation. This is compared to a
"deist," a person who believes in a god that is not prepared to intervene
in it's creation, an "Unmoved Mover." Both of these are compared to an
"agnostic," who professes ignorance about the deity, and an "atheist," who
does not believe in the existence of a god at all.

Traditionally, theists have been thought of as belonging to one of the
great religions of the Mediterranean: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Other religions are "pagan"-although I see no reason in principle why they
should not qualify as theistic or deistic. To keep my discussion within
bounds, I shall confine my discussion to Christian theism. If you fault me
for ethnocentrism, I shall have no ply.

In a sense, there are almost as many notions of Christian theism
(Christianity, for short, from now on) as there am Christians. Cutting
across all divisions, including in a fashion the division between
Catholics and Protestants (not to mention the Orthodox), I shall
distinguish three levels or grades. I shall call them conservative
Christianity, moderate Christianity. and liberal Christianity. I think
that I can use these terms without undue distortion, but please do not
fault me if, say, the present Pope, whom you would judge a conservative,
comes out as a moderate on my schema. I do not intend the grades to be
sharp at the boundaries. In real life, people might be conservative in one
sense, and moderate in another; or they might fall on a dividing line.
For me, a conservative Christian is one who takes the truth of the Bible,
and/or the teaching of the church (often, but not necessarily. the
Catholic church) fairly literally. I am not saying that the conservative
necessarily has to take every last word of the Bible as the unalterable,
face-value truth-since Augustine, Catholicism has had a tradition of
interpretation-but I assume that unbending literalists ("fundamentalists")
are all conservatives in my sense.

For me, therefore, a conservative will believe in a real garden of Eden, a
real Adam and Eve, and a real Fall. A conservative will believe in a real
flood, although I can imagine that he or she might not really care if the
flood failed to reach as far as Texas. A conservative will believe that
Jesus Christ was the son of God, that he performed the biblical miracles
(and that they were genuine miracles), that he died for our sins, that his
body started to stink, and that then he rose from the dead, joining God in
heaven- where some of us might hope to go to share eternal bliss. I really
do not know where today's conservative stands on hell (burning flames or
nonbeing), but he/she believes that that is the punishment for the sinner.
My moderate Christian believes much that the conservative believes-for
instance, that actual people sinned, that Jesus was genuinely the son of
God, that he performed miracles, that he rose from the literal dead, and
that there is salvation for the repentant sinner. I doubt, however, that
my moderate is going to spend funds and time trying to find the true home
of Eden, or the remains of Noah's ark. My moderate likewise might wonder
if one has to follow slavishly every dictate of St. Paul, sensing
sometimes that the apostle told more of his own psyche than of God's
wishes.

My liberals, perhaps, technically ought to be thought of as deists and not
as theists, but for sociological reasons, if for no other, they can be
included here. The liberal is one who interprets the Bible and church
teaching in modern terms. Most of the stories of the Old Testament are
taken to be allegorical, the miracles of Jesus are given natural
explanations (if they are believed at all), and much effort is put into
showing that the resurrection does not necessarily imply bodily
resurrection. Original sin is thought to be something inherent in us all,
and not necessarily the consequence of our first parents' failing.
These then are my three types of Christian. I have emphasized that I am
being nonjudgmental. What I would stress is that it is possible to find in
all three levels, people who are genuinely committed to their faith. The
conservative might think the liberal no true Christian. I can testify that
there are extreme liberals who are as devoted to their savior as any
fundamentalist, and who find their faith a great deal more difficult and
demanding than do most. Conversely, I know conservatives who have made
very real sacrifices for what they believe to be the truth.

What Do You Mean by "Darwinian"?

As a fairly enthusiastic Darwinian myself, I can attest to the fact that
"Darwinism," no less than "Christianity," is a notion with many meanings.
Again, I will propose three grades. In a sense, these correspond to my
three grades of Christian. I feel a bit diffident. however, about
referring to an ardent Darwinian as a "conservative Darwinian." That is a
misnomer, if not an oxymoron. Hence, I shall speak of the ultra-Darwinian,
the moderate Darwinian, and the restrained Darwinian. These are not
necessarily the most elegant terms, but they will serve.

All three Darwinians are evolutionists, believing that organisms,
including ourselves, came by a process of development from a few simple
forms. The ultra-Darwinian thinks that the sole cause was Charles Darwin's
mechanism of natural selection working on random (not uncaused)
variations. This factor suffices to explain all. There are no other causes
at work, nor are other causes needed. This means that all organic features
are to be considered adaptive, even though we may not at present know
precisely the nature of the function of these adaptations.

The classic problem case is that of male nipples. What function could
these possibly serve? The ultra-Darwinian thinks that they have to have
some end, like sexual attractiveness. An explanation in terms of being a
byproduct of other features, or some such thing, will not do. I do not
know how many people are ultra-Darwinians of this extreme ilk today, but
they have certainly existed in the past. Alfred Russet Wallace, the
co-discoverer of natural selection, was one before his conversion to
spiritualism. The turn of the century biometrician, Raphael Weldon, was
another.

The moderate Darwinian thinks that natural selection is the most important
mechanism of evolutionary change. But he or she is unwilling to give
selection complete and exclusive causal authority over evolution. The
moderate thinks that there might well be other causes of change which, in
their way, could be very important included here are genetic drift,
correlation of parts, and perhaps even "hopeful monsters." No one today
believes in Lamarckism, in the old-fashioned sense of the direct
inheritance of acquired characters. Some today think that non-Darwinian
factors might be very important at the molecular level.

The restrained Darwinian thinks that selection is certainly at work and
may have important effects. However, he/she does not think it the most
important cause of change, We must look for other factors of change to
explain the overall pattern. In the past, someone like the American
paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn would have come under this heading.
Today one might include the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in
this category, although I myself think he is more properly labeled a
moderate. (As with Christianity, I do not intend to imply that the
categories of Darwinism are sharp and exclusive; some people will fall on
the boundaries.)

Can a Christian Be a Darwinian?

Now that we have our terms spelled out, we can set about answering our
question. The answer obviously is that it all depends on what you mean by
"Christian" and what you mean by "Darwinian." So let us start running our
different categories past each other.

Start with the conservative Christian. Where would he or she stand with
respect to Darwinism of any variety? My feeling is that there would not be
much sympathy for Darwinism at all, ultra, moderate, or restrained. If
this conservative is an outright biblical literalist, I do not see how
he/she could be an evolutionist at all; and, more important, I do not see
that he/she would want to be an evolutionist anyway. His or her basic
belief would be in a miraculous creation of life and of frequent divine
interventions thereafter. The spirit of such an outlook is against a
natural account of origins.

Would it be possible, nevertheless, for the conservative to be an
evolutionist, supposing that one were prepared to allow a minimum amount
of interpretation? Or, supposing that one really did not think that the
Bible necessarily tells us about everything, could one accept some measure
of development? I do not see why that would be impossible. I doubt that
such a person would be much of a Darwinian; probably he or she would want
some sort of directed evolutionism. Or, one might want to restrict change
to that occurring within major types (within the reptiles, for instance).
Certainly, the presupposition is that there are many significant miracles,
which break with the laws of nature, whether those laws be evolutionary or
not. But, within these strong bounds- accepting evolution as secondary, as
it were-one could allow limited development.

Before you dismiss my suggestion as ridiculous, let me suggest that there
have in fact been people who fit this category. Remember that
fundamentalism is a very restricted version of Christianity, is
essentially an American production, and is not that ancient. It is a child
of the nineteenth century. But in that nineteenth century, one also had
people like John Henry Newman, a Catholic convert and very conservative in
much of his thinking. As a Catholic, Newman's first allegiance was to the
church and not to the literal truth of the Bible. He is in fact on record
as saying that if evolution be true, then so be it Fundamentally, Newman
was not interested in science; it neither helped nor hindered his
religion. Hence, his attitude was that one should not pick a quarrel
unnecessarily. He knew that his redeemer liveth, whatever the truth of
evolution.

I come next to what I have called the moderate Christian. I think you
might get some surprising answers here-at least surprising until you think
about them. Clearly, the moderate Christian cannot be an ultra-Darwinian
in the sense of allowing nothing but unbroken law at all times. The
moderate believes in many of the biblical miracles, including the greatest
of all, the resurrection of Jesus and the washing away of our sins. I
suspect also that the moderate might have trouble, or certainly feel the
need to think hard, concerning some other claims of the ultra-Darwinian
(perhaps of the other kinds of Darwinian also).

I am thinking here particularly about the story of Adam and Eve and the
Fall. One might not believe in a literal garden of Eden, but presumably
one will believe that there was a first pair of humans and that they
sinned. It is possible on Darwinian theory to think that you might get
down to a bottleneck of just one pair-even just one fertilized female- and
so presumably one could reconcile the Genesis story in that way. But I am
not sure one has the right to think that this must have happened, in order
to save one's science. Obviously one might try other options, for
instance, assuming that God gave all extant humans immortal souls at one
instant, and that then they sinned collectively or that the sin of one
pair was transferred to all, or some such thing. The point is that one has
got to think of something, and this might require a rethinking of one's
theology-as long as one wants to stay with the science, that is.

On the other side, however, let me point out that the ultra-Darwinian
argues that there are design-like effects throughout the living world. It
is true that these come about through a struggle for existence, but the
problem of evil is no stranger to the Christian. What is welcome to the
Christian (one moderate enough to be an evolutionist of a kind) is that
his/her natural theology is thus confirmed by the Darwinian, by the
ultra-Darwinian especially. Hence, what I am suggesting is that even
though the moderate Christian can hardly accept the full program of the
ultra-Darwinian, in respects he/she is going to be drawn much more toward
the ultra end than the restrained end or even the moderate middle of the
Darwinian spectrum.

Again, I would point out that before you dismiss this as so much
hypothetical theorizing, there have in fact been people who think this
way-embracing a fairly strong moderate-to-conservative Christianity and
yet drawn by natural theology to an ultra-Darwinian stance. The great
evolutionist Sir Ronald Fisher was one. There were also those, especially
conservative Presbyterians in the nineteenth century, who were drawn to
ultra-Darwinism because the struggle leading to selection confirmed what
they had always believed about God's separating the sheep and the goats,
and his choosing only the former.

I come finally to the liberal Christian. As I have said, in some respects
I see this person as being close to deism rather than theism. But however
you categorize such a person, the fact is that he or she will positively
welcome the advances of science, seeing in every new discovery fresh
evidence of God's power at work and the triumph of his great gift to us,
our ability to reason and understand. Evolution will be taken as one of
the glories of science and as a testament to his greatness.
Whether such a Christian as this will be an ultra, moderate, or restrained
Darwinian seems to me to be an open question, and I suspect that such a
believer would incline to think such a question a little irrelevant. The
matter at issue is God's power, as revealed through his law-and for this,
any kind of naturalistic evolutionism is both necessary and sufficient.

Indeed, if I were to hazard a guess, it would be that in respects the
liberal Christian would feel less drawn to ultra Darwinism than the
moderate Christian, paradoxical though this suggestion may seem, simply
because traditional natural theology, especially teleology, would have
less of a hold on the liberal than on the moderate. I have in mind here
someone like the Anglican priest Arthur Peacocke or the Lutheran pastor
Philip Hefner. But, whatever the option taken, such a Christian would see
Darwinism as supporting his/her faith, not threatening it.

A Final Word

There is no single answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this
discussion. It all depends on what you mean by your terms, and what you
mean can lead to diametrically opposing conclusions. Throughout, as
promised, I have tried to be nonjudgmental. It is enough here to analyze
the options. I trust that the worth of what I have done needs no
justification above its execution.

But, as I conclude, let me say one final word. I speak now especially to
those who hold strong opinions. Do not, I beg of you, assume without
argument that you and your group, alone, have an exclusive lien on the
truth or on the genuine religious spirit. You may be right, and you may be
more holy than most; but remember that there are many people in different
times and places--very different times and places, if you include
non-Chrisuans-- who do not see things as you do. I say this, irrespective
of whether you are a conservative, moderate, or liberal Christian, or not
a Christian at all.

Above all, do not think people insincere if they do not solve the
science/religion problem in the way that you do. Before you assume that
your way of religious thought must be the proper and superior way,
remember that it was not so very long ago that Michigan thought that it
alone had the proper and superior way of making automobiles. I would not
want you to end as the theological equivalent of General Motors.

NOTE

{1} It hardly seems necessary to load down so elementary a discussion as
this with a massive number of notes and references. Two books that I have
found very helpful are Ernan McMullin (ed.), The Creation-Evolution
Controversy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) and Arthur
Peacocke, God and the New Biology (London: Dent, 1986). McMullin is a
Catholic priest and Peacocke an ordained minister in the Church of England
(Episcopalian). The closest I have come to talking about these matters is
in my edited volume, But is it Science ? The Philosophical Question in the
Creation/Evolution Controversy (Buffalo: Prometheus Books. 1988). In the
final essay of my The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge. 1989), I
raise some problems for the Christian about the question of the
foundations of morality from a Darwinian perspective. My Christian friends
all tell me that my worries are unfounded.

Foundation for Thought and Ethics.

Copies of the book Darwinism: Science or Philosophy are available from:
Foundation for Thought and Ethics