{"id":44973,"date":"2017-11-21T11:58:30","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T18:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=44973"},"modified":"2017-11-21T12:23:16","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T19:23:16","slug":"darwinism-necessarily-atheistic-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2017\/11\/darwinism-necessarily-atheistic-part-two.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Darwinism necessarily atheistic? (Part Two)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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\"Galapagos<\/a>
Darwin\u2019s finches, from \u201cThe Voyage of the Beagle\u201d \u00a0\u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Yet more from my notes:<\/span><\/p>\n

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The late Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Alexander Agassiz\u00a0Professor of Zoology\u00a0at Harvard University and an enormously popular popularizer of evolutionary biology, though himself an agnostic (and a Marxist), passionately denied that evolutionary theory was necessarily atheistic, invoking the memory of his third-grade teacher, Mrs, McInerney, whose practice it was to rap the knuckles of pupils who said or did things that she regarded as especially stupid:<\/span><\/p>\n

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitmate methods) adjudicate the issue of God\u2019s possible superintendence of nature.\u00a0 We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can\u2019t comment on it as scientists.\u00a0 If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God\u2019s method of action).<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Charles D. Wolcott, who discovered the Burgess Shale fossil about which I shall have more to say later, was both a devout\u00a0Darwinian and a believing Christian who was convinced that God had used evolution to effect his divine purposes.\u00a0\u00a0 And, since Walcott, the \u201ctwo greatest evolutionists of our generation,\u201d as Gould termed them, took different sides of the debate over the existence of God:\u00a0 George Gaylord Simpson was, it is true, an agnostic, but Theodosius Dobzhansky was devoutly Russian Orthodox.\u00a0 \u201cEither half my colleagues are enormously stupid,\u201d concluded Gould, \u201cor else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs\u2014and equally compatible with atheism.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

It is striking that two substantial surveys of the religious beliefs of practicing scientists, one carried out early in the twentieth century (in 1916) and the other conducted near that century\u2019s end (in 1996), show virtually no difference in the proportion of scientists who held to some form or another of personal religious belief.\u00a0 Roughly 40% of the scientists professed such faith in both surveys, as opposed to 40% who might be described as atheistic and 20% who could be termed undecided or agnostic.\u00a0 The vast advances of science and technology during the eighty years intervening between the two surveys\u2014which included such landmarks as the discovery of the expanding universe and its likely beginning in the Big Bang, the deciphering of the structure of DNA, the rise to dominance of both relativity and quantum theory, and the invention of such fields as neurophysiology\u2014appear to have had no impact on religious beliefs among professional scientists.\u00a0 If the march of science inevitably destroys faith, scientists themselves seem unaware of that fact.[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Cited by McGrath.\u00a0 Find original:\u00a0 Stephen Jay Gould, \u201cImpeaching a Self-Appointed Judge,\u201d Scientific American<\/em> 267\/1 (1992): 118-121.\u00a0 Comment on this review\u2019s treatment of Philip Johnson.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> See Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World<\/em> (New York and London: Doubleday, 2004), 110-111.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 \u00a0 Yet more from my notes: \u00a0 The late Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Alexander Agassiz\u00a0Professor of Zoology\u00a0at Harvard University and an enormously popular popularizer of evolutionary biology, though himself an agnostic (and a Marxist), passionately denied that evolutionary theory was necessarily atheistic, invoking the memory of his third-grade teacher, Mrs, McInerney, whose practice it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Darwinism necessarily atheistic? 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