Here is the summation of the Dilley process:
“The most severe tension, however, can be found in the fundamental justification for all
the positiva theological claims in the Origin. Judged from an epistemic point of view,
these claims offer genuine support for descent with modification only if they are justified
in the first place. In this vein, one may ask, ‘if Darwin’s own theory is true, what
justification is there for the positiva theology he used to support his theory?’”
“To appreciate his query, consider Darwin’s own reflections in his autobiography that
he felt compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that
of man … This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember,
when I wrote the Origin of Species. But then arises a doubt – can the mind of man, which has,
as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be
trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”
“This question, in one form or another, haunted Darwin from at least around 1859 to the
end of this life.104 Just six months after the debut of the Origin, Darwin wrestled with
the relationship between God and evolution in a letter to Asa Gray, writing that he
believed in divinely designed laws with the details left to chance. ‘Not that this notion
at all satisfies me’, Darwin immediately added. ‘I feel most deeply that the whole subject
is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of
Newton’.”
“In Darwin’s view, the human mind was not designed by God in order to know God; it
was instead equipped by nature to cope with the survival and reproductive needs of
ancient hunter-gatherers on the African landscape.106 Indeed, in Descent of Man, in
which Darwin applied evolutionary theory to the human species, God did not fashion
the human mind, but rather the reverse: Darwin argued that religious beliefs, including
the monotheistic concept of God, arose due to a combination of abstraction,
anthropocentric projection and social utility.”
“But what of the positiva theological claims in the Origin itself? It seems that if Darwin
had applied evolutionary theory to himself while writing the Origin, then he would not
have been justified in his claims about God. Here, the looming problem comes to a head:
by his own lights, if evolution is true, then some of the reasons for this theory – the
homology argument, the natural-suffering argument, claims about divine honesty and
as indicated below, perhaps the one exception is the claim that humans cannot know
whether God’s intellectual powers are analogous to their own.”
“Charles Darwin’s use of theology about God’s relationship to the laws of nature, and
so on – are no longer justified. In effect, the theology of the Origin undermined itself.
Darwin was still entitled to use reductio theology, in which he simply took special
creation’s theology seriously in order to test its empirical predictions. (One can test a
claim – say, that the Earth is flat – without having justification for that claim.) But if his
mature reflections are correct, then positiva theology, which purported to be
independent support for his theory, was an epistemic failure.”
“In summary, by taking seriously the laws of logic as well as Darwin’s mature thoughts,
an analysis of the Origin’s theology reveals vagueness, logical incoherence and epistemic
illegitimacy. Darwin’s later theological ‘muddle’ was quietly present in 1859. In this
view, the theology of the Origin resembles an assortment of claims that – even if some
were existentially important to Darwin – do not appear, from an epistemic point of view,
to have been carefully scrutinized for plausibility, clarity or consistency, but rather were
recruited to satisfy the primary purpose of establishing evolution and undermining its
chief rival.”
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What I get from this article is a subtle argument that if Darwin’s analysis was flawed, then
Evolution is somehow defective today.
Come on. This high point of this article is that it is a historical glimpse into the psychology
of a man who helped change the world. I think the article is a fine one in terms of antiquarian
interest.
But as to it being something useful in today’s understanding of Evolution? Hardly.
The evidentiary snow-ball effect for Evolution has taken on its own momentum. It doesn’t
need its birthing-wife (Darwin) to hold its hand any more. Darwin didn’t know anything
about DNA. He didn’t have the sophisticated physics and chemistry procedures that exist
now.
Today, we don’t even think about using theology or God to justify the Existence of Evolutionary
processes. Today, we have the evidence of Evolutionary processes that cannot be denied on a
eye-witness basis (eye-witness to the testing and the field findings). And so now the task
is to rediscover, all over again, what part of our Christian faith works with all this abundant
evidence.