Michael Ruse - The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ruse, Michael, author.

Title: The problem of war: Darwinism, christianity, and their battle to understand human conflict / Michael Ruse.

Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012153 | ISBN 9780190867577 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190867591 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Social Darwinism. | WarReligious aspectsChristianity. | WarPsychological aspects. | Darwin, Charles, 18091882Influence.

Classification: LCC HM631.R87 2019 | DDC 303.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012153

To the memories of

Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant William J. Ruse, my great-grandfather;

of Staff Sergeant William A. Ruse, my grandfather;

and of William R. E. Ruse, my father.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

T oward the end of 1859, the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.In that book, Darwin did two things. He argued for the fact of evolution, that all organisms are descended from just a few forms by natural processes, tracing what he called a tree of life. He argued for a particular force or mechanism of change, natural selection brought on by the struggle for existence. Todays professional evolutionists are committed Darwinians. They think that natural selection is the chief cause of change, and they use this conviction to great effect, explaining organisms right across the spectrum, from the smallest microforms like E. colito the largest of them all: whales, dinosaurs, giant redwood trees. If ever there was an example of what Thomas Kuhn called a scientific revolution, with Darwinian selection at the center of a successful paradigm, this is it.

Yet, all is not happy in the Darwinian world. The very idea of evolution is under attack from the religious right, generally evangelical Christians. Even where some kind of change is allowed, it is felt that Darwinian selection can play at best only a minor role. From the so-called Scientific Creationists of the 1960s and 1970s, who denied that the Earth is more than six thousand years old and who claimed that all organisms were created miraculously in six days, to the Intelligent Design Theorists of the 1990s who insist that history is guided by an intelligence from without, Darwinian evolutionary theory is denied and held up for scorn (