Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation

By Neal C. Gillespie

Book Overview

Book by Gillespie, Neal C. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226293750
• ISBN13: 9780226293752
• Release Date: February 1982
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Charles Darwin and the Creation of a Problem

Pegged around the twin themes of Foucault's epistemes and Kuhn's paradigms this cameo history places Darwin in the context of the Paley generation yielding to an age of positivism. This is a tale which is difficult to tell since the science bard chanting the mythical saga of the foundational moment seldom gets any further than epic mode in the stages of knowledge given by the Positivist Comte. Comte's stages, which people apparently took seriously, are highly misleading and don't correspond to a real picture of knowledge evolution. How speak of positivism if the result is a new myth for an age of science? But this is a good history of Darwin's period and the naive triumph of Darwin's too limited theory, whose main effect was simply to a banishing ritual for the design argument. That the division by episteme is oversimplified should be seen from the loss of substance in the period from Kant via Lamarck and Chambers to Darwin. The epistemic spectrum is reduced to the paltry pseudo-dialectic of the propagandists Darwin and Paley. Trying to overcome purposive explanation via natural selection was an imaginary triumph. The attempt to judge the issue of Kuhn is virtually impossible for one immersed in such. If ever there was a Kuhnian transition followed by frozen brain syndrome it was the Darwinian Revolution (with all due respect to Bowler's Darwinian Non-Revolution). In a word the positivist methodology was inadequate for the job. This is a good historical account in any case.

Darwin as a thinking man relates to his world

The book's purpose is straightforward: using Foucault's epistemes and Kuhn's paradigms as organizing principles(chp 1) look at the life of Charles Darwin as an example of a man between worlds: the old episteme of creationism and the new biological paradigm of positivism. Asking himself the question "why does C.Darwin spend so much time and effort rebuttalling the various arguments that the creationists present" rather than a strict presentation of his views, the author walks through the intellectual life of Darwin as the first modern biologist who left one toe in the old theological-saturated world, that of a general theist.From pg 3 "The positivist limited scientific knowledge, which he saw as the only valid form of knowledge, to the laws of nature and to processes involving "secondary", or natural, causes exclusively. The creationist, on the other hand, saw the world and everything in it as being the result of direct or indirect divine activity. His science was inseparable from his theology. His epistemology was closely geared to a metaphysics, and in metaphysics he tended to be an "idealist". To comprehend nature fully, for a scientist of this persuasion, was to understand the workings of the mind of the Creator."I liked the way he organizes around the epistemes/paradigms, in doing so he often presents the humanity of the scientists involved in the discussion, this makes the ideas so much more real as you realize that although the people are long dead, they are human in the conflicts and heart-break they went through to arrive at their beliefs, to write their books. Darwin especially comes across in the book as a human being, sympathetic but driven by the tenor of his times as much as he added to the pressure to switch epistemes with his thought. The consistent technique presented in the book revolved around his relationships with individuals whether through letters or reactions to books and the way his ideas and theirs fought, twisted together, or passed into oblivion depending upon the greater movement of ideological systems which emerged in the mid 19thC.The big take home message of the book is simple enough. It was Darwin's desire to free science from the miracles that by necessity are attached to creationism. Underneath this is the idea that miracles are violations of natural law and as such elements of the capricious, the mysterious, the unpredictable that he wished to ban from science, if not as impossible then at least as unscientifically explainable. A second major theme, the topic of several chapters is the relationship of design and purpose as underlying the old creationist episteme and the consistent attempt by Darwin to eliminate this type of thinking all together from biological explanations.Gillespie, as a historian, presents the ideas with an eye to the underlying forces that move people to certain ideas, this is akin to the "ideas were in the air" but more detailed. One push to change epistemes emerges in chpt 3 "Darwin and po