Is Religion an Emotional Crutch?
The Cultural Impact of Darwinism
By Nancy Pearcey
In the fall of 2005 Kansas University announced a new course, subtitled
"Intelligent Design [ID], Creationism, and other Religious Mythologies," taught
by the chair of the religious studies department Paul Mirecki. But controversy
erupted when news leaked out that Mirecki had posted notes on the website of a
student atheists group mocking proponents of ID as "fundies." I am "doing my
part to [tick] off the religious right," he wrote, giving them a "slap in their
big fat face" by teaching ID "under the category 'mythology.'" Mirecki later
apologized and cancelled the course, but the cat was out of the bag. Many
evolutionists regard ID not simply as false or mistaken, but as sheer
mythology–in the same category as fables and fairy tales.
We must understand that this is not simply an attempt to insult ID
supporters, but a perfectly logical conclusion. ID builds a scientific case
that the kind of design we observe in the world around us is characteristic of
an intelligent agent, or Agent. Thus ID implies that Mind preceded matter,
whereas naturalistic evolution implies that matter produced mind. These are
antithetical views; they cannot both be true. As Phillip Johnson likes to say,
if material forces acting on their own are capable of doing all the creating,
then there's nothing left for a Creator to do; He has "no gainful employment."
And if the existence of God is not needed to explain anything about the
world–if it does not serve any explanatory or cognitive function–then the only
function left is an emotional one. People will treat religion not as a genuine
truth claim but as an expression of psychological need, a source of comfort and
consolation.
This explains why many historians identify the rise of Darwinism as the key
turning point in reducing religion to the status of mere myth. For example,
Neal Gillespie says Darwinism caused a shift "from religion as knowledge to
religion as faith" (Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation). Since
"there was no longer any function for God to carry out in the world, He was, at
best, a gratuitous philosophical concept derived from personal need." Or, as I
myself used to say as a teenager, religion is nothing but an emotional
crutch.
Another way to put it is that Darwinism shattered the unity of truth.
Traditionally, all cultures have taught that truth is a unified whole–that
there is both a material/physical order and a moral/spiritual order, integrated
into a single coherent system. But Darwin's theory broke the "link" between the
material and the moral order, as his former teacher Adam Sedgwick pointed out.
Morality and religion were relegated to the category of cultural tradition, or
emotional need, or wish fulfillment. One textbook, A History of Philosophy
in America, sums it up nicely: "Until 1859, the fundamental unity of
knowledge was assumed by virtually all serious writers in America. . . . What
the controversy over evolution did was to shatter this unity of
knowledge," ultimately reducing religion and morality to "noncognitive
subjects."
This is why debates over Darwinism will not go away any time soon. The
impact of the theory goes far beyond the details of mutations and natural
selection to a redefinition the concept of truth itself. Today's most strident
popularizer of evolution, Richard Dawkins, describes "the Darwinian view of
life" in stark terms: "No design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but
blind, pitiless, indifference." Notice that in a single breath he combines "no
design" with "no evil or good," and he is right. To define what is morally good
is simply another way of saying what the world is designed or intended to be,
what its purpose is. But if there is no Designer, then there is no objective
purpose, and each of us must live by whatever subjective purposes we can come
up with.
No Design, No Values
Historian Edward Purcell explores the implications of Darwinism in a book
subtitled Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value. The
worldview of scientific naturalism or materialism asserts that nature or matter
is all that exists; there are no spiritual or transcendent realities. As this
worldview became accepted, it created a "problem of value" because good and
evil, right and wrong, are not part of the material world known by science. The
result was a split view of truth, where the natural sciences were elevated to
the only objective knowledge, while religion and morality were demoted to the
level of mere symbol. As Purcell puts it, in scientific naturalism,
"theological dogmas and philosophical absolutes were at worst totally
fraudulent and at best merely symbolic of deep human aspirations."
Another historian, Julie Reuben, tells a similar story of how the concept of
truth was split. In a book aptly subtitled The Marginalization of
Morality, she explains how questions of value were removed from the
college curriculum. After Darwin, the only form of religion considered
acceptable was one that consisted solely of "sentiment, experiences, ritual,
and ethical living"–in short, a religion that "had no intellectual content." By
the 1930s, Reuben writes, American universities had largely given up the ideal
of "the unity of truth" and had relegated religion and science to separate
spheres of life–"science to the intellectual and religion to the inspirational"
sphere. Objective knowledge was defined as "value free" because values had
become a form of subjective bias that threatened to distort research.
Today this division of truth is often referred to as the fact/value
dichotomy. The assumption is that on one hand there is a realm of facts, which
are scientific, objective, and value free. On the other hand there is a
separate realm of values, which are merely private preferences. The split can
be diagramed like this:
VALUE
Private Preference; Subjective
________________________________________
FACT
Public Truth; Objective
This division has now become embedded in most college textbooks as an
unquestioned assumption. "Facts are objective, that is, they can be
measured, and their truth tested," says a typical textbook. "Value
judgments, on the other hand, are subjective, being matters of personal
preference. . . . Such preferences are based on personal likes and feelings,
rather than on facts and reasons" (Economics for Decision Making). The
impact of Darwinism is not limited to science but has permeated the entire
curriculum.
Not Even Wrong
This is why the evolution controversy continues to grow, as it draws in a
broad range of people concerned about the fact/value split. According to
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things, not just conservative
Protestants but also "Catholics and everyone else have an enormous stake in
defending the unity of truth." A BBC correspondent recently asked why many
Americans "are spending more energy fighting Charles Darwin than cutting
taxes," but the reason is clear: At stake is not just a scientific theory but a
divided concept of truth that reduces religion and morality to the level of
myth.
Moreover, propagandists for evolution are growing ever bolder. Not long ago,
the New York Times published a piece by Daniel Dennett, author of
Darwin's Dangerous Idea, saying, "We don't believe in ghosts or elves
or the Easter Bunny–or God." This dismissive attitude explains why the
University of Kansas would hire as chair of its religious studies department a
professor who expresses contempt for religion–and for scientific concepts such
as ID that support a religious worldview. A second KU professor has now
announced that he will add the study of ID to an existing course called
"Archaeological Myths and Realities." John W. Hoopes , an associate professor
of anthropology, told a reporter that ID is "pseudoscience" because "it is
based on hypotheses that are not falsifiable." In other words, the starting
assumption of the course is that ID does not even qualify as something that can
be true or false, but is merely myth.
What this means is that the challenge to any religion-based worldview is
much more radical than it used to be. In the past, secularists would argue that
Christianity is false–which meant the two sides could engage one
another with questions such as, What is true and false? How we know? What is
the evidence? What are the arguments? Today, however, secularists are much more
likely to argue that Christianity is not a valid truth claim at all. It may be
personally meaningful to certain people; it may be part of their cultural
tradition; but it is not taken seriously as a candidate for truth in public
discourse.
A well-known physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, is famous for having told one of his
colleagues, Your theory is so bad, it's not even wrong. That is, it's not even
in the ballpark of possible answers. This is how Christianity is treated in the
public arena today: It is not that people reject it as wrong so much as that
they do not even consider it a possible answer to the question of truth.
All Truth Is God's Truth
Before the dominance of Darwinism, most people simply assumed the unity of
truth. Western culture was thoroughly imbued with the biblical conviction that
all of creation comes from the hand of God, and therefore all its parts fit
within a single ordered plan. "Knowledge was unified because it rested on
Christian claims to universal truth," write Catholic historians Jon Roberts and
James Turner (The Sacred and the Secular University). Even though
scholars specialized in various fields of expertise, they assumed that each
specialty was part of an overall system of truth, like an old-fashioned
quilting bee where each embroiderer works on one part of the overall
pattern.
The conviction of a unitary truth rested ultimately on the biblical teaching
of creation. "Christianity posited a single reality, with some kind of rational
coherence integrating it," Roberts and Turner explain, because it all
originated from a single Mind. Christianity taught that "a single omnipotent
and all-wise God had created the universe, including human beings, who shared
to some extent in the rationality behind creation. Given this creation
story, it followed that knowledge, too, comprised a single whole."
In short, the biblical creation story leads to a unified concept of truth,
in which the moral and the material orders fit into a single whole. By
contrast, the Darwinian creation story has bequeathed a divided conception of
truth, where the material order is all the exists or can be known, while moral
and spiritual truths are no longer truths at all but merely private fantasies.
That's why the debate over Darwinism has implications far beyond the bounds of
science. At stake is the definition of truth itself.
Biosketch:Nancy Randolph Pearcey is the
Francis A. Schaeffer scholar at the World Journalism Institute. Having studied
under Schaeffer at L'Abri in the 1970s, Pearcey earned an MA from Covenant
Theological Seminary, followed by further graduate work in philosophy at the
Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. She has authoried or contributed to
several works, including The Soul of Science and How Now Shall We
Live? Her latest book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its
Cultural Captivity won an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today
2005 Book Awards, and the ECPA Gold Medallion Award for best book of
the year in the Christianity & Society category.