The Rhetoric of Darwinism

Darwin deliberately stressed the reductionistic, physicalist aspects of his theory in order to eliminate any hint of the involvement of a designer or a vital force in his explanation of the development of living things.See Darwin and the term ‘evolution’and Darwin’s Challenge to Theological Positions, also Stephen Jay Gould in Depew, DJ, and Weber, BH, (eds), Evolution at a Crossroads (Cambridge, Ma.:...Rather the rhetoric of Darwinism is of a ‘force’ (selection) acting upon essentially passive objects considered in isolation (organisms). It is the rhetoric of physics. And physics has also profoundly influenced molecular biology;See See God, Humanity and the Cosmos, pp159 for a discussion of physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s seminal lectures on the nature of life. genes are described as strings of chemicals to which mutations happen. It may be, however, that the rhetoric of evolution in the next century will be much more in terms of Kauffman’s work on self-organisation and the development of complexity, of interdependent organisms exploring together the possibilities of greater complexity.See also Rolston, H, III, Genes, Genesis and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

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Evolution as a Science of the Unrepeatable Past
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Email link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate and Dr. Michael Robert Negus
Source: God, Humanity and the Cosmos  (T&T Clark, 1999)