I take it as nigh axiomatic that the sign of a healthy democracy is that members are given as much freedom as possible. No one is arguing for absolute freedom. Men should not be allowed to go out and rape at will, for instance. But freedom where there is no good reason to deny it. If you want to go to a Catholic church, that is your business. If you want to go to a Protestant church, your business again. And if you want to go to no church at all, still your business. There are going to be debates about where to draw the line. No one should be allowed, without reason, to yell “fire” in a crowded cinema. No one should be barred from saying that they don't much care for the current crop of leaders. What about getting up in a public square and saying, “Hitler was right about the Jews. Pity there weren't more gas ovens”? In the United States, you are allowed to do this. In Canada, you are not. Different views, with reasons for or against either.

WHAT IS PSEUDOSCIENCE?

What about pseudoscience? This is a slippery notion, a bit like religion, easier to spot than to define.1 Roughly, though, I take it that pseudoscience is a body of knowledge or of claims purporting to be knowledge. This is knowledge or purported knowledge about the physical world, in the same sense that regular science is. However, it is driven by cultural values, broadly construed—religious, philosophical, political, and more—rather than by the empirical world. Moreover, when its claims come into conflict with the physical world, it is the physical world that has to concede ground rather than the body of claims. The judge of what is to be labeled a pseudoscience is the professional scientific community, and often cries of “pseudoscience” are made most often and sound most shrill when for one reason or another the professional science is under attack.

A paradigmatic example of a pseudoscience is the eighteenth-century belief system (and practice) of mesmerism. Named after the German doctor Franz Mesmer, it postulated the existence of vital forces in living beings that were open to discovery and manipulation—in other words, a kind of “animal magnetism”—and that its practitioners regarded as a way to cure many illnesses and diseases. It was very popular—it is almost a mark of a pseudoscience that it is popular—and from the first was criticized and condemned by actual scientists. In 1784, the French king Louis XVI set up a commission—including Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier—to study mesmerism, and they drew conclusions that were very critical. Not that their report had much effect, because mesmerism rode high until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it ran out of steam.

Although these things are usually portrayed as black or white, they often are not. Evolutionary thinking is a good case in point. A good case can be made for saying that, until Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, evolutionary thinking was more or less—usually more—a pseudoscience.2 It had little hard empirical evidence and was driven by values—in particular, the ideology of progress. Things getting better in the social and cultural world—better healthcare and so forth—reflected into the belief that things are getting better in the living world. From the blob to the human, or (as people used to say) from the monad to the man. Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin is a case in point. He was an ardent evolutionist given to expressing his ideas in verse:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,
Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood;
The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,
The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,
The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,
Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!3

Erasmus Darwin explicitly tied his biology to his philosophy. This idea of organic progressive evolution “is analogous to the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation; such as…the progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its inhabitants.”⁴

The term “pseudoscience” (or “pseudo science”) only came into being and use in the nineteenth century, but people knew a pseudoscience when they saw it. Noted already is how professional scientists are usually irate to the point of being shrill about pseudoscience, especially when they see it as threatening their own interests. In Britain, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the scientists were Anglican clergymen supported in their work—especially if they worked at Oxford or Cambridge—by their church.⁵ These people—men like the professor of geology at the University of Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick—were not crude literalists. They knew the earth was old and they didn't believe in a universal deluge. But they saw the naturalistic theory of evolution as a threat to their status and beliefs and reacted with fury. To a midcentury evolutionary tract, the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Sedgwick responded first with an eighty-five-page diatribe in the leading journal, The Quarterly Review, and then, in a new edition of a little sermon (thirty-five pages on the proper conduct of students at university), he added a five-hundred-page anti-Vestiges preface, and for good measure a three-hundred-page epilogue.

Things were turned around completely when Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection; but, at the time, I am not sure that Sedgwick's response was so very wrong. Neither Erasmus Darwin nor the anonymous author of Vestiges—known now to be the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers—had given much empirical evidence for their beliefs. In Chambers's case, particularly, there were all sorts of bogus arguments, for instance that the patterns of frost on windows—“frost ferns”—suggest the spontaneous generation of life. It was clear that everything was fueled by enthusiasm for the idea of progress—something that runs directly counter to the central Christian doctrine of Providence—and by the ideology of making things better for ourselves as opposed to putting everything in the hands of God.

PSEUDOSCIENCE TODAY

Now what about pseudoscience today and its relationship to democracy? Pseudoscience is certainly alive and well, to use a somewhat unfortunate metaphor. Anti–global warming, anti-vaccination (anti-vax), anti–genetically modified foods, for a start. Some of these systems are clear-cut examples of pseudoscience—such as anti–global warming. Some are contested somewhat. Chiropractic might be a case in point. Some swear by it. Others think it phony—a pseudoscience—especially when it makes grandiose claims about cancer and so forth. Amusingly, several years ago, the then very new Faculty of Medicine at Florida State University was offered by the legislature a large sum of money to start a department of chiropractic medicine. Immediately, the rather insecure school raised the cry of “pseudoscience” and the offer was rejected. This despite the fact that before and after the incident the local medical establishment would often refer patients to chiropractors. The new school just could not afford to be connected to such a flaky business, especially with the grandiose claims about curing cancer. Harvard might get away with it, but not Florida State.6

What about democracy? However strongly you may feel that something is a pseudoscience, you are hardly going to stop people believing in it. At least, not in the sense of prohibiting it. To be honest, I am not quite sure how you would prohibit it. I happen to think that opposition to global warming theory is bad—really, really bad—but I am not sure that, through some kind of mind control, I want to make even the president of the United States of America agree that global warming is real and a threat. Mind control like you get in 1984, although I guess that today, instead of rats, you use Fox News. One can, however, think of obvious examples where you might want to block the dissemination of pseudoscientific ideas. Suppose that someone had the view that sexual intercourse with young children is the secret to physical health. Even worse, suppose they think that drinking the blood of young children adds to one's life-span. In cases like these, we don't want people getting up and being allowed to promote their beliefs on television. Are they more like crying fire in a cinema or like saying Hitler was right on about the Jews? Most of us would say that, if there is any hint that such views might push people into action, then they are more like the cinema case and should be prohibited.

Much as I dislike uninformed criticisms of global warming—if anything is pseudoscience they are, with no empirical evidence and value-driven arguments (for instance about the need to keep jobs in the coal-mining industry)—I don't see them in the drinking-the-blood-of-young children category. At least, not in any direct sense. In this age of the internet, apart from the sheer impossibility of banning open discussions critical of global warming theory—although the Chinese do seem to be pretty good at this kind of thing—it seems to me to be inherently wrong in a democracy to stop people from disseminating their views, however crackpot they may be. I think the Mormons have some unbelievably daft ideas, but I don't want to ban the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Also, as the case of evolution makes clear, you need to let ideas thrive, however silly and annoying they may be. Evolution was a pseudoscience until the Origin, but one doubts that Darwin would have done what he did do without the background that this pseudoscience gave to him. More generally, I am Popperian in thinking that you should generate hypotheses if you want to move forward. Or, as Mao said in 1957, launching a short-lived movement to let intellectuals offer open criticism of his regime, “Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.”

A hundred flowers blossom? Yes, but then one needs to start cutting them down. I think anti-vaxxers are really dangerous. Their ill-formed and pernicious views put young children at serious risk. No child should go through life with the terrible eyesight of my father, a result of childhood measles. Reluctantly, however, I would not stop fanatics from preaching the dangers of vaccination. At the same time, the obligation is on me to oppose the views, publicly, in an informed manner. Tolerance is not an excuse for doing nothing. I don't think one necessarily has to spend all of one's life systematically going after every pseudoscience in a row—although perhaps those of us who are philosophers have a greater obligation than most—but one should do something.

I am not Mother Teresa, but I have tried to follow my own urging, and I want now—providing a case study to flesh out what I have been talking of in general terms—to talk about my own encounter with pseudoscience. How I was led into it, what I did, and what followed.7

CREATION SCIENCE

I am by training a philosopher of science. In the 1960s, looking for a thesis topic—I was studying in England, in the United States this would be “looking for a dissertation topic”—I, like a small number of others, realized that biology was a science crying out for philosophical attention. I set about obliging.8 Serendipitously, this was just the time when the philosophy of science community was feeling the full force of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), with the exhortation to turn to the history of science for understanding of today's science. Naturally, I turned to the Darwinian Revolution, the coming, in the mid-nineteenth century, of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. Taking to heart what Kuhn told us, namely that we philosophers had to take the history of science as seriously as did the historians, I spent a sabbatical year at Cambridge attending lectures and seminars, as well as working in the Darwin Archives in the University Library.

This resulted in my writing and publishing, in 1979, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. I joke that this is the book that I wish I could have read ten years previously when I first became interested in Darwin. Like all good jokes, it was not really a joke. I set out to give a comprehensive overview of the Darwinian Revolution, explaining what went on and why. Forty years and twenty-five-thousand copies (twice that in translation) later—still in print—I think I succeeded in my aim. What is important for my story here is that I came to the project as a philosopher and this showed. I was interested in such questions as the evidence for evolution and the nature of natural selection as a mechanism. Not to mention issues to do with science, religion, and the like.

All of this know-how suddenly found an immediate and unintended use. The moment when the book was published was precisely that when the American biblical literalists, the fundamentalists of old, now rechristened the creationists—a vocal subset of evangelical Protestantism—were stepping up the pressure.⁹ That subset wanted to have its views—six days of creation, six thousand years ago, miraculous creation of organisms, including—especially including—Adam and Eve, and then a universal flood—included in science classrooms of the United States. Because of the First Amendment's separation of church and state, this could not be done directly. A subterfuge had to be created. This was simply to argue that all of the claims of the creationists were in fact backed by good science. Thus was born scientific creationism or creation science,¹⁰ something designed expressly to get around the First Amendment.

Note that creation science is not religion; it is something designed to take on professional science. The religious person might, for instance, think that the story of Noah's flood is true, just not literally true. It is not something that justifies or was ever intended to justify a worldwide deluge. It is rather allegorical or metaphorical. In the story, after the flood is over, Noah gets drunk and one of his sons makes fun of this. The story truly is about the futility of simplistic solutions to complex problems—wipe them all out and sin will be gone. Things just are not that simple. One can hold to this and be perfectly comfortable with modern science.11 Creation science denies that we are dealing with a metaphor. It uses all sorts of pseudo arguments to claim that the flood really did happen. In short, it is as much a paradigm of pseudoscientific thinking as was mesmerism two centuries earlier.

So there we were. On the one side was creation science, something invented to get around the First Amendment. Something that its supporters wanted to get into the science classrooms—note, science classrooms, not general studies or some such thing. On the other side was I, serendipitously preadapted to take on creation science, for I knew the history and the philosophy of what was going on. Things came to a head in 1981, when the state of Arkansas in its wisdom passed a bill mandating the “balanced treatment” of Darwinian evolutionary theory and creation science in the science classrooms of the publicly funded schools in the state. It was signed by the governor, a man as surprised at being elected as he was unfit for the job. (Sound familiar?!)¹² At once, the ACLU sprang into action, opposing the new law and lining up a list of expert witnesses—these included paleontologist Steven Jay Gould, geneticist Francisco J. Ayala, and Langdon Gilkey, the most famous Protestant theologian of his day. I was added, almost as an afterthought, as the historian and philosopher of science.

I say as an “afterthought,” but that is not quite true. The ACLU thought long and hard about including a philosopher—things could so easily go wrong—and it was not until I was virtually on the stand that they decided to use me. As it happens, their fears were well grounded. The state, convinced that philosophy is just a flimflam game, grilled me nonstop for three hours. This was at least twice as long as anyone else. However, the nerve of the ACLU paid off. The judge used my testimony as the key support of his decision to rule the new law unconstitutional. He picked up on my definition of science—showing that creation science is not science but something pseudo, put in place for a religious purpose.13 He quoted me verbatim.

(1) It is guided by natural law;

(2) It has to be explanatory by reference to nature law;

(3) It is testable against the empirical world;

(4) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and

(5) It is falsifiable (testimony of Ruse and other science witnesses).¹⁴

So here was a case where a pseudoscience posed a real threat to education and where it was right and proper to oppose it. A thriving democracy depends on its inhabitants being properly educated and trained. If you turn your back on science in a case like this, it is the thin end of a massive wedge that makes it only too easy to move on from evolution to global warming and so forth.

THE STORY CONTINUES

It is worth noting how enthusiasts for the Left are as much into pseudoscience—anti-vaxxers and those who are anti-GM foods—as enthusiasts for the Right—who are against Darwinism and global warming. The move from anti-Darwin to anti-vax and anti-GM might not be direct, but it is interesting how much anti-Darwinism there is in the thinking of those on the Left. They hate what they think are the harsh social Darwinian implications of Darwin's natural selection, beginning as it does with the struggle for existence. This all becomes very clear as we continue with our story, for the defeat in Arkansas was far from the end of the story. Indeed, I am sure that there is today more creationism being taught in American schools—including those getting government funding—than there was forty years ago.

It was clear after Arkansas—and it was clear to many of the more far-sighted creationists before Arkansas—that a full-frontal assault on the problem was going to come to grief. The First Amendment's separation of church and state is a barrier not to be passed. A more subtle approach was needed. This came at the beginning of the last decade of the century, with Darwin on Trial, by Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson.15 Here, we are introduced to the idea of “Intelligent Design Theory.” Explicit reference to the Bible is minimized to the point of nonbeing. Indeed, explicit reference to the Christian god is minimized to the point of nonbeing. However, an intelligence—more likely an Intelligence—is demanded to make the process of creation—which might plausibly be evolutionary—fully effective. Very much a case of nod nod, wink wink, because it is clear—as was discovered later through a cache of private emails—that it is creationism of one sort or another that is hiding behind the veils.¹⁶

In the last decade of the last century, a number of writers, including Catholic biochemist Michael Behe¹⁷ and Protestant philosopher/mathematician William Dembski,¹⁸ picked up on Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) and started to flesh it out.¹⁹ Behe cited a number of biological phenomena, including the bacterial flagellum (the whip-like tail that some bacteria use for motion) and the blood-clotting cascade (a series of chemical reactions involved in the coagulation of blood). He argued that these phenomena cannot be given a natural explanation. Dembski turned to theory, arguing that naturalism leaves holes to be plugged by an external, designing intervention. Immediately critics descended, notably the Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller²⁰ and the Quaker philosopher Robert Pennock,²¹ who showed that neither scientifically nor philosophically does IDT hold water. It is as pseudoscientific—and for many of the same reasons—as the original creation science. To note this connection, I refer to IDT as “creationism lite.”

History repeated itself. Again, against the advice of far-sighted creationists or IDT enthusiasts, a court case was brought, in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, this time, when the attempt was made to get IDT into state-supported classrooms. Again, the result was the same, with a quite conservative judge ruling firmly that IDT is religiously motivated pseudoscience, trying to slip around the First Amendment.22 Two successes in court, but no ultimate victory. Finally, creationists decided to do what the wiser said they should have been doing all along. They now work at the local level, under the radar as it were. So-called charter schools are now very popular—and strongly supported by the Trump administration. These schools get public funds but they go their own merry ways when it comes to curriculum. It is hard to get statistics, because that is the very thing that charter school enthusiasts prefer not to disclose. However, given the enthusiasm that the evangelicals show for such schools, it does not require a very stable genius to infer that creationism is firmly ensconced in biology classes. This goes along with field trips to the Creationist Museum in Northern Kentucky.

As I have said, what is remarkable is the extent to which my fellow philosophers show enthusiasm for IDT, even those who claim to be atheists! They like the sense of meaning and of wholeness that you get out of this world picture, in contradistinction to the harshness of Darwinism.²³ Thomas Nagel is one who cozies up to people like Behe, while at the same time favoring some kind of strong, secular Aristotelian position. He tells us that we are presented with two options: blind law (which presumably means Darwinism) or “there are natural teleological laws governing the development of organization over time, in addition to laws of the familiar kind governing the behavior of the elements.”²⁴ Nagel continues:

This is a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science. But I have been persuaded that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the intentions of a purposive being who produces the means to his ends by choice. In spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it certainly shouldn't be ruled out a priori.²⁵

It is worth noting that one of the biggest criticisms made by regular biologists of Jim Lovelock's²⁶ Gaia hypothesis—that the earth is a living organism—was that it was teleological, explaining in terms of ends rather than prior causes. This was a major reason many characterized it as a pseudoscience.²⁷ “Gaia—the Great Earth Mother! The planetary organism!” John Postgate, leading British microbiologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, writes.28 “Am I the only biologist to suffer a nasty twitch, a feeling of unreality, when the media invite me yet again to take her seriously?” He continues, writing that Gaia “has metamorphosed, in Lovelock's writings and those of others, first into a hypothesis, later into a theory, then into something terribly like a cult.” Postgate's judgment: “It is pseudoscientific mythmaking.” And his warning: “When Lovelock introduced her in 1972, Gaia was an amusing, fanciful name for a familiar concept; today he would have it be a theory, one which tells us that the Earth is a living organism. Will tomorrow bring hordes of militant Gaia activists enforcing some pseudoscientific idiocy on the community, crying ‘There is no God but Gaia and Lovelock is her prophet’? All too easily.”

TAKING STOCK

Let me start to gather together the threads of my discussion. Pseudoscience is a mockery of real science. It is value driven and has scant regard for the facts. Worse, it manipulates the facts to satisfy its value-impregnated view of the world. This said, there is no place in a healthy democracy for banning pseudoscience. Apart from the difficulty of doing this effectively, especially that now we are in the age of the internet, there are reasons for not so doing on what we might call Kantian grounds and on utilitarian grounds. If we are to respect people as people—treat them as ends in themselves and not as means—then this means letting people believe and promulgate daft ideas. There will be limits, of course, but these are limits, not the thin end of the wedge leading to total prohibition. Tolerance does not mean acceptance or indifference.

Pseudoscience is not just an insult to human rationality; it is or can be dangerous. This can be short-term: anti-vaxxers are already having success in places like California, with the consequent rise of hitherto-vanquished childhood illnesses like measles. This can be longer-term: people in India and elsewhere on the globe are starving because misguided fanatics in the West do all they can to prevent the development and use of genetically modified organisms. This can be short-term and long-term: already global warming is causing disruptions. Ask me, I live in Florida where we are experiencing one horrendous hurricane after another. I had just finished removing the detritus from last year, including a massive tree right across my garden and smashing against the windows in the living room, when hurricane season was on us again. Down the road, things are only going to get worse. This truly is crisis time, folks!

Therefore, as responsible citizens, we have an obligation to fight against pseudoscience, showing its faults and trying to limit its influence. This obligation is especially strong for those of us with the tools or weapons to enter the fight. My knowledge of the history of Darwinism is a case in point.29 Although others might disagree, it is legitimate for the cobbler to stick to his last. Significantly, although my field of expertise is biology, I am probably most incensed by the anti-vax movement. I was raised in the 1940s, when vaccinations were just coming in and we children were starting to benefit. I still remember the horrors of polio and how so often in the summer swimming pools would be closed for fear of contamination. Then, when a teenager, my mother died and my father remarried to a German woman, whose family were deeply into the Rudolf Steiner movement, anthroposophy. My father became enthused to the extent of leaving his job and going to work in a Steiner-based school, a so-called Waldorf school. Steiner argued that childhood illnesses are an essential aspect of physical and spiritual development.

For over fifty years (when I go back to England from North America, where I have lived since 1962), I have listened to ongoing diatribes about the evils of vaccination. This from a father whose dreadful eyesight was a function of measles. However, I have stayed out of the anti-vax fight. I am not medically trained nor am I a statistician—the two attributes most needed in this particular battle. I urge from the sidelines! I have other work to do.³⁰ In fact, what I am doing now is part of that work. (You didn't think I was writing this piece for pleasure, did you?!) I am seventy-eight years old and still at it. I don't have to answer to anyone. (I have been a nonbeliever for over fifty years. I still take the Parable of the Talents—I have not been put on this earth with gifts just to please myself—as my categorical imperative.)

Am I and others of my ilk—Philip Kitcher, who wrote most eloquently against creationism,31 Ken Miller and Robert Pennock, who have written equally eloquently against IDT—just kidding ourselves? I remember, many years ago, being on a line protesting racial inequality. My neighbor turned to me and said, “You know, I think these things are like prayer. They make us feel good, but I doubt they have much overall effect on the real world.” Is this what is going on here? Does our intervention and efforts make any difference in the fight against pseud-science? It is naive to think that we intellectuals have total or even the biggest control over things. It is very clear, to stay with the evolution case for now—although the global warming issue cries out for similar discussion—that external factors, basically political, have huge effects. I have said already, I am sure truly, that huge amounts of creationism and IDT are being taught in America at the moment. Fortunately, other than at farcical excuses for education like Liberty University, this is not occurring at the level of higher education. Secondary education is another matter, and a major reason for this is that legislatures and administrations have made this possible. As of this writing, the current United States Secretary of Education is Betsy DeVos, a passionate advocate for private education and for charter schools. On a recent visit to my home city of Tallahassee, she ostentatiously ignored the public-school system and visited only private (religious) schools. She and President Donald Trump are responsible for much of this.

External factors have huge effects. I am not sure, though, that this means they have all the effects or even all the significant effects. In the case of evolution, imagine what would have happened had we lost in Arkansas and then later in (Dover) Pennsylvania. Creationism would be taught widely in public schools, and for those who think that this would not have a knock-on effect on higher education, let me tell you that I have a bridge in which I would like to interest you. I do think that my own efforts, along with the efforts of Stephen Jay Gould and Francisco Ayala and Langdon Gilkey and Kenneth Miller and Robert Pennock and other fellow laborers, have made a very big difference, if only by preventing a very big difference! Pseudoscience is a nasty threat to democracy. We must do what we can to contain it. It is an ongoing fight with as many losses as successes. However, we can make a difference. We owe it to ourselves and our fellow citizens to do our best. We need to keep working!

DARWINISM AS RELIGION

Taking note of my own exhortation, let me conclude this short essay by talking very briefly about how my own researches have led me. Specifically, let me make mention of how, in recent years, my own work has focused a great deal on Darwinism and whether that early pseudoscientific side to the evolutionary enterprise has entirely vanished. After the Arkansas trial was over (at the end of 1981), although I had to spend much time defending myself against the criticisms of my fellow philosophers, my main worry was about why exactly it is that Darwinism causes such angst in the breasts of evangelical Christians. I knew that, for all of the talk about taking the Bible absolutely literally, this could not be the whole story. No one takes literally the claims in Revelation about the Whore of Babylon. She is always the pope or the Catholic Church generally, or someone further east like Saladin or Osama Bin Laden. There has never been any doubt in my mind that the Whore of Babylon refers to my late headmaster.

I took note of what these critics themselves said, namely that their big objection is that Darwinian theory is itself a religion, a religion that rivals Christianity. For many years, I pooh-poohed this idea. There is—as I still very much believe—a fully functioning genuine science of evolutionary biology, with Darwin's natural selection as the core causal force.32 It was, after all, to defend this idea that I was called down to Arkansas. Gradually, however, I came to see the truth in the charge. Alongside the genuine science, there is a body of claims that truly functions as a religion. I make no claims about a hierarchy, even though there are days when Richard Dawkins, as people charged Thomas Henry Huxley with many years ago, does somewhat resemble a high priest, or even a pope. If you prefer, speak of a secular religious perspective. Either way, there is truly something more than pure science that challenges Christianity.

I have continued to explore this insight in a number of books. In The Evolution-Creation Struggle, I analyzed matters in apocalyptic terms, arguing that creationists tend to premillennial thinking and Darwinians to postmillennial thinking.33 In Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution, I explore these insights through the writings of poets and novelists.³⁴ My next book, The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict, uses war as a case study to explore the thinking of Christians and Darwinians on so important and fraught a topic.³⁵ Through the Christian adhesion to Providence and original sin and through the Darwinian adhesion to progress and the virtues of struggle, I show that the differences are properly described as religious.

Now, in a proposed book—A Meaning to Life, to be published by Oxford University Press in the spring of 2019—I want to pull back a little and ask some bigger questions. Agree that the Darwinian Revolution was a watershed in Christian-Science dealings. Agree that Darwinism was in important respects turned into a religious rival to Christianity. What next? Is the Darwinian, accepting fully Darwin's theory including its application to our own species, committed then to a religious perspective? Having given up one religion, Christianity, is one now committed to accepting another religion, Darwinism? Or, is there a third way, one that takes Darwinian theory as a true foundation but that does not thereby embrace a religious perspective?³⁶

In another recent book, On Purpose,³⁷ I began to explore what (somewhat pretentiously) I call “Darwinian Existentialism,” where I try to show how one can accept the metaphysical implications of Darwin's thinking without plunging into religion.³⁸ Or worse, pseudoscience, bound up (as in the early years) with thoughts of progress—cultural and biological—making the running. Another approach is demanded, one that is, in respects, significantly chillier, and yet in other respects is not just more honest but ennobling and comforting. In some ways, it is close to existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre makes the point about the alienation from God:

Existentialism is not so much an atheism in the sense that it would exhaust itself attempting to demonstrate the nonexistence of God; rather, it affirms that even if God were to exist, it would make no difference—that is our point of view. It is not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the real problem is not one of his existence; what man needs is to rediscover himself and to comprehend that nothing can save him from himself, not even valid proof of the existence of God.39

Then Sartre follows by trying to explain what this means for humankind:

My atheist existentialism…declares that God does not exist, yet there is still a being in whom existence precedes essence, a being which exists before being defined by any concept, and this being is man or, as Heidegger puts it, human reality.⁴⁰

That means that man first exists, encounters himself and emerges in the world, to be defined afterward. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. It is man who conceives himself, who propels himself toward existence. Man becomes nothing other than what is actually done, not what he will want to be.

No student of modern science is going to accept all of this. Even a half-baked knowledge of human biology shows that it just plain silly to say that there is no human nature.⁴¹ Humans are bipedal and rational and warthogs are not. It is true that human nature is variable—although, apparently, genetically we are nothing like as variable as many species—but to distinguish humans from warthogs is not bad science or motivated by racism or sexism or any other ism. The claim is true. To take a more specific example, for all of John Locke's horrendous stories about the ways in which people have treated their children, it is part of human nature to be loving toward children and especially so to one's own children. Of course, culture is involved. Perhaps culture can override biology and some people really do geld their children to fatten them up before eating them. Nevertheless, biology is the foundation. It is genetic that we humans can speak and warthogs cannot. Then, we speak different languages because of culture.

Qualifications notwithstanding, this approach nevertheless says that Sartre is right. We start from where we are. It is just a matter of where we are. The Darwinian says no one is a blank slate—and one very much doubts that Sartre, the quintessential Frenchman, truly thought that, either. We start from where we are and have to create meaning in this unfeeling Darwinian world.42 There is no help from an external good God nor is there help from an external, progressive, value-increasing world process. Given this prospect, here too we can and must work through the items that give Christians and humanists meaning—family, friends, society, and more.

There is much more I could say and, before long, I am very sure I will say! For now, I will draw to a conclusion. Pseudoscience can be attractive even to the more skeptical of us. It is so easy to see it in the thinking of others and not in ourselves. If we cherish democracy, as we should, we need to be eternally vigilant. I am not arguing against trying to find meaning in our lives. I am not even arguing against religion, although it is not for me. I am arguing against thinking something is scientific when truly it is only value-impregnated, wishful thinking.