9 - Christian Anti-Darwinism: the realm of certainty and fixity

Summary

The vivid and popular features of the anti-Darwinian row tended to leave the impression that the issue was between science on one side and theology on the other. Such was not the case. … Although the ideas that rose up like armed men against Darwinism owed their intensity to religious associations, their origin and meaning are to be sought in science and philosophy, not in religion.

John Dewey

The military metaphor has taken its heaviest toll among Christian anti-Darwinians. With visions of polarisation, organisation, and antagonism filling their minds, commentators on the post-Darwinian controversies have made Darwin's religious opposition appear as hostile as possible, sometimes by emphasising the incoherent polemical utterances of vulgar writers while neglecting the responses of more competent critics, more often by overlooking the philosophical and scientific objections implicit in the vulgar responses and explicit in the competent ones. To take but a single example: in a recent study of the impact of evolutionary naturalism on American thought there is a chapter entitled ‘The warfare of science and religion’. This chapter surveys the rhetoric of twenty-one anti-Darwinian writers, among them three who figure in the following pages, Enoch Fitch Burr, Charles Hodge, and John William Dawson. And what becomes of these prominent individuals? Burr is twice enlisted for a colourful quotation to match the lurid remarks of the popular preacher T. De Witt Talmage (who is cited three times), thereby illuminating the chapter's title. Hodge appears, not as the author of a trenchant theological analysis of Darwin's theory, but as an obscurantistic bibliolater who simply equated Darwinism with atheism.