Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Philosophy in Action)

Kitcher has an intense interest in how secondary schools teach biology. Keeping Intelligent Design from being taught there was the motive for this book. 'Living with Darwin' is formulated "in a way that people with no great training in science, history or philosophy could appreciate." Those people would include, I suppose, school board members and jurists---that is, the people who are determining the K-12 science curriculum.

The book is laid out in five chapters and the middle three are where Kitcher is most sure of himself; but those three chapters were much less interesting to me; they were the Inside the Laboratory view of ID criticism of three principles of evolutionary science and the counterarguments of those working within the evolutionary science paradigm. I will not discuss those arguments here other than to say, as a good Kuhnian, I endorse Kitcher's proposal that IDers are doing "dead science". It seems to me that as long as IDers are pointing out hard cases and inconsistencies within the evolutionary science paradigm they are doing somewhat useful work. However, if they step outside that role and propose Intelligent Design as a solution without an accompanying program that defines "the problems available for scientific inquiry and standards for what counts as an admissible problem and solution"---that is create their own paradigm of "normal science"---I would suggest they are simply doing theology.

In the last chapter Kitcher moves to speculations about the future of religious faith, which is a much more ambitious and interesting topic. He narrows his audience to the "honest and worried" people who accept ID and want to keep their fundamentalist beliefs. I have several criticisms of the last chapter.

I believe 'Living with Darwin' would have benefited from a greater historical perspective. For some reason, Kitcher dates to the 18th century "what is wrongly viewed" as a conflict between science and Christian beliefs. However, one can get a better handle on Darwin if he is viewed as simply one more de-centering movement to Christian beliefs; a movement continuous with the revolution brought about by Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th century. At that time society was ordered and its worldview determined by Christianity to far greater degree than any of us can imagine today; a society with very limited secular activities outside of organized religion and independent of its authority. The Catholic Church famously reacted to Copernicus by placing his De Revolutionibus on the Index and making poor old Galileo recant. So the competition between science and Christian beliefs is not a new one centered on Darwin but a continuation of five centuries of Western intellectual thought in which great progress has been made in the secularization of Western culture.

I believe Kitcher makes a tactical mistake in the last chapter when he revisits such topics as why God would allow evil in the world, what is divine justice, etc. By doing so he unnecessarily gets himself entangled in 2000 years of theology created by some very smart guys (who I can guarantee have a better grasp of the issues than Kitcher), and fights the fundamentalist on his home turf----well, good luck with that. He makes another mistake when he reiterates what he calls "the enlightenment case" against supernaturalism. The enlightenment case puts a heavy emphasis on reason and casts the "honest and worried" fundamentalist as irrational in some sense. I would suggest to start a conversation with a fundamentalist by claiming she has her theology all wrong and is irrational would make that interlocutor defensive and more resistant to change.

Moreover, Kitcher does not come across as being a particularly trustworthy friend to the honest and worried fundamentalist. Kitcher is disingenuous when he tries to assure his fundamentalist reader with comments like "it would be arrogant to declare categorically that there is nothing that might answer our (that is, Kitcher's, not the evangelical's) vague conception of the transcendent" and "It would be wrong to maintain that we know sincere religious experiences are the products of delusion." For he turns around in other passages to authoritatively intone, "to believe in the genuine possibility of ...a reunion in the hereafter...would be self-deception", and "the promise is literally false---there is no God that will wipe the tears from our eyes", "eternal salvation---all that I repeat is literally false" and "churches provide a sense of hope, illusory to be sure." I think a reasonable response by our "honest and worried" fundamentalist is to tell Kitcher to get lost.

There is a tendency for Kitcher to associate religious experience with emotion, access to the divine and in one place explicit identification that "the core of the experience is an accurate sense of the transcendent." Instead of separating religious experience from religion, as Dewey did, he embraces religion because he thinks it is the only source of religious experience. He is less than convincing when he recommends what he calls "spiritual religion" to the fundamentalist as a replacement for their already organized religion. "Spiritual religion" is religion shorn of its dogma and tradition. To his credit Kitcher recognizes his problem: once he has eliminated the dogma and tradition he has no idea what the content of "spiritual religion" would be that would differentiate it from secularism. Perhaps the only difference Kitcher sees for the fundamentalists he converts is that they already own a place to meet once a week and sing songs.

At the present moment in America, converting Southern Baptists and Mormons to a "spiritual religion" is far-fetched. The best chance for success is for a new Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith to arise and invent a religion that doesnt have dogma but simply preached love. We'll see.

Now this review will grade into a short essay. A more sensible approach is to leave religion to itself, and propose something that looks attractive to the unconverted. It is ironic, that the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia does not embrace and recommend Dewey's own approach. Dewey took a naturalistic stance in order to emancipate religious experience from religion and thereby allow religious experience to be safely used by secularists. In 'A Common Faith' he says, "Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality. Many a person, inquirer, artist, philanthropist, citizen, men and women in the humblest walks of life, have achieved, without presumption and without display, such unification of themselves and of their relations to the conditions of existence." (By the way, I must admit Dewey's attempt in the same book to hijack the word God for secular purposes was very unconvincing.)

What is more, Dewey provides what Kitcher thinks is lacking with secularists: Hope. (Kitcher, who thinks most people have a drab, painful, impoverished life, is remarkably pessimistic himself). For Dewey sees one of the happy by-products of science as the change in our view of the world from something we fear and must try to propitiate to something we can predict and/or control. It's a move from what Freud called a "pious worldview" to a causal one. This new worldview is the spur human beings need to reach maturity as a species. It's the prodding to realize all we have is each other and therefore we need to consciously and courageously take charge of our own future and, as Rorty says, stop masochistically abasing ourselves before some non-human authority. Dewey believed participation in democratic politics would be the vehicle by which humans would fight social evils and make life better for themselves and future humans. That is my hope as well, but we'll see if it pans out.

But even Dewey does not go far enough. As Kitcher notes, Darwin and science do not provide comfort at a funeral. I agree with Kitcher that the development of communities (political organizations, work unions, and continued cultivation of the family) to provide support at times of great personal distress is most important. Perhaps at future funerals, instead of songs about low swinging chariots secularists can sing songs of ourself. Perhaps ideas like people videotaping their own eulogies will catch on, and it becomes a moral responsibility like leaving a last will and testament; a self-eulogy where a person can give mourners a first hand account of what people, poems, and ideas were important to her and how she lived to make things better for others. Perhaps this is idle thinking. And a tough case remains: what are secularists to do for a parent when she loses a child, as Huxley did?

This is a terrific essay. It covers the entire Darwin versus Intelligent Design issue with insight, comprehension, and clarity. He apportions time to all the central arguments on both sides without being distracted by obvious and tempting side arguments. Rarely does one book save a person from needing to read three or four. This is one of those books.

The author has thought long and hard about the issues and has written about it on previous occasions. Those projects have allowed him to hone the issues to the core and explore them fully.

This little book is a devastating critique of the Intelligent Design as a religion in disguise. Prof. Kitcher continues the project begun back in the 1980a in his ABUSING SCIENCE, which demolished the old-fashioned creationism (i.e., the anti-Darwinism of the pre-ID days). And yet, in the final chapter of LIVING WITH DARWIN, "The Mess of Pottage", Kitcher is greatly sensitive and understanding of the motivations of religious believers to oppose Darwinism. I should like to say a bit more about the idas expressed in this chapter, since it is here where I find an important difference between Kitcher and other well-known critics of creationism, such as Prof. Dawkins. Prof. Kitcher offers a sort of sociological hypothesis to explain why biblical literalism and Christian fundamentalism thrive in the United States, while they are negligible anywhere else in the developed world. According to Kitcher, the church is virtually the only place of communal support in America, which is, at the same time, a country where competition and alienation are particularly fierce. Ordinary people who find in the church the last place of support and comfort see Darwin as a symbol of all that threatens the institution that sustains them in the fierce social environment. Now, Kitcher is in a basic agreement with Dawkins about the illusionary nature of religion. Unlike Dawkins, however, Kitcher does not believe that people hold onto religion because of mere stupidity. Although he doesn't develop this point in a great detail, I suppose that Kitcher implies that only a radical social change could alter the conditions of life of ordinary Americans in such a way that they would no longer need the illusion of a religion.

Philip Kitcher's Living with Darwin is one of the better discussions of the current battle between creationism and evolutionary theory. Much like the on-going feud about sexuality in Christian denominations, the creationism/evolution tussle is about much more than just the front line issues. It involves a bona fide worldview clash between naturalists and supernaturalists.

To Kitcher's credit, he seems to recognize the narrow and comprehensive levels of the debate. He addresses the former in the first four chapters of this book. Arguing that creationism/ID has several varieties, he focuses on what he calls "Genesis creationism," which denies the ancient age of the earth; "novelty creationism," which claims that at least certain species are acts of special creation, thereby denying the one tree of life foundation of standard evolutionary theory; and "anti-selectionism," which argues that selection isn't a sufficient explanation for certain transitions, either from one species to the next in the development of "irreducibly complex" organs or organisms. Patiently and logically, these positions are addressed, respectively, in chapters 2-4.

What I found most intriguing in Kitcher's book is his effort in the final chapter to reflect on the more comprehensive worldview clash that fuels the more specific ones between ID and evolution. Kitcher argues that evolution destroys the possibility of divine design in the universe, and that textual analysis and comparative religion studies destroys faith in the literal truth of sacred scripture. Supernatural religion, then, is as dead as ID. But the "music of faith" (p. 158) is still something we yearn for. To fill that need, Kitcher recommends "spiritual" rather than supernatural religion, with the former being very much what John Dewey defended in his A Common Faith: an embrace of the religious experience without ascribing to it culturally fashioned notions of the supernatural.

This is a commendable argument. But it's one that leaves me dissatisfied for three reasons. First, it seems to me that Kitcher has illegitimately jumped from science to metaphysics--from a methodological naturalism, if you will, to a metaphysical one--in his conviction that evolution destroys the possibility of supernaturalism. Second, while it's absolutely the case that theology and God-belief needs to come to terms with (rather than denying) the Darwinian evolution, it's not at all clear that the only way to do that is by self-erasure. John Haught, for one, has worked on a consistent and sophisticated post-Darwinian theology. Finally, it's not clear to me that the human malaise which Kitcher thinks spiritual religion will ameliorate are just symptoms of social and economic injustice (which Kitcher believes). This account seems to me to ignore deeper questions of what might be called existential despair or loneliness with spiritual religion may simply not be equipped to deal with.

Authors of books often summarize their views in the last chapter, especially the last pages. Something similar happens in this book, prompting me to start at its end. The author states with assurance frequent with philosophers: "There is truth in Marx's dictum that religion...is the opium of the people" (p.165). And indeed the last chapter displays throughout this assurance, of the unquestionable truth of Darwinism face to face with religion. Thus: "Darwin's discovery of a single tree of life undercuts creationism" (p.149), "there is no God" (p.158), "churches...provide a sense of hope, illusory to be sure" (p.159), "Intelligent design-ers...give concerned people the hope that there is a genuine alternative [to Darwinian evolution], friendlier to faith...When these advertisements are probed...they are found to be thoroughly false" (p.151).

"Advertisements", incidentally, is one of many derisive terms used in the book for "disparaging of Darwin" (p.162). Find "zealous", "snake" (p.x), "charges" (p.38), "attacks" (p.70), "lamentably" (p.100), "wriggle" (p.110), "bobbings and weavings" (p.115), "concoct" (p.120). Instead for Darwinians "redoubtable" (p.x), "powerful", "expose" (p.xi), "responsible", "selflessly", "reasonably", "patient" (p.38), "appreciated" (p.163).

As noted by other reviewers, the author battles anti-Darwinism in three large areas: the origin of the universe compared to the biblical account, the origin of species in like comparison, and the manner in which living beings come about. The first two areas I shall not consider. The disputes on whether Darwinism can be reconciled with established religions seems futile and not the central issue, which evidently is the "faith" ending the author's subtitle. The question appears to be whether Darwin's randomness in forming organisms, "the denial of all purpose" in "life's history" (p.5) holds or not.

The author describes religious aspirations nicely when saying that Christians and others "believe that the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and who is especially concerned with humanity" (pp.122-3). But he continues that "the story...is hard to sustain when you think about the details". The details concern suffering, and at the moment I may only remark that this is an elaboration of the central question of purpose. However, let us look at some of his ethics arguments.

Leaning on natural selection as undisputable, he notes that it "is founded on strenuous competition" (p.123), or that mutations "arise without any direction toward the needs of organisms" (p.124). "Direction" concerns purpose, toward which I am heading, and "strenuous competition" is the infamous "survival of the fittest" that denies coexistence, sidestepping the predatory. He mentions Holocaust victims (p.128), presuming that "the divine plan demands the existence of some who can only attain heaven through extreme suffering". The Holocaust, however, is attributable to "survival of the fittest", not a "divine plan". He fails to distinguish between human and divine action. He like other Darwinists also fails to explain why purposeless evolution brings about pain. Supposing purpose instead, it is easily seen that pain serves the purpose of warning against harm. And this brings me to the general question of purpose in organisms.

Author Kitcher participates in the recently fashionable atheist claim that organisms are not so intelligently designed, countering the "intelligent design" arguments for purpose in organisms. He speaks repeatedly of "accumulated junk, vestigial structures, and genetic blunders" (p.106) as not assignable to Intelligence, complaining why resistance to malaria in certain populations isn't as good as it might be.

Ironically, he like other Darwinians asks for numerous allowances regarding gaps Darwinism hasn't explained, but admits no allowances regarding lack of sufficient understanding of functions of parts of organisms. Organisms are admittedly the most complex objects of continued scientific research, yet Darwinians have the arrogance to declare the structure of organisms unintelligent, despite human inability to come anywhere near to simulating their marvelous functionality with robots. And their resistance to dangers isn't as good as it might be? As obvious, nothing made of matter is immune to damage or destruction, but organisms are better equipped than anything else. They in fact FUNCTION toward self-preservation, and this is exactly where purpose in them is overlooked. This function in organisms itself demonstrates purpose, obviating looking for it in their structure, as has become the fixation on both sides of the debates. I elucidate this point and the accompanying theistic issues, as well as other concerns regarding human knowledge, in On Proof for Existence of God, and Other Reflective Inquiries, which I therefore immodestly again recommend for scrutiny.