Robert Merton once postulated that the flourishing of Puritanism directly led to the growth of modern science, rather like Max Weber maintained that the Protestant ethic fostered the growth of capitalism.
Why then is it that modern Protestant evangelicals appear to struggle with accepting science today? Why does this struggle emerge especially around biology, particularly evolution? And why have many evangelicals turned to approaches like “Intelligent Design,” which instead of replacing science with religion, instead seeks to co-opt science within terms acceptable to Protestant evangelicalism?
These are the questions I was considering today while discussing sociology and science, and considering how the nature of certain kinds of evidence and theory influences its acceptance and utility by different social groups. (For more, see, e.g., Religion and Science: Beyond the Epistemological Conflict Narrative, by John Evans and Michael Evans.)
Let’s consider Protestant fundamentalists, who generally consider the Bible literally true (despite problems of translation, changes in fundamentalist interpretations over time, and other difficulties). This is the group, one would expect, who might well have the most objections to science, and indeed when it comes to geological sciences and evolution, they do.
But interestingly, most Christian fundamentalists see no conflict with other kinds of science (chemistry, for example), and are typically — despite what one might extrapolate from Young Earth Creationists or geo-centrists, for example — quite happy to accept many forms of modern science and technology.
Evangelicals — who take the Bible less literally than the fundamentalists, but otherwise share many values — have even fewer quibbles with mainstream science, but do tend still to object specifically to the concept of Darwinian evolution. They object so strongly, and yet otherwise consider science so important, that they have struggled to create and teach their own theory of “Intelligent Design” to account for the empirical data scientists have accumulated.
But why is it evolution, and not heliocentrism or photosynthesis, both of which draw from scientific theories which organize and explain empirical data, which has attracted such vehement opposition from evangelicals and fundamentalists?
First, I think evolution, and especially the apparent “randomness” of mutations that leads to change (even if natural selection itself is far from random), generates a kind of anti-materialist repugnance that sees in it a threat to the moral order. If our existence owes as much to chance as anything else, does this not threaten the role of the divine in our lives and, perhaps more importantly, does this not threaten or status as the élite of the world? If we as humans came to exist in the same manner as every animal on Earth, what right do we have to claim an immortal soul?
Second, Protestantism comes from a tradition that values evidence and observation, but looks suspiciously at over-abstract concepts and trust in elites. Thus, evangelicals are wary of science that relies on abstractions, but are fine with science that is strongly connected with observable events. We can see and experience a chemical reaction, but we cannot see or directly experience macro-evolution over millennia.
So why is evolution a target? It is abstract. It is difficult to observe directly, and thus seem to require trusting in scientific elites. (Both of these have historically been issues for Protestantism generally.) It is threat to the established order of things. It feels wrong.
In short, it is less about the truth of the matter than it is about values.
Does this same kind of analysis apply to conservative resistance to climate change research? How many of those who do not believe that the Earth’s climate is being impacted by human activity are evangelical or fundamentalist Protestants? I’m not sure of the answers to these two questions, but I am curious.
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Of course "God" is dead
Darwinian consequences make nonsense of ancient metaphysical certainties
...there's nothing new about xianity's entrenched resistance to a continuing de-deification of "nature" (wringing "God" out of the cosmic wash) -- the xian assualt on the intellect begins with Saul/Paul of Tarsus (fl 50-65CE) after he was laughed at by Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in the Agora of Athens (Acts17:18 NIV). Hostility continues through the book burnings of the 400's CE.
After 1,200 years of blackout, Copernicanism gets rejected even by the so-called reformer Luther, who calls the astronomer a fool. Galileo enjoys an afternoon viewing the instruments of torture before abjuring his errant ways and departing for house arrest. Darwin's theory of natural selection digs God's grave by killing off any metaphysics dependent upon 'Design' and 'Purpose'.
Even 151 years after publication of ‘On the origin of species’, liars on the xian right and slovenly jokers in philosophy imagine that Modern Evolutionary Theory will collapse by quoting some non-existent divinity or by uttering some gibberish about “survival of the fittest” being a circular argument.
Speciation via natural selection does not produce universally optimal individuals; it produces only locally better breeders. Even a slim advantage works. ‘Survival of the fittest’ — not Darwin’s phrase but Herbert Spencer’s — has never described evolutionary theory.
Steve Gould exposed the saboteurs years ago. His writings will convince all but the most obtuse and mendacious. They have not forgotten, nor forgiven, Darwin. Why so much irrational ire? —
Darwin’s master conceptual engine, natural selection, forever abolished from biological explanation the “teleological cause” of Aristotle and the "ideal forms" of Plato. Purpose and Design are dead.
As a youthful Darwin tartly remarked in a post-Beagle Notebook: “Plato says . . . that our 'necessary ideas' arise from the preexistence of the soul, [and] are not derivable from experience — read monkeys for preexistence.” [M Notebook (entry 128)]
• the Invisible Hand writes its own script
Complex systems do arise from simple events, including random events. There is no need for a 'god of economics' to design the microeconomic market of Adam Smith (‘The wealth of nations’ 1776) -- under specified mechanisms of random exchange, it forms itself.
What makes natural selection so uncomfortable? In operation, it has no goal and achieves no purpose. Speciation is a random trial-and-error process dependent upon differential reproductive success -- in a determinate ecological setting.
A designer for evolution is as superfluous as a designer for economics. And for exactly the same reason.
the anti_supernaturalist
The de-deification of western culture (including science) is our task for the next 100 years.
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