Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?
Ruse, Michael & Haught, John F.
YES Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion Michael Ruse Cambridge University Press, $24.95,242 pp. John F. Haught ew scholars have written more...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...REV...
...But by referring to Darwinism as a "materialistic theory" he only adds credibility to Plantinga's spurious claim...
...Marvin, S.D...
...Michael O. Garvey tie summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention...
...The book's respectful and sympathetic treatment provides a refreshing alternative to Dawkins's own notorious tantrums about the stubborn persistence of theology in the face of all the Darwinian evidence against it...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...Harleys...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...WE BRAKE FOR GOD Riders for Cod The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang Rich Remsberg Afterword by Colleen McDannett University of Illinois Press, $34,95, 263 pp...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...He is content to deal only with rather centrist theological understandings of Christian faith, and he finds that Darwin's ideas can live quite comfortably even in this setting...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...Perhaps out of caution Ruse has decided to comment mostly on traditional interpretations such as "the Augustinian Option," and he avoids encounter with the many other more adventurous theological perspectives on evolution now available...
...Arguing that our genes have led us to devise beliefs conducive to good behavior and hence to the survival of our genes, they had exclaimed that "the way our biology enforces its ends is by making us think that there is an objective higher moral code, to which we are all subject...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...In Can a Darwinian Be a Christian ? he wants us to understand, as always, that he remains not only an agnostic, but a materialist and reductionist to boot...
...The author continues, at least verbally if not intentionally, to fuse Darwinian science with philosophical materialism...
...It was easy to accede...
...Filled with useful information and sparkling wit, it will provide scientists, theologians, and lay readers the opportunity to think in fresh ways about God, Christianity, and evolution...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...Thoughtful believers, and not just the academically embattled defenders of "intelligent design," will find such an alloy logically incompatible with any genuinely religious sense of God...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...The author's own philo38 sophical stance has itself evolved somewhat over the last decade or so...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...Ruse still confesses that he agrees with the philosophical assumptions of Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary materialists...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...Ruse, however, has little use for the work of another Notre Dame philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, who, along with Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, and other anti-Darwinian Christians, dismisses fundamental tenets of evolutionary biology as incompatible with "intelligent design...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...One would hope that Ruse means "methodologically materialistic" and not necessarily "metaphysically materialistic...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...Maybe I will...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...Distancing himself significantly from Wilson, he now advances the more temperate view that "not all explanations of why or how we got to believe things are necessarily such as to debunk the veracity of the belief systems...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...Ruse may be the only living human who could write a book as unusual as this one...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...Ruse is entirely correct in rebuking Plantinga for insisting that methodological naturalism inevitably leads us down the slippery slope to metaphysical materialism...
...Even an entrenched agnostic evolutionist can see how Darwin and Christianity may get along, so why can't they...
...And yet, as he argues here in a series of chapters on various doctrines of Christian faith, it is not unreasonable or silly for Darwinians to be prayerful Christians as well...
...He seems to have pulled back from the debunking of ethics and religion that he had earlier expressed in an often-cited joint essay with sodobiologist E. O. Wilson...
...And the author himself is conversant with numerous contemporary theologians who have no difficulty with Darwinian evolution either...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...It is almost habitual for some Darwinians to refer to evolution as a "materialist" theory...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...He is certainly aware of this distinction, but he does not always seem as willing as one would expect in a book of this nature to let Darwinism, as science, slip out of the materialist clothing it has often worn...
...As far as he is concerned, the existence of life and the emergence of its diverse kinds can be explained quite adequately in purely naturalist and even materialist terms...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...Apart from this puzzling inconsistency, Ruse's fine book contributes significantly to the contemporary dialogue of science and religion...
...But then, much more provocatively, he goes on to say that Darwinism is "the apotheosis of a materialistic theory...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...Ruse is telling the "intelligent design theorists" not to be afraid...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Ruse refers to the "naturalistic philosophy" that underlies evolutionary science, by which he means, uncontroversially, that evolution is subject to laws of nature...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...REV...
...As a matter of fact a lot of them have been, and apparently without experiencing any inconsistency...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...And yet a major difficulty carries over...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of epater le bourgeois, but what31...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...Ruse points out, for example, that among the "top ten" evolutionists since Darwin we will find such ardent Christians as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ronald Fisher...
...Although Wilson would continue to view Darwinism as a definitive demonstration of the illusory character of our most cherished beliefs, Ruse would not...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...There is no need to invoke the idea of God...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...A professed agnostic, he remains fascinated by religion and is always willing to engage in dialogue—in good humor and without an ounce of condescension—with theologians whom he is quite happy to call his friends...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...Although Ruse realizes that the most prominent Darwinians profess to be either agnostic or atheist, he argues here that it is not at all dishonest for scientifically educated people to embrace Christian faith and still be good Darwinians...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Such a distinction was difficult even for Darwin to make, and it seems no less the case with many of his disciples...
...39 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...He was an expert witness at the famous Arkansas creationism trial and for many years has been a delightfully irrepressible presence at gatherings of scholars interested in the relationship of science and religion...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...Ruse may have always believed this, but it is good to see him say it so explicitly here...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck...
...God will hear you...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...As long as Darwinism is taken to be as ineradicably materialistic as it appears to Ruse, it will remain logically irreconcilable with Christianity...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...He strategically steers away from process theology, for example, which long ago made peace with evolutionary biology...
...John F. Haught ew scholars have written more voluminously and more interestingly about Charles Darwin than the philosopher Michael Ruse...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...Only if Darwinian science can be more carefully distinguished from materialist ideology can a Darwinian be a Christian...
...Among the Christian thinkers Ruse admires most is Ernan McMullin, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame who has often argued that evolution is consistent with Saint Augustine's vision of a divine plan unfolding over the course of time from a seminal potential given in the creation of the world...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...For many years a professor at Guelph University and now at Florida State, Ruse continues to produce a steady flow of books and articles on the implications of Darwin's revolution...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier...
...However, this may be hard to believe after reading such a sincere defense of classic Christian theology's logical compatibility with Darwinian science...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
