Yes, Zane, you are right (as always) on multiple fronts (including the fact that I am a bit of a Platonist, no doubt under the corrosive influence of David Hart…but let’s leave that aside for now!). I should perhaps just add a note about the structure and scope of the chapter since I don’t think these have been made clear above.
Most of “Dignity After Darwin” is devoted to critiquing what Conor Cunningham calls “ultra-Darwinism” and its corrosive implications for values, particularly the idea of an inviolable dignity attaching to each individual. The argument is not particularly original, I have to confess. It is really just a historical as well as philosophical exploration of the so-called “naturalistic fallacy” or “Hume’s Law.” It was first inspired by a deceptively simple but I think profound book, The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis (who also happened to accept common ancestry and deep time, i.e., evolution). After spelling out some of these problems I propose the need for what I call “apophatic science”, that is, a science that like apophatic theology knows what it does not know…not for present lack of empirical data but logically, as a matter of rational constraint.
In the final and briefest part of the chapter I then gesture toward some thinkers who I have found helpful in wrestling with questions of faith and science. What I do not in any way attempt or offer in these concluding remarks is some kind of grand synthesis of evolution and theology or some kind of vigorous explanation and defense of any of the authors I cite. Readers can refer to my footnotes and read the books by these authors for themselves if they are interested in large scale works on theistic evolution by theistic evolutionists (who bear little resemblance to the pathetic straw men offered up by some commenters here). I have especially benefited from Alister McGrath’s Gifford lectures, Stephen J. Pope’s synthesis of Thomist theology with evolutionary ideas, and Cunningham’s sophisticated (and frequently hilarious) dissection of the metaphysical and ontological pitfalls of reductive Darwinism and “scientific” creationism both. The fact that I have learned much from these writers, it should go without saying, does not mean I am slavishly committed to defending each and every thing they have written or might think.
But as I say, all of these final remarks in my chapter, and now here as well, are really just gestural. The book is a largely negative critique of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, although I do attempt to offer some constructive answers and positive defenses of Christian humanism along the way.
Since another work of mine has been brought into the conversation, I might add that the approach I took in my earlier book from IVP Academic, Death Before the Fall, was also a largely deconstructive one. That book was an admittedly eclectic set of essays mostly devoted to exposing and critiquing the fallacies of rigid literalism on Genesis. It was positively reviewed by qualified biblical scholars such as Walter Brueggemann and John Walton. Their views on the meaning of the Old Testament and Genesis matter to me. While I also “gestured” in the direction of some positive answers in the final third of the book (paying attention, e.g., to what the creation narrative in the book of Job says about the wildness and even ferocity of God’s “very good” creation), I was less interested in providing confident (let alone strident) answers to our puzzles than I was in helping to make clear what we do not know.
The two books are in this sense, I hope, complementary. Together I hope they might provide readers with some conceptual tools or “maps” to resist the zealots on both sides of the science/religion debate, atheists and wooden biblical literalists alike.
*I depart early tomorrow morning to visit ADRA projects in the White Nile region and don’t expect to have access to internet. This will therefore be my final comment on this thread. Thanks again to all for your interest.