From a seminar on at Bethel Seminary titled, Theology in Contemporary Culture
When I read Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I gained a general familiarity of the extent to which science—whatever its illumination of the natural world—is a socially constructed discipline, in which the precepts of any given subfield are canonically derived from the fields of knowledge and the forms of investigation that underscore its legitimation. As knowledge accrues, more or less unproblematically, a field develops in a “normal” fashion in a successive building block accumulative process. Problems emerge, but can be typically resolved within an existing frame of reference, a process Kuhn refers to as “normal” science. At critical points, a given discipline experiences anomalies sufficiently disruptive to result in a “paradigm” change of an existing model. A given model, however long standing—such as the shift in physics from Newton’s unchanging laws of motion—gives way when the anomalies of the given paradigm are too great to subsume, and when an alternative interpretation of more comprehensive scope emerges—Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics—that provides a more comprehensive understanding of how the laws of the universe operate.
While Kuhn dealt primarily with changes in scientific
thought, his work includes discussion of the mediation of scientific thought
through communities of scientific investigators and their roles in defining the
realm of the canonical in the formation of accepted scientific standards and in
signaling the need for paradigmatic change.
With that backdrop, I was able to process Murphy’s social construction
and historical impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the exploration of
alternative interpretations that could have emerged had the social climate for
the reception of such work developed in directions different that which actually
transpired in the second half of the 19th century.
In Ch. 3, Nancey Murphy, in Witness: Systematic
Theology, Vol. 3, does a nice job in articulating the social and
intellectual context in which Darwin’s work took shape and received into the
European and U. S. intellectual and religious cultures, particularly in mediating
the tension in the natural theologies, respectively, of William Paley and Thomas
Malthus. From the former, Darwin drew out the importance of design in his inescapable
anthropomorphizing theory of “natural selection” (p. 111). From the latter he
drew on the notion of “survival of the fittest” as a core metaphor for
depicting the competing forces in nature underlying his theory of “natural
selection” based on more rather than less effective adaptation of a genetically
differentiated organism to thrive in any given environment.
While not directly intended by Darwin, the underlying
metaphors of his theory of evolution, in which “natural selection” emerged
through a “struggle for existence and the “survival of the fittest,” gave shape
to a highly competitive social ideology in which those who succeeded in the
social and economic arena deserved to do so based on their natural merits. In turn, government or charitable
organizations—including the church—should not support those who failed because
to do so violated the natural laws of the social universe. 19th century intellectuals
associated this form of social Darwinism with “laissez-faire liberalism,” in
which the government’s role was to protect the liberty of individuals and not
meddle in improving the affairs of social classes, since such efforts, being
contrary to the laws of social and biological nature would only be counterproductive. This was prevailing viewpoint that provided
scientific justification to the captains of industry and their managers and an
explanation for the increasingly sharp class divisions which characterized
European and U. S. society in the era of the second industrialization and
imperialistic expansion into Africa, Asia, and Latin and South America. In the U. S., this era was dubbed as the
Gilded Age, recently highlighted in a PBS American Experience series (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/gilded-age/). Mark Twain and Charles Dudley dubbed this era
as The Gilded Age, the title of their
novel.
Murphy points to a more benign interpretation of
social Darwinism underlying a reformist
impetus that undergirded the progressive movement of the early 20th
century based on the capacity of society to evolve through intentional social
policy, an orientation that led to the improvement of the conditions of
humankind in support both of “liberalism and socialism” (p. 113). While “Darwin’s
theory [was able to] lend itself to a multiplicity of…different directions” (p.
114), the ideology of laissez faire individualism based upon the survival of
the fittest had (and continues to have) an enduring impact on U. S. and
European social practices, leading to a number of malignant outcomes. Murphy does a nice job in illustrating how
such a position was embedded in the social, intellectual, religious and
scientific thinking of the late 19th century.
In the later sections of Ch. 3 Murphey also
illustrates that the constrained language that gave shape to the emphasis in
evolution on competition masked some of the more symbiotic and cooperative ways
in which animals interacted with each other in their natural environments and
draws implications as well for the evolution of human morality predisposed to
such cooperative designs. In this interpretation,
“‘the most effective ‘struggle’ for life is mutual cooperation,’” (p. 117),
undergirded with a degree of altruism intrinsic to animal behavior. Throughout Section 3, Murphy provides
wonderful examples of animals, mostly within a clan network within a species,
cooperating with each other, sometimes at risk of an individual animal’s own
narrow interests, even to the point of survival. One sees something of this sort on many of
the PBS Nature Series, very powerfully reinforced in Jane Goodall’s decades-long
studies of the social life of chimpanzees.
Murphy does not want to over-romanticize this altruistic and communal
focused impulse in the animal world.
Nonetheless, she makes the critically important point that even today,
such an emphasis in the biological sciences is minimized in the works of
Dawkins and other contemporary biologists because they are presupposed to
identify a “selfish” gene underlying even the most apparently benign altruistic
behavior.
In Section 4,
Murphy draws out the implications of a richer view of biology for a theology
rooted within the context of an “embodied selfhood,” which underlies creation
theologies often underplayed in perspectives based on a radical polarity
between the spirit and the flesh. A
critical point of her discussion in this section is that our moral sense of the
human community has an evolutionary grounding in the animal kingdom. That whatever one is to make of any literal
interpretation of the Adam and Eve narrative, a sense of religious identity had
its formation within the hominid species itself, and not just with homo
sapiens. Based on the archeological and
geological evidence, “burial practices and cave drawings of Neanderthals are
often taken to show religious awareness” (p. 126). Consequently, Murphey wonders whether
Neanderthals also had souls.
Murphy does not probe into the extent to which any such reality poses fundamental challenges for traditional Christian theology, but her embodied understanding of human reality puts to rest any theology based on body/soul dualisms of any sort. She implicitly contends that Christian theology can carry the full weight of contemporary science. From her vantage point, it is easier to grasp the interface between science and religion when the spiritual and embodied dimensions of human understanding are more thoroughly integrated.
Murphy’s discussion is wide ranging, covering many critical areas. Given her emphasis on evolution, it would have been interesting to see how she would have processed the arguments of intelligent design within the context of her obvious respect for and understanding of evolutionary theory. From what I can see, she has no problem in squaring a mature, scientifically informed Christian theology with evolutionary biology, as such. For those interested in such an interface see the Biologos website https://biologos.org/. Their discussion of biological evolution is particularly instructive https://biologos.org/blogs/archive/biological-evolution-what-makes-it-good-science-part-1
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