Darwinism As Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution

Description

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion. Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution

  • 2016-09-20
  • 288 pages
  • Ebook
  • Oxford University Press
• 

  Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution

  • 2016-09-15
  • 288 pages
  • Ebook
  • Oxford University Press

Similar books

• 

  Can a Darwinian be a Christian?: The Relationship Between Science and Religion

  By Michael Ruse

  London : John Murray . 1871. The Descent of Man . London : John Murray . 1872. ... London : J. Johnson . Darwin , F. ed . 1887. ... Human chauvinism : review of Full House by Stephen Jay Gould . Evolution 51 ( 3 ) : 1015-20 . 1997b .

• 

  Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion

  By Francisco J. Ayala

  An acclaimed evolutionary biologist with a background in theology, Francisco Ayala offers clear explanations of the science, reviews the history that led us to ratify Darwin's theories, and ultimately provides a clear path for a confused ...

• 

  Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism: Evolutionary Theories in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian Cultural Contexts

  By C. Mackenzie Brown

  This volume brings together diverse Asian religious perspectives to address critical issues in the encounter between tradition and modern western evolutionary thought.

• 

  Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect For Religion In The Age Of Evolution

  By John Haught

  Deeper Than Darwin takes up where God After Darwin left off, arguing that Darwin's vision is important and essentially correct but that we can still dig deeper in our understanding of what is going on in the life-story.

• 

  The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Great Discoveries)

  By David Quammen

  Traces the twenty-one-year period between Charles Darwin's original idea about natural selection and the publication of "On the Origin of Species," in an account that offers insight into his experiences as a cautious naturalist.

• 

  Darwin's Religious Odyssey

  By William E. Phipps

  Draws on newly available material to consider Darwin's personal religious beliefs, profiling him as a man from a specific time in history struggling to harmonize his spiritual worldviews with his scientific findings. Original.

• 

  Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender

  By Ronald L. Numbers, John Stenhouse

  This innovative collection of original essays focuses on the ways in which geography, gender, race, and religion influenced the reception of Darwinism in the English-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• 

  Darwin's Proof: The Triumph of Religion Over Science

  By Cornelius G. Hunter

  Do similar features found among different animal species prove a common ancestry? Is evolution purely science, as evolutionists claim, or are there other factors involved? How can we account for...

• 

  Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith

  By Philip Kitcher

  In Living With Darwin, Philip Kitcher stokes the flames swirling around Darwin's theory, sifting through the scientific evidence for evolution, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design, and revealing why evolution has been the object of ...

• 

  Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan

  By G. Clinton Godart

  Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine is the first book in English on the history of evolutionary theory in Japan.