Creationism to Universal Darwinism Evolution and Religion Today Taner Edis Truman State University www2.truman.edu/~edis

Thus sayeth the polls... In the US: ~45% of the population are creationists. ~45% believe in a progressive evolutionary process guided by God. ~5-10% accept naturalistic evolution with no explicit divine involvement.  Darwinian evolution has very thin public support in our rather religious culture.

Creationism and “ID” Not just literalism, fundamentalism. Object to Darwinian mechanism. Central idea is design. Order must arise from mind and purpose. Intelligence must not be reducible to material processes. Stop materialism by refusing a foothold: deny efficacy of naturalistic evolution.

Guided Evolution Confine Darwinian approach to biology. There is a transcendent driving force behind evolutionary progress toward higher consciousness, capability, spirituality, and morality. Darwin himself OK. Correct in biology, left room for God as First Cause. No conflict between science and religion. Separate spheres.

Religion-free Evolution Natural selection a non-directional mechanism. “Progress” is an artifact. Natural selection is the source of the creativity in the history of life, though other processes such as genetic drift, phenotypic plasticity, mass extinctions etc. are also important. Biology is naturalistic, but this only means we must seek God elsewhere.

Godless Evolution The concept of scriptural revelation is crippled -- only liberal handwaving. Problem of Evil: Darwinian evolution is cruel, inefficient. God as add-on an unnecessary hypothesis. Like Santa Claus to the Christmas of naturalistic evolution. Part of a broader case against God.

Universal Darwinism Darwinism applies beyond biology. It explains all creativity; it is central to achieving all complex order. Speculative: Darwinian cosmology. Speculative: “Memes” and culture. More solid: Darwinian AI. Our own intelligence and creativity relies on Darwinian processes in the brain!

Darwin vs. God? Today, the Darwinian challenge to religion is broader. Not confined to chasing God out of biology. The challenge is also deeper. At first, we added evolution to purposeful design as an alternative explanation for complex order. Now, these two are both subsumed under Darwinism. The design analogy cannot get started.

What all this means... It is no accident skeptics of religion are usually such great fans of Darwin.

To learn more www2.truman.edu/~edis Taner Edis, The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science, coming out in March 2002! (Check with campus bookstore.) Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life