Darwin, Science And Religion. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, April, 2001 by R.D. Kernohan

Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion. Michael Ruse. Cambridge University Press. [pound]16.95. US$24.95. ISBN 0-521-63144-0.

'My theology is a simple muddle', said Charles Darwin near the end of his life. Some of the arguments invoking the name of the great naturalist and author of The Origin of Species have also been muddled, but Michael Ruse brings more simplicity into them than might be expected, given the mild difficulties of defining a Darwinian and the far greater ones of defining a Christian.

The author is a professed Darwinian and philosophy professor at the Florida State University. His curriculum vitae includes being an expert witness at an Arkansas 'creation trial' and his bibliography cites nineteen of his publications in this and distantly related fields. His book, though part of one continuing series of controversies about evolution and creation, also seeks to explore the wider relationship of science and religion, most obviously in a debatable ground where religion, ethics, and philosophy, now coexist with the neo-Darwinian concept of 'sociobiology'.

Professor Ruse writes with grace and style, serious but never solemn, even about such sacred Darwinian commemorations as the Wilberforce-Huxley debate, when 'everybody enjoyed himself immensely and all went cheerfully off to dinner together afterwards', and the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, whose 'ionic status' is questioned. His argument is that although Darwinians may encounter difficulties in being Christians, 'it is by no means inconceivable'. His conclusion is that 'Darwinism is ecumenical'. The Christians seem to be allowed less difficulty in accepting evolutionism in general and Darwinism in particular. Professor Ruse also recognises that Christian belief and theology were being challenged in their primacy within Western civilisation and by Biblical criticism as well as scientific discovery, before Darwin decided to be a scientist and not a gentleman-parson.

Although this is a reasoned and reasonable book, some of its arguments may at first seem to relate more directly to North American debates than to Western European and especially British ones. For example Professor Ruse may seem to over-emphasise the obvious when he writes about the way in which Darwinian secularists, even those who were anti-religious in a way Darwin never was, both shared and reflected many Christian moral, ethical, and social concerns. But it may be that the British take this shared tradition too much for granted, and are ill-conditioned (not even having any serious experience of Marxism) to consider the issues which arise if science becomes a quasi-religion in any age of rapid and radical social change.

More important, the context of Professor Ruse's discussion of mainly American disputes between 'evolutionists' and 'creationists', loosely equated with religious fundamentalism, is alien to most Western European experience. It has little in common with either traditional Continental conflicts of Church and anti-clericals or with the most powerful Evangelical influences in British Protestantism. Indifference is more menacing than Dawkins, and Alvin Platinga (to whose attacks on 'naturalism' Professor Ruse devotes ten pages) is scarcely a household name even among Evangelicals. Many of those angered by talk of a 'myth of God incarnate' and its devaluation of Christ would accept that, in no derogatory sense of the term, the early chapters of Genesis are a myth of creation.

Professor Ruse's interrogatory title probably reflects a vital question for important sectors of American society. In Europe it would be easier to claim, using the term vaguely, that we are all Darwinians now, even though there is an increasing conservative Evangelical proportion among the diminished number of active Christians. But just possibly the American argument may be as important for the future of Christianity as the European synthesis. Certainly if congregations are reduced to those for whom religion is fundamental to their lives, 'Fundamentalism' may become more significant, even if the American term still fits awkwardly into the cultures and even vocabularies of European Christianity.

It is hard to believe that Professor Ruse will find himself an expert witness at a European trial or even a heresy hearing, but he can be credited with a book and theme of contemporary as well as historical significance.