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Peter J. Bowler, ""

From the beginning, Darwin’s dangerous idea has been a snake in the garden, denounced from pulpits then and now as incompatible with the central tenets of Christian faith. Recovered here is the less well-known but equally long history of thoughtful engagement and compromise on the part of liberal theologians. Peter J. Bowler doesn’t minimize the hostility of many of the faithful toward evolution, but he reveals the existence of a long tradition within the churches that sought to reconcile Christian beliefs with evolution by finding reflections of the divine in scientific explanations for the origin of life. By tracing the historical forerunners of these rival Christian responses, Bowler provides a valuable alternative to accounts that stress only the escalating confrontation.

Our polarized society, Bowler says, has all too often projected its rivalries onto the past, concealing the efforts by both scientists and theologians to find common ground. Our perception of past confrontations has been shaped by an oversimplified model of a “war” between science and religion. By uncovering the complexity of the debates sparked by Darwin’s theory, we might discover ways to depolarize our own debates about where we came from and why we are here.

(20071214)

Summary: Historical perspective on evolution disputes

Rating: 5

Several books about the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, about the teaching of "intelligent design" have appeared in recent years. Before that there were books on earlier trials, and there will certainly be others in the future, as Dover is very unlikely to be the last. Most of these are designed to appeal to a broad audience, and concentrate much more on the personalities involved than on the science or the history. So far as the science is concerned, Sahotra Sarkar's book Doubting Darwin: Creationist Designs on Evolution (Blackwell Public Philosophy Series) is an excellent source, but as the topic is by no means new it is also useful to have a detailed and thoughtful account of how we got where we are now, and this is what Peter Bowler provides.

Everyone will recognize the reference to monkey trials in the title, but the gorilla sermons will be less obvious. These were a series of sermons preached by William Barnes, Canon of Westminster, in the 1920s. However, despite his position as a religious leader Barnes was an enthusiastic believer in evolution, and followed St Augustine's principle that Christians make themselves look foolish when they argue from complete ignorance of scientific reality. (As an interesting aside, R. A. Fisher, a practising Christian himself, but better known as one of the greatest statisticians of the 20th century and one of the creators of the "new synthesis" that reconciled Darwinian evolution with genetics, had been taught mathematics at Cambridge by Barnes.)

The stories starts much earlier than the 1920s, however, but at the beginning of the 19th century, at a time when most intellectuals in Europe took the truth of Christianity as a given. Nowadays we tend to think of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck as The Man Who Was Wrong (about the inheritance of acquired characteristics), but this is unfair for two reasons: first of all, Darwin himself incorporated many ideas that we now regard as Lamarckian in to the later editions of "The Origin of Species"; more important, he probably did more than anyone to establish the reality of evolution. Many of the disputes about evolution in the 19th century were between scientists, but these have essentially evaporated as the number of known facts has steadily increase. Today it is hard to find any biological scientists at all who doubt the reality of evolution. (Not even Michael Behe is an example: despite his support of "intelligent design" he accepts the idea of descent of the different species from a common ancestor.)

Disputes about evolution between physicists and biologists also began in the 19th century, and these continue to the present day. Only a minority of physicists reject the idea of evolution by natural selection, but it is a surprisingly large minority nonetheless. Numerically much more important, however, are those who reject it for religious reasons, normally extreme fundamentalist reasons, whether Christian or Muslim.

Bowler provides a clear and coherent account of the history of these disputes, and his book provides a useful reference for anyone who wants to understand the historical background. In general it is well written, though some repetitiveness suggests weaknesses in the editing: Bishop Ussher's calculation of the date of creation of the earth is described twice, in almost the same words, only 20 pages apart; William Paley's "watchmaker" analogy is presented no fewer than three times, again in very similar words. All this suggests that the index was compiled in a very mechanical way without paying much attention to what the book was about, probably, therefore, by someone other than the author.

Summary: A must read on Evolution and Religion

Rating: 5

Peter Bowler is one of the authorities on the history of evolution. Professor of the History of Science at Queens University, Belfast, he has written extensively on the history of the science of the "Darwinian Revolution" as well as on the moral and political responses it has provoked. _Monkey Trials_ is a short and easy read that is almost deceptively packed with a vast survey of scholarship, while at the same time providing real insight into the history of the present relationship between evolution and religion in America. Bowler justifies this work as his own contribution to the American phenomenon of the apparent "debate" between the science of Darwinian evolution and the Creationist "Intelligent Design" movement that has made such headway among the religious left, and which continues to threaten science standards in schools in many southern states despite recent rulings against teaching religion as science by the courts.

Bowler is open about his own religious skepticism, but much like Michael Ruse, does not think it productive to go down the path of strident atheist advocacy pursued by Daniel Dennett and the Richard Dawkins. As a European, Bowler claims to offer an outsider's perspective, but it is Bowler's perspective as an historian that really allows him to see the wood as well as the trees. Bowler's book sheds much needed light.

The opening chapters of _Monkey Trials_ give a brief but comprehensive overview of the history of the development of Darwin's thought, of earlier evolutionary ideas, and the range of Victorian moral reactions to the idea that humanity might share a common ancestor with apes. Bowler shows that despite the efforts of many to portray this as a "God or Darwin" black or white choice, history shows that this is at best a caricature of the much more complex and multiple responses to contemporary developments in biology. Bowler provides a deftly written history of those developments, that lead through the "eclipse of Darwinism" - the preference of many biologists for alternative mechanisms of evolution to Darwin's "natural selection", to the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 40s. The main thrust of Bowler's story, however, is to recount the many efforts by liberal "Modernist" theologians to accommodate evolution into their religious understanding, a move that was met by many scientists in the early 1900s, (amongst them even Julian Huxley, one of the key authors of the synthesis), who accepted that the apparent purpose they saw in evolution might also provide a ready compromise. This oft uncomfortable middle ground was not shared by religious conservatives, however, and similarly became increasingly untenable to scientists in light of the advances in genetics that laid the groundwork of the synthesis of Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics. Indeed, the synthesis increasingly undermined any basis for seeing purpose or direction in nature at all. If God was the divine architect at work, (as the geneticist R.A. Fischer continued to believe), He was very much an unmoved mover - a view that was - and remains - an unsatisfactory conception of God for a great many believers.

Nevertheless, Bowler does show that, despite the apparent polarization of science and religion that gets the headlines, there remains a number of significant liberal theologians, such as John Polkinghorne and John F. Haught, who are willing to do the hard work of seriously thinking through a modern synthesis of their own: that of bringing together the apparently non-directed and purposeless character of modern evolutionary biology with a belief in a compassionate and caring Creator.

In short, Bowler's work is an important synthetic work in the history of religious responses to the changing nature of Darwinism from the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ in 1859 to the present, but it is also more than this. Hopefully, _Monkey Trials_ will underline the fact that the debate need not be as polarized as the present American episode in debating the moral implications of evolutionary biology suggests

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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123