Social Darwinism, secularism and religion

Social Darwinism, secularism and religion

Though Darwinism excited a fierce, often bitter debate between scientists and theologicans, ‘Social Darwinism’ is not synonymous with ‘secularism’ as such. Not only did Social Darwinism, or even more broadly science as such, not ‘cause’ the widespread late nineteenth-century crisis of religious faith. A lengthy period of biblical criticism preceded Origin of Species, in which works like D.F.STRAUSS’S Das Leben Jesu (1835) and, later, ERNEST RENAN’S La Vie de Jésus (1860) or John Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1865) stressed the human character of Christ. The growth of materialist philosophy, for example in the works of LUDWIG FEUERBACH (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1840), also sapped religious belief. The discovery of primitive human remains from the 1840s onwards cast serious doubts upon the validity of sacred chronology. Geological discoveries assisted in this process, and promoted an ideal of the

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struggle for existence as well (which Darwin noted in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, 1833). Darwin did, however, indisputably weaken religious belief, notably by casting strong doubts upon the biblical account of the Creation, the accepted 4,000-year chronology of human development and the story of the Flood, putting in their place instead a notion of the linear progress of species towards an eventual perfection. The pro videntialist account of human history, thus, notably associated with works like William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), was badly dented. And, of course, the suggestion that humanity was descended from remote pre-human beings, developed after Origin of Species by T.H.Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (1863) in particular, fatally undermined the notion of a special creation of mankind by God. (Huxley coined the term ‘agnostic’ to define the lack of scientific evidence for God). Evolutionary writers, in addition, often proclaimed the reconciliation of Darwinism and religion, or that there was no necessary antagonism between them; Spencer, for instance, took up an argument from Henry Mansel’s The Limits of Religious Thought (1858), and asserted that there was an ‘unknowable’ realm beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. Science and religion as such, therefore, could not conflict. A variety of writers, however, attempted to use evolutionary arguments in order to construct a metaphysic that would serve as a substitute for religion. Darwin’s leading German follower, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), expounded a theory of evolutionary laws linking everything from human consciousness to planetary movements (cf. The Riddle of the Universe, 1899). FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) developed a highly influential account of one central instinctive principle, ‘the will to power’, which lay beyond morality, and which he associated with the need to create a ‘master race’ capable of resisting the dominant egalitarian slave morality of the modern epoch. In his assertion that human destiny relied on the production of mankind’s ‘highest types’ or specimens, Nietzsche clearly echoes prominent Social Darwinist themes. In the 1930s and 1940s his ideas were perverted by Hitler and other National Socialists, who presumed their own elevation, and the degradation and destruction of the Jews, was in keeping with Nietzschean ideals, though Nietzsche was himself no anti-Semite. A later interpreter of Darwin in a metaphysical direction was HENRI BERGSON (1859–1941), whose Creative Evolution (1907) described a vital principle that underlay both organic and inorganic matter, and gave them

a capacity of adapting to their environments. In human beings this chiefly assumed the form of intelligence, which did not develop towards any particular end, but which facilitated human adaptation to increasingly complex and swiftly evolving structures. A similar conception of ‘life-force’ was developed by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856–1950) as a form of evolutionary theology, in which mankind was construed as an important, but flawed, experiment on God’s part. Like Nietzsche, however, Shaw thought Darwin had paid too much heed to the role of the environment in evolution, and emphasized the active and creative elements in human development.