By Dr. Robert Thorson
Being drowned out by the din of politics and economics is a celebration by scientists around the world. This academic year spans Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of his most famous work “The Origin of Species.” Hence, the University of Connecticut is sponsoring a yearlong series of eight talks by scholars from various disciplines. The most recent, “Darwin and the Evolution of Reasons,” was by Daniel Dennett, a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University.
He opened with a remark that that Darwin was the most important “philosopher who wasn’t.” Posing this verbal conundrum was a clever device for introducing his lecture. My concern is that the phrase reinforces a common misunderstanding that the boundary between science and philosophy is fuzzy in the religious (metaphysical) arena.
The courts have made it very clear that biblical creationism – even with the lipstick of Intelligent Design – cannot be taught in U.S. public schools. Fairness requires that science not be portrayed as some sort of covert philosophy. Doing so plays into the hands of those who believe that Darwinism is a form of religious indoctrination.
Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Goedel, Alan Turing and B.F. Skinner are other luminaries on Dennett’s list of philosophers who weren’t actually philosophers. But when Newtown explained planetary motions with a single equation, when B.F. Skinner proposed that human societies were governed by subconscious behavioral rewards and when Darwin presented his theory of natural selection, they were being scientists. They were not positing belief systems.
Taken together, their collective scientific ideas presented a view of the universe that was machinelike, autonomic and somewhat random, respectively. Of course such a view provided plenty of fodder for philosophical rumination. But that fodder and the philosophy fed by it are not the same thing.
What I liked most about Dennett’s talk was his celebration of Darwin’s main point: that a beautiful and complex Earth system does not require a fastidious designer. In contrast, Darwin’s metaphorical “tangled bank” arose from the sum of countless smaller, less complex events over long periods of time. Elements became compounds, which became auto-catalytic molecules, which became prokaryote cells (without a nucleus), which became eukaryotic cells (with a nucleus), which became tissues and organs, which become colonies called organisms, which become ecosystems in which individuals interacted and automatically shaped each other.
Dennett concluded by quoting a 1917 quip from the mathematical biologist D’arcy Wentworth Thompson: “A thing is what it is because it got that way.”
Darwin’s bottom-up “view of life” was revolutionary because it inverted the top-down reasoning implicit in monotheistic doctrine. And like all revolutions (and all evolutions as well), it was an uprising, not a downrising. His observations guided hypotheses, which merged into theory, which, when published, forced his and other human minds to grapple with philosophical implications, first as individuals, then as the collections of minds constituting society at large.
Normally, the semantic differences between science, philosophy and religion wouldn’t bother me. But with a vice presidential candidate known for her support of teaching creationism, I want to help ensure that the chain of sequence regarding these three disciplines are clearly distinguished. Lofty religious beliefs derive from philosophical insights, which may or may not derive from scientific grunt work.
In the “Origin of Species,” Darwin concluded: “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.” I completely agree.