Post by syzygy on Jul 18, 2009 3:21:39 GMT
I recently read a 2002 article called “Dangerous Darwinism” in Public Understanding of Science by Chris Fleming and Jane Goodall. I thought it was worth a summary.
Fleming and Goodall take Dennett, Dawkins, Wilson and just about every new popular book about evolution to task for delighting in the “culture shock” supposedly occasioned by Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s the enlightened scientist fighting the uphill battle against a benighted, dogmatic and, especially, religious opposition. According to this article, however, the culture shock never happened, but the myth that it did happen serves a useful purpose in the atheists’ war with religion.
Summarizing further:
Freud represented Darwin’s theory as one of the three major blows to which human vanity has been subjected. Our earth was removed from the center of the universe by Copernicus. Our bodies were not specially created but only part of a long process of development and not necessarily the end. And our souls—this was Freud’s part—were subject to influences we don’t even know about. Dawkins and even Steven J. Gould, picking up the theme, speak of several humiliating blows science has delivered to the human consciousness, deposing humankind “from one pedestal after another.”
Focusing on evolution the article provides copious evidence that most people, including religious, were quite willing to accept Darwin’s conclusions. For example, the article quotes David Livingstone: “…the theory of evolution was absorbed in Edinburgh, repudiated in Belfast and tolerated in Princeton” (all centers of conservative Christianity) and comments: “If churchmen in Belfast felt threatened by scientific materialism, this probably had far more to do with Tyndall’s hegemonic proclamations [about science dethroning religion] than with anything intrinsically threatening in the ideas he had adopted from Darwin.”
Further quotes:
“There is little evidence that scientists who supported Darwinism were moved to change their religious views.”
“. . . by the 1870s, uncritical Darwinism was coming to be seen as a fashionable form of intellectual laziness. Henry Adams, who described himself as “a Darwinist before the letter,” felt “like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution.” This is an especially interesting testament in the light of Richard Dawkins’s claim that “we are predisposed to disbelieve Darwinism.”
“The reader who is invited to believe the culture-shock narrative is by the same gesture invited into the coterie of the fearless, those who can take the punishment of a new tough paradigm. Given the assumption that people all around you are reeling from the blows dealt by the “hard” science of evolutionary biology, there is a kind of bravado in demonstrating that you can take it without flinching. The humiliation narrative thus actually works as a technique for creating intellectual stature.”
It also, the authors conclude, tends to “produce an audience of true believers, immunized against whatever propensities to skeptical inquiry they may have possessed to begin with.”
In general, the authors downplay the idea of revolution in science. Does anyone have further thoughts on this? What about public acceptance or rejection of the Copernican and Freudian “revolutions”?
Fleming and Goodall take Dennett, Dawkins, Wilson and just about every new popular book about evolution to task for delighting in the “culture shock” supposedly occasioned by Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s the enlightened scientist fighting the uphill battle against a benighted, dogmatic and, especially, religious opposition. According to this article, however, the culture shock never happened, but the myth that it did happen serves a useful purpose in the atheists’ war with religion.
Summarizing further:
Freud represented Darwin’s theory as one of the three major blows to which human vanity has been subjected. Our earth was removed from the center of the universe by Copernicus. Our bodies were not specially created but only part of a long process of development and not necessarily the end. And our souls—this was Freud’s part—were subject to influences we don’t even know about. Dawkins and even Steven J. Gould, picking up the theme, speak of several humiliating blows science has delivered to the human consciousness, deposing humankind “from one pedestal after another.”
Focusing on evolution the article provides copious evidence that most people, including religious, were quite willing to accept Darwin’s conclusions. For example, the article quotes David Livingstone: “…the theory of evolution was absorbed in Edinburgh, repudiated in Belfast and tolerated in Princeton” (all centers of conservative Christianity) and comments: “If churchmen in Belfast felt threatened by scientific materialism, this probably had far more to do with Tyndall’s hegemonic proclamations [about science dethroning religion] than with anything intrinsically threatening in the ideas he had adopted from Darwin.”
Further quotes:
“There is little evidence that scientists who supported Darwinism were moved to change their religious views.”
“. . . by the 1870s, uncritical Darwinism was coming to be seen as a fashionable form of intellectual laziness. Henry Adams, who described himself as “a Darwinist before the letter,” felt “like nine men in ten, an instinctive belief in Evolution.” This is an especially interesting testament in the light of Richard Dawkins’s claim that “we are predisposed to disbelieve Darwinism.”
“The reader who is invited to believe the culture-shock narrative is by the same gesture invited into the coterie of the fearless, those who can take the punishment of a new tough paradigm. Given the assumption that people all around you are reeling from the blows dealt by the “hard” science of evolutionary biology, there is a kind of bravado in demonstrating that you can take it without flinching. The humiliation narrative thus actually works as a technique for creating intellectual stature.”
It also, the authors conclude, tends to “produce an audience of true believers, immunized against whatever propensities to skeptical inquiry they may have possessed to begin with.”
In general, the authors downplay the idea of revolution in science. Does anyone have further thoughts on this? What about public acceptance or rejection of the Copernican and Freudian “revolutions”?
