Plurationalist Dialogue 299, “Can a Darwinian Be Religious?”

The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 299th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, “Can a Darwinian Be Religious?”

Charles Darwin had intended to join the clergy, persuaded by the Christian apologist William Paley’s “watchmaker” argument for the creationist origin of biological complexity. But then Darwin joined the crew of the HMS Beagle, journeying around the world to find the “centers of creation” for what the scientific & religious establishment presumed were fixed animal species. Instead, Darwin found diffusing diversity, supporting ongoing species transmutation rather than static creations. By the end of Darwin’s life, he’d become a sometimes “first-cause deist” and sometimes “agnostic,” but when holding either worldview he always maintained that, from its initial state, Life on earth had evolved by natural selection.

It was Darwin’s own evidence of species adaptation and evolution by survival of the fittest, that left him so perturbed by the notion that any non-distant and benevolent God would tolerate the pain and suffering inbuilt within natural selection: “I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world,” he wrote in 1860 to botanist Asa Gray, an American Darwinian who believed in evolution guided by a Creator. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the [paralyzed] living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

But Gray respectfully disagreed, considering God to have knowingly created the basic natural rules and mechanisms driving evolution to ensure the greatest good for all life on Earth, at the expense of individual suffering and death. Darwin had Gray in mind when he wrote, "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist & an evolutionist." But try as he might, Darwin remained personally unable to regain his prior ardent theism, saying, “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.” Meanwhile, Gray remained during his life both a strong supporter of Darwinism (in the form of belief in God-created natural laws, also known as theistic evolution or evolutionary creationism) and a devout Presbyterian believer in predestination.

Gray’s belief that scientific natural selection is how God ongoingly creates new species has since been adopted by many religions, as well as by many non-biblical-literalist Christians, including the former director of the Human Genome [Sequencing] Project and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Frances Collins: “The faith that [atheist Richard] Dawkins describes isn't the faith I recognize. Like me, most people are seeking a possible harmony between these worldviews [religious faith and empirical science].” Collins’ term for a Creator’s formulation of natural processes that drive evolutionary creation is “BioLogos,” the rational principle ordering the universe, including its natural selection-driven evolution of life, as an expression of the will of God – which could allow non-coercive advocates of faith and science to co-exist in harmony. Today, most biblical-literalists now believe that after a small number of platonic “kinds” of animals were de novo Created, those surviving the biblical Great Flood in Noah’s Ark then further evolved by natural selection into our modern species.

In contrast, atheist Sam Harris sees Collins as committing “intellectual suicide,” and asserts that “rationalists” must ask whether evidence suggests a Creator, rather than merely asking whether it’s compatible with one; and that religious liberals’ adopting non-dogma like evolutionary creationism gives “rhetorical cover” to religious fundamentalists. Yet Harris adopted Buddhist meditation practices (without belief in the Buddha as a deity), and agrees with Presbyterians that “free will” is an illusion of biological processes that are predestined (regardless of whether from God’s diktat or Nature’s statistics).

We'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate views on whether “Religious Darwinian” is an oxymoron at 7-9pm CDT Mon 5/19/25 by Zoom. Our agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should help us naturally select the fittest surviving view!