Recently, someone wrote to us saying: "I'm not impressed with your charge that evolution theory is a form of religion."Darwinism's theological agenda" on the BCS Web Site in which the theological arguments of Darwin and Darwinists are discussed. The perception that science has found a way to rise above "beliefs" and "dogmas" is very widespread, and so it is something that deserves to be re-examined frequently.

Religious and cultural values in science

Perhaps surprisingly, a challenge to the 'belief-free science' position has come recently from the pen of one of Darwinism's staunch supporters. Michael Ruse is a well-known philosopher of science and editor of the journal "Biology and Philosophy". In 1982, he was prominent as a witness at the Arkansas creationism trial, claiming that evolutionary biology is clearly science and creationism is clearly non-science. Ruse's close involvement in the Creation/Evolution debate has led him to scrutinise more closely the relative importance of cultural, social and religious factors in the scientists who have developed evolutionary theory. The book is called "Mystery of Mysteries, is evolution a social construction?" (Harvard University Press, 1999). 

Ruse discusses particular "representative" individuals. Erasmus Darwin is the pre-Darwinian evolutionist; Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley represent 19^th Century Darwinism; early 20^th Century figures are Julian Huxley and Theodosius Dobzhansky; contemporary figures are Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, E.O. Wilson, Geoffrey Parker and Jack Sepkowski. 

An interesting and informative review of the book appeared in Science (284, 14 May 1999, 1131-1133) authored by the philosopher David Hull. After setting the scene and explaining why Ruse is well equipped to write the book, Hull says: 

"For each of the evolutionary biologists that Ruse studies, he asks how do such  traditional epistemic values as predictive ability, consistency, and coherence contribute to the biologist's work? He also investigates the influence of what he terms  "metavalues," those beliefs that scientists have about science itself. To take  one example: in the early days of science, references to God in science were perfectly acceptable, but later such references were excluded. Finally, Ruse examines whether such cultural factors as beliefs in progress, male dominance, and individualism had significant  effects on the path that evolutionary biology has taken."

Erasmus Darwin is on one extreme of the spectrum: epistemic values are minimal and metavalues maximal. Charles Darwin shifted the balance dramatically, but he was only partially successful. According to Ruse, evolutionary thought in the late 19^th Century was "more epistemically rigorous than it ever was; yet at all levels it is thoroughly impregnated with culture" (p.80). Moving into the 20^th Century, the trend towards epistemic purity continued, especially with the emphasis on mathematics by the Neo-darwinians. Nevertheless, the leaders of the Synthetic Theory of Evolution all had strong cultural/religious convictions. Hull says:

"Although Ruse has no trouble in setting out the extra-scientific views that these evolutionary biologists held, showing causal connections of any kind is much more  difficult, particularly for religion and the substantive content of science. Ruse makes as strong a case as he can in the few pages available to him."

The heated exchanges that have taken place between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, and between Richard Lewontin and E.O. Wilson provide Ruse with much fruitful material to analyse. What emerges is that there is a growing divide between the professional and the popular publications of scientists.

"Looking back on the history of evolutionary biology as exemplified by this dozen  or so biologists, Ruse sees a steady increase in the influence of epistemic factors from Erasmus Darwin to Jack Sepkowski and a corresponding diminution of cultural factors. Yet,  to make these extrapolations from his data, Ruse has to introduce another consideration -  professional versus popular science. Present-day scientists exclude reference to the cultural from their professional publication, reserving it, if used at all, for their more  popular writings".

That there are two complementary faces of science is an important  conclusion, especially when it is made by a professional philosopher. We have an 'official  face' of science (that is supposedly value free) and a 'public face' (which is an  undisguised naturalism). Only rarely do those adhering to the official position get to express themselves 'wrongly' - but when they do, the defenders of authentic naturalism  step in to keep everyone toeing the naturalistic line.

Ideologically "correct" science

Daniel Dennett (in his book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea") has taken numerous Darwinians to task for exhibiting non-Darwinian thinking. In particular, he has alerted people to the apparently insidious way that biologists sneak 'purpose' into their scientific thinking. 

A recent example of this ideological corrective influence is found in the 6 May 1999 issue of Nature. Last year, Rutherford and Lindquist (Nature, 396, 336-342) suggested that the heat-shock protein Hsp90 has the effect of stabilising developmental pathways. This was thought to foster the accumulation of hidden variants that can subsequently be exposed by environmental challenges and may then be fixed by selection. It was interpreted as "an explicit molecular mechanism that assists the process of evolutionary change" and by someone who commented on their work in Science, as "a way of saving up mutations for a rainy day".

In their letter to Nature (1999, 399 , 30), W. Joe Dickinson and Jon Seger (of the University of Utah) say: 

"Such interpretations seem to call for the evolution of properties that anticipate future needs. But selection lacks foresight and no one has described a plausible way to provide it.

Their last paragraph is quoted below in full: 

"In the natural world, only living things (and their artefacts) have 'purposes', and natural selection is the ultimate source of all such 'purposeful' design [Reference to Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker]. When speaking of the function or purpose of some feature of an organism, we are therefore referring to the selective advantages that brought the feature into being and that maintain it in the face of recurrent damaging mutations. It is especially important, in any discussion of evolutionary processes, to  observe the distinction between function or purpose on the one hand, and effect or  consequence on the other. This is not a semantic quibble. Cosmic rays affect evolution by  causing mutations, but we would not claim that they exist for that purpose. Similarly, developmental buffering and variable mutation rates may influence the course of evolution, but this does not mean that they evolved to that end."

It is interesting to see evolutionists calling fellow evolutionists to account for their lapses towards 'direction', 'internal drive', or 'purpose'. The important point to note is that the issue is not just one of consistency with the adopted theory (which is laudable) but consistency with the nature of reality. These authors actually believe that there is no underlying purpose in the course of evolution. Maybe the reason some biologists find the concept of purpose so hard to shed is more than cultural baggage - maybe they find the indications of design compelling!

It is also interesting to see Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker" being used as the only referenced 'authority' for the position taken by these correspondents. But more importantly, here is naturalism in action! Lewontin's oft-cited remark applies:  ^1.

Summary

The conclusion, then, is that the academic literature related to evolutionary explanations of origins conveys the illusion of "value-free" science. Nevertheless, establishment science does have a commitment to naturalism, and there are feedback mechanisms that either prevent alternative ideologies seeing the light of day, or that take to task those who unwittingly lapse into ways of thinking that are even remotely associated with design or purpose in nature. To find out more about the "belief-system" of evolutionary scientists, one has to turn to their popular literature. This material is generally overtly naturalistic and the vision of unguided, unsupervised, purposeless, meaningless processes is not difficult to find. Arguably, this is the message that is effectively communicated and, in the public mind, these are the conclusions of "science". 

How should Christians respond? We can learn from what Ruse and many other contemporary philosophers are telling us: that scientists cannot escape from the social and cultural contexts they find themselves in. This is not denigrating the work of the scientific community, but it is seeing it as the product of a socially and culturally-influenced community. Science is a human activity, not one that can be abstracted from the scientists doing the research. The Christian contribution is to point out that man's fallen state has affected his thinking. The philosophy of naturalism is the choice of people who are in a state of alienation from God. These philosophical roots then permeate the intellectual trees that grow up from them. The Christian has a different foundation: our thinking is to be rooted in Theism and the cosmos we study as scientists is to be understood as the creation of God. The challenge for us is to develop scientific ideas worthy of these roots.

David J. Tyler (1999)

1. "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." (Lewontin, Richard C. [Professor of Zoology and Biology, Harvard University], Billions and Billions of Demons, Review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan, New York Review, January 9, 1997).

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