Here’s one that we missed when it was published in 2016, but that a colleague noticed in reading this recent review : Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us About Evolution (OUP), by philosopher Michael Ruse. As a general matter, claims by the religious that American law incorporates a scientistic, secular religion have been rejected by the Supreme Court and have been met with skepticism. But Ruse seems to argue that we should embrace the idea that the Darwinian “revolution” was primarily spiritual and exactly a secular religion. The Darwinian Revolution–the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God–is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion. Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in […]

By : Mark McDowell Tags: