The Evolution of Religion, According to Darwin

[cbayer]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/science/6822/the_evolution_of_religion__according_to_darwin/

February 11, 2013

Was the great scientist a “proto-None”?
By ELIZABETH DRESCHER

Elizabeth Drescher
Elizabeth Drescher is the author, with Keith Anderson, of Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (Morehouse, 2012). She teaches religion and pastoral ministries at Santa Clara University. She is currently at work on Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of Religious Nones, a project funded in part through a grant from the Social Science Research Council’s “New Directions in the Study of Prayer” project through the Templeton Foundation. Her website is www.elizabethdrescher.com



Evolving God: Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion
by David Pleins
Bloomsbury , 2013

Some hundred-fifty years since the publication of On the Origin of Species roiled the deeply intertwined worlds of science and religion, it remains a commonplace to set Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the practice of religion, and those who engage either, as polar opposites.

A recent piece by Mark Oppenheimer in the New York Times set out the well-worn path: a thoughtful, temperate physicist who has introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to designate February 12, 2013 as Darwin Day versus a fire-and-brimstone physician who’s called evolution “lies, straight from the pit of hell.” If there’s any nuance in the piece, it’s that Oppenheimer notes—briefly—that both protagonists, Democratic representative Holt D. Rush and his Republican counterpart Paul Broun, are Christian. One a mild-mannered Quaker; one a fundamentalist Baptist. You guess which is which.

A short hinge paragraph in Oppenheimer’s piece goes on to highlight the affirmation by Pope John Paul II that evolutionary theory is not in conflict with Roman Catholic teaching. But the heft of the article, as with so many on Darwin’s work, sets religious belief—especially Christian belief—in opposition to scientific reason. Central to this narrative is the idea that Darwin himself experienced a decisive conversion away from any belief in the Anglican Christianity within which he had studied toward ordination.

My Santa Clara University colleague David Pleins, whose Evolving God: Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion (Bloomsbury) will be released this summer, sees no small irony in rigid ideological polarities that he says Darwin himself resisted throughout his life. Further, Pleins argues that reading Darwin and the theories he developed through the lens of an uncompromising rejection of religion has prevented us from seeing the full scope of Darwin’s genius, which reckoned with religion in evolutionary terms every bit as much as it did with natural selection or adaptation.

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