Hunter on Darwin and Gnosticism

Don Nield:

I understand you posted a message (pasted below), where you find my book *Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil* wanting because you didn't find the word "theodicy" in the index of Neal Gillespie's *Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation.* Fascinating. What is particularly ironic here is that of all books you might have chosen, Gillespie well documents Darwin's concerns about dysteleology and natural evil, in support of his strong arguments that divine creation must be false. You might try reading the book instead of the index. But that's not the reason I'm posting. I'm posting because you also are spreading personal misinformation about me:

"I now refer to a book by another author, who I undertand is
financially independent but who is closely associated with members of
the Discovery Institute, namely "Darwin's God", by Cornelius G. (George)
Hunter."

I have no association whatsoever with the Discovery Institute and I am not financially independent.

--George

==============

I am sorry that James Mahaffy feels that the response on this list to
the writings of Nancy Pearcey have been unfair, and that he wonders why
ID brings such an automatic negative response, one involving a stereotype. I
would suggest that the response is not automatic and not unfair. As I
see it, Nancy writes not as an individual but as a member of a team, as
a Fellow of the CRC of the Discovery Institute, which has a well
publicized agenda. It is thus reasonable to compare her current book, in
which she has opted to include a substantial amount of material on ID,
with publications of her DI colleagues. Nancy chose to endorse (on the
back cover) Wiker's book, joining Dembski (who wrote the foreword,)
Johnson, Wells and Behe in so doing.

It seems to me that in the ID literature one can legitimately discern a
consistent anti-evolution bias when the discussion turns to historical
matters. I now refer to a book by another author, who I undertand is
financially independent but who is closely associated with members of
the Discovery Institute, namely "Darwin's God", by Cornelius G. (George)
Hunter. This book is endorsed by Johnson (front cover), and Behe,
Dembski and Meyer (back cover). As it happens, I wrote a review of this
book that was not intended for NCSE but ended up their Reports (Jan-Apr.
2002)
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol22/8784_idarwin39s_god_evo
lution_12_30_1899.asp
Here are some excerpts from my review:

*****According to Johnson, Hunter brilliantly supports his thesis that
Darwinism is a mixture of metaphysical dogma and biased scientific
observation, that "at its core, evolution is about God, not science".
According to Behe, Hunter argues perceptively that the main supporting
pole of the Darwinian tent has always been a theological assertion; "God
wouldn't have done it that way."
.............

Hunter says that it was reasonable for Darwin to argue that God would
not be personally involved in the swallow's attack on the gnat - not
because of any finding of modern science but because of the persistence
of Gnosticism into modern times, and given such a premise it was then
reasonable to conclude that God is altogether removed from the world.
.................................

The question now is whether Hunter has made his case or whether his book
should be regarded as a revisionist reading of history in line with the
" Wedge" doctrine of the "intelligent design" movement. There is no
doubt that Darwin was concerned with the religious implications of
evolution, but was he driven by religious considerations? To help answer
this question, I have studied the book /Charles Darwin and the Problem
of Creation/ by Neal C Gillespie (Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press,
1979). The author was Professor of History at Georgia State University.
Hunter gives eight inconsequential references to Gillespie's book, but
does not seriously engage with him.

Gillespie (p. 135) wrote

<> There can be no real doubt as to Darwin's theism during the years
that he prepared for and wrote the /Origin/. Aside from the strong
evidence in his writing, he tells us in his /Autobiography/ that the
need for postulating an intelligent First Cause as initiating the
universe - a belief implied in the theological arguments in the /Origin/
- "was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when
I wrote the /Origin of Species." / When Dr Pusey seemed to accuse him of
having written the /Origin/ as an attack on religion and not as science,
Darwin replied indignantly that Pusey was "mistaken in imagining that I
wrote the /Origin /with any relation whatever to theology" (not exactly
the case, as we have seen), and that "when I was collecting facts for
the /Origin/, my belief in what is called a personal God was as firm as
that of Dr. Pusey himself.

Theodicy is not listed in the index of Gillespie's book. In the light of
this I find Hunter's thesis difficult to accept. It is correct that
there is an element of truth in what Hunter says. Elsewhere (p. 133)
Gillespie notes that later in his life, in the passage that concludes
/The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, /Darwin/
/presents us with the quandary that he himself never resolved: if God is
omnipotent and omniscient then it is hard to see why he is not also
irrational and even immoral in producing superfluous laws of nature and
waste of life. "Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as
insoluble as that of free will and predestination." Thus Darwin
certainly recognized that his work involved the problem of theodicy, but
that is completely different from Hunter's claim that it was
consideration of theodicy that led Darwin to advance his theory of
evolution.******

One of the things that I did not pick up at the time that I wrote my
review is Hunters's peculiar use of the term "neo-gnostics" to refer to
Darwinists. I later inferred by following up one of his footnotes that
Hunter got his idea from Harold Bloom, a Jewish literary critic, who
wrote "The American Religion" (Sinon & Schuster, 1992). It seems to me
that this is a far fetched idea. (I mention this because I know of one
person who now writes off theistic evolutionists as neo-gnostics.) Don
Received on Sat Jul 30 20:49:24 2005