On 16 September Mike Smith wrote: >…the first scientists were all very religious men. Bacon, >Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Darwin for example.
Leaving aside that Darwin was hardly among "the first scientists", it is erroneous to state he was religious. On the contrary, he had ceased to believe in the tenets of Christianity by the early 1840s, and following the death of his beloved daughter Annie in 1850 he ceased to be a believer in any kind of conventional religious belief. He spelled out his position in maturity (1879) as follows: "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist… whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term: which is much too large a subject for a note. In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind." http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-12041.html There have been recent attempts to claim he was *really* an atheist, but these depend on flawed evidence. For instance, Richard Dawkins writes: "It is true that Darwin declined to call himself an atheist. But his motive, clearly expressed to the atheist intellectual Edward Aveling (incidentally the common-law husband of Karl Marx's daughter) was that Darwin didn't want to upset people. Atheism, in Darwin's view, was all well and good for the intelligentsia, but ordinary people were not yet "ripe" for atheism. So he called himself an agnostic, largely for diplomatic reasons." http://richarddawkins.net/articles/3475 (scroll down) Dawkins here is evidently basing himself (using similar language) on a misleading passage in Desmond and Moore's *Darwin* in which they (characteristically) use truncated quotations and an omission of contrary evidence to claim that Darwin was in agreement with the free-thinker Edward Aveling that "'agnostic' was but 'atheist' writ respectable." (1991, pp 657; 736, n. 11) Desmond and Moore base this on Aveling's report in a pamphlet ("The Religious Views of Charles Darwin", 1883) published a couple of years after a lunch he attended at Down House at which Darwin's son Francis was also present among the guests. Desmond and Moore write in an endnote that Frances "confirms that Aveling gave quite fairly his impressions of my father's views", creating the impression that Francis agreed with Aveling's version. But they fail to note that Francis Darwin went on to say that readers of the pamphlet may be "misled" by Aveling's account "into seeing more resemblance than really existed between the positions of my father and Dr Aveling. [...]" (1887, p. 317): http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=text&pageseq=1 I think this illustrates something I have come to recognize forcefully in recent years (not least in Desmond and Moore's co-authored books on Darwin): Don't assume that because an author supplies references for a particular assertion that they necessarily confirm that assertion. Very few people are going to take the trouble to check the actual reference, so instances like the above are likely to go undetected (as we see from Dawkins' recycling of the Aveling story). Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org --------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Smith <tipsl...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Galileo Was Wrong? Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:02:51 -0500 Well, I didn't mean anything very deep. Just that the first scientists were all very religious men. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Darwin for example. They saw (like Aquinus) that an orderly, rational, lawful universe was a reflection of those qualities of its creator. And studying nature was a way of glorifying God and coming to know the mind of God more fully (by discovering the divine order) since his creation reflected at least some of his qualities even if only on a lower level. So science was the result of a worked out theology. One might even call science "practical theology" since these men believed their investigative activities were glorifying God through the application of one of his crowning gifts: reason. --Mike --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=4917 or send a blank email to leave-4917-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
