As I have argued at length in my Darwin Myth, evolution and Darwinism are not the same thing. Darwin's version of evolution is properly called "Darwinism." Darwinism was largely defined by the skeptical Enlightenment secularism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Evolution is the thing that happened, the marvelous and still largely mysterious complex of evidence that gives every indication that nature is a spectacular work in progress.

Do you see the distinction? Darwinism is a particular theory about evolution. Evolution is a fact that Darwin tried to explain in a particular way, an entirely reductionist, materialist way so that he could avoid at all costs letting a divine foot in nature's door.

This distinction allows me to say a most astounding thing: one can heartily accept evolution on scientific grounds and roundly reject Darwinism on scientific, philosophical, moral, and theological grounds. Evolution is not the problem. Darwinism is the problem. It is perfectly possible to have a God-friendly account of evolution. The notion that evolution has to be Godless to be scientific is a myth, a secular ideology, one that Charles Darwin himself promoted with great energy.

This distinction is important for many reasons, but I'd like to focus on one in particular, namely the relationship of Christianity to evolution. Those Christians who reject evolution because they believe that it leads to atheism are indeed proceeding from a proper fear.

Insofar as Darwinism has swallowed up all of evolution into itself, the evolutionary theory partakes of the deep anti-theistic bias that Darwin built into it. It in fact does lead to atheism because it was designed to do so. The enormous push that secularization received from Darwinism should be proof enough that the theory of evolution so understood destroys belief in God.

The problem with this side—if we recall our distinction between Darwinism and evolution—is that these Christians then feel they must attack evolution itself, that is, all the evidence from the great age of the earth to the fossils, that indicates all too clearly that God did not create the earth and all its creatures, fully-formed, just six thousand years ago. Needless to say, Christians of this camp then appear entirely irrational and unscientific.

But there are other Christians who make an opposite error. These Christians take themselves to be of the more sophisticated sort. They accept evolution and deny that it leads to atheism. They blithely ignore the obvious historical fact that Darwinism has been the most significant contributing cause in the de-Christianization of the west, and what should be the obvious contemporary fact, that most evolutionary biologists today (or at least most of the famous and influential ones) are atheists because they regard evolution as having proven that the whole God thing is intellectually obsolete.

The problem with this camp—if we again recall our distinction between Darwinism and evolution—is that its denizens feel that they must uncritically defend Darwinism itself, as if all the evidence must be sifted through an entirely reductionist, materialist filter, and also that they must attack anyone who has any reservations at all about uncritically accepting Darwinism.

I would like to introduce someone into this debate, a stranger to be sure. We might call him the reasonable Christian. He is to be distinguished from the Christian fideist who wrongly attacks evolution because he rightly sees the damage caused to the faith by Darwinism, and from the rationalist Christian who wrongly defends Darwinism at all costs because he rightly sees the damage caused to reason by the attack on evolution on behalf of Christian faith.

The reasonable Christian holds, first of all, that science cannot contradict the faith because he assumes that the Creator God and the Redeemer God are one and the same God. He differs markedly in this from both the Christian fideist and the rationalist Christian. The fideist is often driven to deny science that seems to contradict the faith; the rationalist to deny every aspect of faith that seems to contradict science. The reasonable Christian does not allow that a contradiction is possible on either side. He knows from the history of science itself that science, including evolutionary science, is a merely human activity, and that despite its pretensions, scientists are often wandering in confusion, hobbled by bad theories, and misled by their very victories into assuming that they are omniscient. He knows that nature, as a creation of the profound wisdom of God, is much more magnificent and mysterious than our human attempts to grasp it, and so assumes that evolution must be something far grander than Darwin made it out to be, something so marvelous that, if we fully understood it, it would appear miraculous—a manifestation of the glory and wisdom of the Creator. Darwinism is too small for him as a theory of evolution because nature is too big for Darwinism to be true.

A proper theory of evolution would not (as Darwinism does) reduce the real complexity of human beings to make them fit within a tight materialist and reductionist framework; it would expand the theory of evolution so that the real moral, aesthetic, and intellectual complexity of human beings, as the pinnacle of evolution, defines the framework to understand all of evolution. It would place human beings, once again, at the very center of creation.

Evolutionists against Darwinism: Simon Conway Morris

Simon Conway Morris is a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John's College. Elected to the Royal Society in 1990, he is the author, most recently, of Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. With other eminent evolutionists, he was asked the question, “Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?” His answer, “Except where it matters.” The following is an excerpt.

“So why quibble with the standard Darwinian formulation? Is it not obvious that the roots of human behavior and cultural sophistication lie in the rich loam of our evolutionary past? We are but a hair's breadth from our animal cousins. Such is evident in terms of their cognitive world (which many believe encompasses, at least in apes and some birds, a theory of mind), their capacity for self-recognition in mirrors, and the glimmerings among them not just of culture and its transmission but of crafted tools and even traits of personality. So what is the problem?”

“At one level, there is none. It would be strange if my fingers and eyes were to have an evolutionary origin but not my capacity to speak, to empathize, and even to deal with simple abstractions like numbers. And yet, though we may be just a hair’s breadth away from a chimp - not to mention a crow, a dolphin, an elephant, and even an octopus - we humans are still utterly and stupendously different. A seamless extrapolation from one species to another? That is what Darwin proposed, but pinning down how the glaring gaps - most obviously, language - were actually bridged remains almost entirely obscure.”

“Should we look, then, to human exceptionalism, to a freak mutation that suddenly propelled us into new worlds? It is possible, of course, but there is not a shred of evidence for it. Could it just be an illusion? Perhaps we think we are different, but the animals themselves know better. Is that credible? Not really. So profound is the gulf between us and the chimps that they might as well live in the Andromeda galaxy. Have you seen a chimp make a fire, let alone go to the library?”

“The late David Stove, an Australian philosopher, wrote a wonderful book entitled Darwinian Fairytales. How dare anybody use a word like ‘fairytale’ in the same breath as the venerated Darwin? (See how the cage housing the ultra-Darwinists rocks and shudders, the occupants hurling themselves against the bars with cries of outrage.) But Stove was emphatically not a creationist or even a theist, let alone a Christian. And he had no quarrel with evolution. For him, the question was not where we came from but who we are now. In a piercing critique, he dismantled the Darwinian pieties purporting to show why we are so extraordinarily altruistic (not to mention our love of animals), demolished the absurdities of genetic determinism, exploded the naiveties of sociobiology, and laid waste the myth that we are ‘just another species.’”

http://www.templeton.org/evolution

An excerpt from The Darwin Myth

A particular thorn in Darwin’s side was a former pupil of Thomas Huxley himself, the English anatomist and biologist St. George Jackson Mivart. He had begun, under Huxley’s tutelage, as an ardent evolutionist. He remained an ardent evolutionist, and indeed put forth a form of theistic evolution not too different from Darwin’s co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Wallace.

St. George Mivart was a convert to Catholicism who offered a reconciliation of evolution with Christian orthodoxy, and did so by hammering away at the weak points in Darwin’s theory. The weakest of all, in Mivart’s opinion, was that it was undergirded by naturalistic philosophical presuppositions that were unexamined. Darwin had rejected outright the idea of a divine hand guiding evolution, and then set about explaining religion away as one more unintended effect of natural selection. To do so, Mivart argued, Darwin had to treat theology in a most superficial and unsophisticated way.

According to Mivart, Darwin’s theory did not prove that there was no Creator God; it began from the assumption that God did not exist, and so his theory was constructed and expressed in such a way as to dismiss the possibility without seriously engaging it. Moreover, in order to ensure that a divine foot could not enter the door, Darwin had skirted over the profound moral and intellectual differences between man and animals by pretending that an enormous gap didn’t exist when in fact it most obviously did.

Darwin could ignore many of his critics, but Mivart’s arguments and credentials were formidable. A professor of biology; Fellow and Vice-President of the Zoological Society; Fellow, Secretary, and Vice President of the Linnean Society; Fellow of the Royal Society; he would later get his doctorate in medicine from the University of Louvain. Almost simultaneously with the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man, Mivart came out with On the Genesis of Species in which Darwin’s Origin of Species (including its implications for man) was subjected to the most thorough and serious criticism in Darwin’s lifetime. Mivart’s attack was so devastating that Darwin felt as though he had to begin again.

Again, the problem wasn’t evolution. Mivart believed that the current understanding of evolution was still largely hypothetical, but that the facts would, more and more, support it, and
further, that evolution would prove itself to be “perfectly consistent with the strictest and most orthodox Christian theology.” But Darwin’s version was another thing: “The special Darwinian hypothesis, however, is beset with certain scientific difficulties, which must by no means be ignored, and some of which, I venture to think, are absolutely insuperable.”

Two related problems pointed out by Mivart must be mentioned. First, natural selection itself is insufficient to explain the evolution of species and so must “be supplemented by the action of some other natural law or laws as yet undiscovered,” and second, illegitimate consequences have been drawn from evolution against religion.

Notice the relationship between the two. Darwin had carefully crafted natural selection to displace the need for God, but natural selection itself was inadequate on scientific grounds. It was hamstrung by its own reductionist, anti-theistic bias, the very bias which led to its illegitimate attack on religion as a mere epiphenomenon of natural selection.

http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Myth-Life-Lies-Charles/dp/1596980974

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