Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Hello, I'm Andrew McDermott. Today my guest is Nancy Pearcey, professor and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University and a fellow of the Discovery Institute. She is author of books such as Total Truth, Saving Leonardo, and Love Thy Body. Over a series of four episodes, I'm speaking with Nancy about a chapter she wrote for a book called Mere Creation Science, Faith and Intelligent Design that was recently highlighted in four parts on the blog. More Than Cake, it's called you'd Guys. Is Design a Closed issue? Although many hold that Darwin conquered the design argument over 150 years ago, Nancy shows us there are good reasons for returning to that side of battle and asking whether it was one. Fair and square. Nancy, thanks for joining us today.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Well, I'm so glad we can finish this conversation together. This is the third episode in a series of four. Just looking at some of these interesting ideas you've written on about this, this, this moment in history when Darwin came up with his theory and, and just how people reacted to that. So before we begin, a quick review for listeners who are just coming into this, not have heard the previous discussions. In the first episode, you address, Nancy, the question of why Darwin became the focal point of debate in the 19th century, even for many who did not accept his theory. In part two, you recount your examination of the writings of Darwin's core supporters during that time to get a more accurate picture of Darwin's chief allies. And then in today's episode, you're going to review with us the most important strategies Darwin and his supporters used to discredit design. As the battle became more heated, they sought to make design implausible by casting it as a perpetual miracle. In doing so, they set up a strong man that continues to be useful to modern day Darwinists as well. So let's jump right in. You write that the battle to explain the origin and development of life was rigged, that Darwin won less because it fit the empirical data than because it provided a scientific rationale for those already committed to, to a purely naturalistic account of life. What was the immediate response to Darwin's scientific mechanism for evolution? Did it gain wide acceptance? Why or why not?
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Right. That's a very good question because many people do assume that Darwin won the day because of his scientific theory. In fact, even today, the persuasive power of Darwinism stems primarily from the aura of scientific validity that it has. And so sometimes going back in history can be very instructive. It turns out that if you look at the 19th century, when Darwin first published his theory, it wasn't very widely accepted. And this is very puzzling for people because we tend to think it won the day right away and the battle's over and that Christians should all go home. And so it's very interesting to find out that Darwin did not win over very many of his contemporaries.
What he did succeed is in persuading people that evolution had happened, but he did not persuade people of his mechanism. His mechanism meaning primarily natural selection. So many people in his day were still were Christians or theists of some kind, and they continued to believe that God had directed the process of evolution, or they believed in some sort of a life force, some kind of a vitalistic mechanism that had, that drove evolution. Lamarck, for example, was still very popular. We forget that evolutionary thinking started about a century earlier with a philosopher named Hegel. Hegel was the first person to really suggest that all of reality has a historical progress, that it unfolds through stages from simple to complex. And he had proposed actually kind of a pantheistic understanding of evolution. And so many people in Darwin's day still had some concept of an inner, either a deity directing evolution or a life force. And this is true, ironically, even of people who supported Darwin, not just the people who said, no, we don't accept your theory, but even people who did support it. For example, Herbert Spencer had more influence in America than Darwin himself did. He was extremely popular here in America and persuaded many people of the validity of evolutionary thinking. But he did not accept Darwin's theory of natural selection. He was a Lamarckian. He still accepted Lamarck's theory of kind of inner striving, that organisms evolve when they strive to improve. And so there's a kind of progressive notion there. And even Thomas Huxley, who called himself Darwin's bulldog, wrote very clearly that he did not think natural selection had been supported and even, even speculated that there might be a kind of law, a law of variation that would direct the process of evolution. So one historian actually calls them pseudo Darwinians.
And this is in a book called the Non Darwinian Revolution. And the whole point of the book is that Darwin had an impact in persuading people evolution had happened, but he did not persuade people of his actual scientific theory of natural selection. So that's an important thing for us to get our minds around, is that it did not win the day for scientific reasons. It won the day primarily because it was a naturalistic philosophy and it appealed to people who wanted to make science more naturalistic.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that is very interesting. Well, many of Darwin's contemporaries sought a middle ground. Can you explain how they did that? And was this the beginning of the theistic evolution perspective that still endures today?
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Yes, many people, like I said, since many of them were theists or Christians of some kind, many did try to say, well, maybe we can accept parts of Darwin and connect it to our theistic understanding of the universe. And so the best known would be Asa Gray. Asa Gray was an American botanist who was probably the best known of the theistic evolutionists. Others were Baden Powell, Richard Owen, Robert Chambers. Some of these names you may know if you are familiar with the history of science. But the main point is that they thought they could take parts of Darwin's theory and meld it to a progressive and theistic understanding of evolution. In fact, one of them is John Herschel, a well known astronomer who wrote, we know that the direction of evolution must be guided by a purpose, by an intelligence. And he actually wrote, we do not believe that Mr. Darwin means to deny the necessity of such intelligent direction. And unfortunately they were all mistaken. Mr. Darwin did intend to deny the necessity of such intelligent direction.
So that was Asa Gray actually thought he could take Darwin's theory and weld it to a fairly conservative Christian theology. And you're right, many people still today are still trying that strategy.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: So how did Darwin respond to people who were coming up with a theory of providential evolution?
[00:07:50] Speaker A: He was adamantly against it. He made it very clear that, that his theory, the whole purpose of natural selection, of proposing that theory was to mimic the products of a mind. In other words, to have a kind of counterfeit purpose, to show that purely natural causes could do what we used to think it took a mind to do or an intelligence to do. Darwin and Asa Gray actually corresponded quite a bit. And Darwin kept telling Asa Gray, you've misunderstood me. If I had to add some kind of divine direction to natural selection, then natural selection would be superfluous. You don't need natural selection acts as a sieve, sifting out the beneficial variations. But if God is guiding the process and creating beneficial variations to begin with, then you don't need a sieve. And so Darwin argued specifically that trying to put the two of them together makes one of them superfluous. And he had two arguments actually. That was the first one and then the second one I think is actually more important. And that is he argued that any sort of mind or intelligence cannot be regarded as a real cause in nature. In other words, until this time, many scientists had no problem thinking of mind or intelligence as a cause in nature.
And Darwin said, no, if you add any kind of divine intelligence to the theory of evolution, he said, you have taken it out of the range of science. That was his phrase. You've taken it out of the range of science. So his point was that he wanted to also propose an epistemology, a view of truth, a view of knowledge that did not allow for anything but natural causes. So that's even the more important argument on his part, was that, no, no, we have to have a completely naturalistic epistemology in science.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: Well, let's talk about the boundaries of science for a few minutes, because I know that's an important part of any discussion of what science can and cannot do for us. In formulating his theory, how was Darwin demarcating the boundaries of science?
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Right. So in the sense, it's what we've covered already, in the sense that up until this time, think of scientists like Newton and Copernicus and Galileo, the real founders of the scientific revolution, all argued that God could be directing, guiding. There was nothing unscientific about reasoning to an intelligent designer. And Newton argued that specifically. He specifically, specifically argued that the whole point of science is to argue backward through secondary causes until you get to the first cause.
So this was a really important break that Darwin was proposing that we need to try to separate science from any notion of an intelligent cause. And we can only allow for natural causes in biology.
Of course, that had already happened already in geology and cosmology. And so in many ways, that's another reason his theory was accepted, was, well, he's just bringing naturalism to biology, which has already happened in some of the other fields. So again, we're back to the naturalism being the primary motivation.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: So how did Darwin and his allies attempt to discredit the design argument?
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Right. Now this was very interesting because what he was arguing was that again, contrary to the whole history of what had gone before, from the time of the church fathers, Christian thinkers had said, there's a distinction between what we call primary cause and secondary cause. In other words, God is a primary cause and God created the universe, but God set in place a universe that had its own causality, that had its own order, its own structure, and that God does not normally interfere with a secondary causality. And this has been part of Christian thinking all along. Christians who were working in science worked with prime the concepts of primary and secondary causality. Darwin says, no, if you accept the slightest bit of secondary causality, then you have to accept the whole thing, or contrary wise, if you accept any primary causality, in other words, if you allow any room for a creator to work, then you must accept perpetual miracle. You must accept that God acts all the time and that there's no secondary causes. And he comes back to this over and over again. It's interesting when you read his works because he'll frequently he'll say, well, let me give you an example. In the Descent of Man, he said, our minds refuse to accept an explanation of the universe based on blind chance. Yet he said the alternative is that God is working by perpetual miracle. And he has that. I have several quotes in this article, this chapter, the book that we're talking about. I have several quotes from him where he says, we cannot accept pure chance, yet once we open the door to God, we've got perpetual miracle, we cannot have science anymore. He says that in a letter to Asa Gray. He says, I cannot think that the world is the result of chance. And yet once we'd accept design, we have to see every separate thing as a product of design. And the example he gave, as you probably know, he bred pigeons. He was a pigeon breeder. One of the ways that he wanted to see natural selection at work would be to see all the different variations of pigeons, those powder pigeons and fantail pigeons and all kinds of different pigeons. And he says to Asa Gray, really, do you think that God would invent every single different kind of pigeon feather, all these different tail feathers, just to satisfy the caprice of pigeon fanciers? And so he tried to even ridicule the notion that God would be interested in the details of his creation. So this is one of the ways that still you still see it in literature, the polemical literature written by evolutionists, is that they will often say, once you accept that there can be diversification of finch beaks or peppered moths or fruit flies, then you are logically committed to admitting that the same processes can create birds and moths and fruit flies in the first place. And so it's kind of the same argument that Darwin used. If you acknowledge that there's secondary causes at all, then you get rid of primary causes.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: So what does Darwin's views mean for us today then, as we're in a great position now in the 21st century to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the theory of evolution?
[00:14:54] Speaker A: Well, I think it's interesting, especially in terms of that last point. You know, sometimes people use the terms microevolution and macroevolution. And there's been a long standing debate among scientists, whether microevolution, in other words, the minor changes that we see in finch beaks, peppered moths, fruit flies, whether those minor changes actually accumulate, add up to form the major changes, like what we call macroevolution. Or to use a more familiar example, all of us are familiar with the various breeds of dogs, you know, the various kinds of roses or the various kinds of horses and so on. Is that same process responsible for creating dogs and roses and horses in the first place? And Already back in 1980, there was a very famous conference called the macroevolution conference held in Chicago. And the conclusion of the conference was, no, microevolution is not the mechanism that drives macroevolution. And so what I think is amazing is that scientists today, when they're talking with each other, are willing to acknowledge that the mechanism of microevolution, the minor changes that Darwin saw and that Darwin was pointing out, are not adequate to create the major changes required for the process of macroevolution. And yet, when they face the public, what are the first things that scientists like to trot out? They like to trot out these very familiar examples of micro evolution. So that's an important distinction, I think people need to recognize and kind of see through the propaganda.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Well, in the final episode of our series, you'll show us that the success of Darwin and his cohorts in the 19th century has had much to do with their political expertise. They understood clearly that the battle is not about ideas alone, but also about institutions and power. Well, Nancy, thanks so much for your time today, and I look forward to finishing this up soon.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: To read more of Nancy's writing on science, pick up a copy of her book the Soul of Science, and to explore some of the social and moral implications of Darwinism. To show why getting this issue right is so important, check out her latest book, Love Thy Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Get all the info you need at her website, nancypiercy.com for I D the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the future is copyright Discovery Institute. For for more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com.
