Rescuing Darwin from His Detractors (and Supporters)

TITLE: Rescuing Darwin

AUTHOR: Paul Fayter

SOURCE: The United Church Observer

SUMMARY: Ever since the Origin of Species was first published 150 years ago, scientists and creationists have tried to spin the religious views of Charles Darwin their way.

COMMENTARY: This article by Paul Fayter (appearing on a website sponsored by The United Church Observer, a Christian organization) directly contradicts many of the assertions made by some evolutionary biologists and most ID supporters, including most of the egregious distortions in Benjamin Wiker's recent book,
The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin.

Unlike Wiker and most ID supporters, Paul Fayter has spent a significant fraction of his professional life studying Charles Darwin and his work. Here's what he found:

- Darwin was not an atheist when he wrote the Origin of Species and therefore could not possibly have written it as an "apology" for his atheism;

- the most important factors in his eventual agnosticism were 1) the death of his daughter, Annie, and 2) his view that a benevolent deity would not have created a world with such horrors as parasites (and the indiscriminate death of innocents);

- that despite his agnosticism, Darwin remained a "practicing" member of both the Church of England and his local parish church;

- that despite his embrace of the science of evolutionary theory, he did not descend into a life of libertinism and immorality, nor did he distort his theory to support any political position (including eugenics or "social darwinism");

- he remained a dedicated scientist, a loving husband, a doting father, a devoted member of his parish, and an unwavering opponent of slavery and its concomitant evils; and

- he also remained what would now be considered to be a "theistic evolutionist" until his death.

Here is Faytor's conclusion:

Darwin was able to reconcile the power and glory of a good and loving God with nature's cold indifference and manifest cruelty - the infamous and pitiless "survival of the fittest" - by viewing struggle, pain, suffering and death not as the direct will of God but as the result of the impersonal operation of universal laws. The process of evolution by means of natural selection was deadly and wasteful, and yet, as Darwin concluded in The Origin, it had a higher, nobler purpose. Higher species would evolve. The Creator - the God of scientific theism - lawfully drew good out of evil and progress out of pain.

Near the end of his life, Darwin thought it impossible to conceive that "this immense and wonderful universe" was "the result of blind chance or necessity." No, it still seemed that the world had been willed into being. "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man," he wrote in his autobiography, "and I deserve to be called a Theist." At the same time, Darwin believed that "the mystery of the beginning of all things" was simply unsolvable; and so he also declared, "I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."

All of this directly contradicts Wiker's biography of Darwin and the opinions of most ID supporters. Demonizing Darwin, especially when there are very good (and unbiased) biographies of Darwin (not to mention his own, very candid autobiography) does nothing to harm Darwin's scientific reputation. By contrast, the fundamental misunderstanding among many ID supporters of how real science is done does quite a bit to harm ID's scientific reputation.

Neither evolutionary biology nor ID will be advanced or forestalled as scientific enterprises by pro- or anti-hagiographies of Charles Darwin (or any other individual scientist or ID supporter). This will happen only when sufficient field and laboratory work has been done and the results published in reputable scientific journals to decide between them. So far ID supporters have chosen to pursue a political program and the vilification of world-renowned scientists, rather than do the requisite science. Until they decide to abandon ad hominem arguments and actually focus on the science, they will remain (like "scientific creationism") a cautionary footnote to the history of the triumph of evolutionary biology.

In closing, I find it quite significant that only ID supporters refer to Darwin as a "little God". Like all evolutionary biologists, I consider him to have been a dedicated and talented observer of nature and a genuinely good person, but (like all of us) a plain and simple (and, of course, fallible) human.

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As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

--Allen

The Answer (Now, What Was The Question?)

For what it’s worth (and because I have been rather sneeringly referred to as an atheist at other websites), here is some information that readers of this blog may find interesting.

I am a Quaker. That is, I am a member of the Ithaca Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. The actual name for “Quakers” is "Friends". When they started out (in England in the 17th century) they tended to refer to themselves (rather grandly, IMHO) as the “children of the light” and/or “the publishers of truth”. However, by the time they had come to America they had settled on the Society of Friends. “Quakers” was a somewhat derogatory name given to them by their opponents in Cromwell’s England.

It is important to note that there are two different kinds of Friends, known as “programmed” and “unprogrammed” (sometimes referred to as “evangelical” and “traditional”, respectively). The programmed/evangelical friends are a lot like Methodists: they meet on Sundays in buildings that look like churches (but generally without steeples), there is a minister who gives a sermon, there is often a choir, and the congregation sits auditorium-style facing the front of the “church” where the pastor speaks. Following the service there is generally “fellowship time”, with coffee and snacks in the fellowship room, etc. Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon were both brought up in “programmed” Friends meetings.

The other kind (the original kind, the kind invented by the founder of the Friends, George Fox, and the kind of meeting that I belong to) meets in silence in a simple (often very plain) meeting house, with no minister, no choir, no hymns, no sermons, indeed no “program” at all. Everybody waits in silence for the “gathering of the spirit”, usually all facing each other in a roughly circular (or square) arrangement of chairs or short pews. Sometimes a person in meeting is “moved” to stand up and speak (or, much more rarely, to sing). This almost never happens until at least a half hour of silence has gone by. No one comments while they speak, although people sometimes join in with a familiar song. When they have finished speaking, they sit back down and all wait for the silence to “settle”. I’ve never been at a meeting at which more than a half dozen people spoke, and I’ve been at plenty at which nobody spoke for the entire hour (and sometimes much longer than that, as some special meetings have no set time limit).

In an unprogrammed/traditional meeting such as the one in Ithaca there are no officials except for the Clerk of the Meeting, whose responsibility it is to keep people informed of when and where meetings are happening, and to take notes at “meetings for worship with attention to business”, which generally happen once a month. The Clerk also “breaks” meeting by catching people’s eyes and turning to the people next to them to shake hands. At the “rise of meeting” the Clerk makes announcements and invites members of the meeting to share concerns. There is also a Treasurer, who keeps accounts, but is not considered to be an “officer” and is not elected. Both the Clerk and the Treasurer have assistants, and are usually chosen annually by the committee for ministry and oversight (which used to be referred to as the elders, a now archaic term). I was for many years a member of this committee.

Probably not surprisingly to some at this website, I am known to some of the older members of the Ithaca Meeting as a “minister”; that is, someone who is often moved to speak. I haven’t done so in about a year, but that’s not unusual, especially for our meeting. Some meetings have a tradition of recording and drawing attention to ministers, but this is rare and becoming more so among “traditional” Friends meetings.

Although as one might expect there are a number of Cornell and Ithaca College professors in our meeting, the overwhelming majority of our members are not professional academics. Rather, they are working people from the town; everything from secretaries to lumberjacks to farmers. Quite a few of these, as it turns out; Ithaca is “centrally isolated” and is known for having a "cow college" on east hill...and yes, I grew up in the middle of farm country and spent some of my summers and vacations in college milking cows (and I'm a proud graduate of Cornell's "Ag school", class of '69).

Membership in a traditional Friends meeting is gained by petition to the committee on ministry and oversight, who appoints a “clearness committee” for the prospective member. Clearness committees work together with members to “come to clearness” on particular issues. People can ask for a “clearness committee” to join the meeting, get married “under the care of the meeting” (FWIW, the Ithaca meeting has been recognizing marriages between same-sex couples “under the care of the meeting” for almost thirty years), decide on taking a particular job, pursue a particular academic degree, get divorced (yes, it happens, although not often) or whatever is of concern to them. Anyone can ask to join a meeting, and there is no prohibition against people becoming members of a Friends meeting while remaining full members of other churches or religions. Indeed, there are a number of agnostics and atheists in our meeting (but, as I stated earlier, I’m not one of them). Because of this process, we say that a person becomes a Friend by “convincement”, not conversion, and that “convincement” must come from within, not from a minister or the group.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference between “traditional” Friends and other religious groups is the total lack of a creed or “confession of faith”. Instead, we maintain a collection of written “Queries and Advises”, which are periodically read and revised by clearness committees. We feel that it is each person’s responsibility to come to whatever “measure of the light” we can. All decisions (and I mean ALL decisions) are made by pure consensus. There are no votes taken at any Friends meetings, including those held with attention to business. This means that some decisions take a generation or more to be reached, but when they are finally arrived at, everyone in the meeting has agreed to the decision and will back it wholeheartedly.

Friends are one of the three historic “peace churches” (along with the Brethren and Mennonites). To be a Friend means never to participate in war or the preparation for war in any form whatsoever. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and remain one to this day.

This doesn’t mean that Friends are pacifists, however. Quite far from it; Friends are very active in our “peace witness”, often placing ourselves between combatants and doing humanitarian work around the world. The Friends service group, the American Friends Service Committee, received the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Friends worldwide, for our corporate work for peace and reconciliation.

Friends also don’t proselytize (indeed, there is a heavy but unspoken prohibition against doing so), and so the foregoing should be considered to be informational only. If you would like to learn more about the Society of Friends, I recommend this website, and here is the website for the Friends meeting I attend.

“Dearly beloved Friends, These things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided: and so in the light, walking and abiding, these may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

– Given forth at a General Meeting of Friends in the Truth at Balby in Yorkshire, in the ninth month 1656, from the Spirit of Truth to the Children of Light

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As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

--Allen