A Religion for Darwinians?

"A Religion for Darwinians?" is a review by H. Allen Orr of Philip Kitcher's
recent book "Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of
Faith". You can pick it up in the Aug 16/2007 issue of the New York Review
of Books. I see a digital copy of the review is already up at
http://badscience.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pC906 (the review isn't
available for free at nybooks.com).

The review actually makes me want to buy the book, though that doesn't seem
to be the primary aim of the review. The main reason I'd like to read
Kitcher's book is the way Orr discusses Kitcher's historical approach to
creationist arguments. Not simply to 'intelligent design', but to the
lineage of related arguments. And how these arguments were defeated, how
they died. Yet how they continue, in different forms.

"Kitcher hopes to accomplish two things in 'Living with Darwin'. One is to
survey various versions of creationism and to recount the arguments against
them. In doing so, he hopes to present a positive case for Darwinism and "to
formulate it in a way that people with no great training in science,
history, or philosophy could appreciate." Kitcher's other goal is more
ambitious and–given the current noisy debate over science and
religion–perhaps more important. He hopes to get at just what it is about
Darwinism that's so threattening to religion. Why is it that of all
intellectual enterprises, this one "particular piece of science provokes
such passions, requires such continual scrutiny, demands such constant
reenactment of old battles?" Kitcher believes that unless this question is
answered, we are destined to repeat the wars between evolution and creation.
In the final part of his book, Kitcher thus offers his diagnosis of the
difficulties Darwinism poses to faith and describes the adjustments to
religion that he believes are demanded by science.

ja
http://vispo.com

ps: Just as Darwinism has provoked creationist arguments for 150 years, the
question of whether there is some part of us that is not machinistic will
undoubtedly provoke related debate for the next 150 years (at least). In
other words, the question of whether there are thought processes of which
humans are capable and computers are not is a similarly controversial issue.
But while Darwinism has primarily provoked religious people, the
human/machine issue seems to provoke a broader audience who believes that
machines cannot be capable of all human thought processes.