Thoughts in a Haystack

It is, perhaps, part of the human condition to think our circumstances are unique; our problems never before faced. It's almost never true. Consider the following from Neal C. Gillespie's book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation. Gillespie notes, in connection with the change from the theological to the positivist view of nature:

What had separated the developing positive outlook from the traditional one, from its significant beginnings in the seventeenth century on, was not the idea that nature is predictable -- men had known that from neolithic times if not earlier -- but that nature must not be unpredictable. ...

This need for a nature that was predictably certain was the crux of the reaction against miracles that began in natural history with the nomothetic creationists [who believed God acted only through natural law] and came to full flower in positivism where it eventually led to the rejection of any divine role in natural processes or in scientific explanations of them. ...

[The] common idea, held by laymen as well as scientist, that miracles or supernatural interruptions of the order of nature were impossible, was part of the episteme shift represented by the Origin. The impossibility of miracles followed from the implicit metaphysics of positivism: the belief that all events are part of an inviolable web of natural, even material, causation. For [John] Tyndall such a simple prayer as one for good weather implied a rearranging of the forces of nature on a scale that would be miraculous if carried out. All prayers to interfere with the determined course of nature, he said, were prayers for miracles and, as such, were beyond the limits of the possible.

On the other hand:

To be sure, not all subscribed to the idea that miracles were simply impossible. Some, like Huxley, followed David Hume in denying that the so-called laws of nature were anything more than human conventions about the perceived regularity of phenomena and, by themselves, were no justification for rejecting a priori the possibility of preternatural events. For these, the occurrence of events out of the accustomed order of nature was not a matter of possibility but one of probability, of evidence. ...

One might have wondered, with Archbishop Manning (as told by R. H. Hutton), why, with all the emphasis on evidence, skeptics like Huxley did not investigate contemporary miracles where eyewitnesses and scientific evaluation were available. Manning meant Roman Catholic Lourdes, of course ...

To some extent, Huxley took his battles where he found them and, for the most part, he found them in scripture. But even if he had investigated modern miracles thoroughly, he certainly would have found nothing more than a confirmation that the event had happened-which, in theory, he was prepared to admit -- and no evidence at all that the event was supernaturally caused. "We can never," he wrote, "be in a position to set bounds to the possibilities of nature." And, continued [John Stuart] Mill,

if we do not already believe in supernatural agencies, no miracle can prove to us their existence. The miracle itself, considered merely as an extraordinary fact, may be satisfactorily certified by our senses or by testimony; but nothing can ever prove that it is a miracle: there is still another possible hypothesis, that of its being the result of some unknown natural cause. ...

Those who appealed to evidence, therefore, misrepresented the question by suggesting that evidence could settle it. But belief about the miraculous, one way or the other, required a prior belief, that is, an epistemic commitment. "The essential question of miracles," said Baden Powell,

stands quite apart from any consideration of testimony; the question would remain the same, if we had the evidence of our own senses to an alleged miracle, that is, to an extraordinary or inexplicable fact. It is not the mere fact, but the came or explanation of it, which is the point at issue.

Interpretations of such events, he went on, are governed by our preconceptions. A believer in the uniformity of nature would find, in the mere event, no reason to think it a supernatural intervention or miracle.'

There'll be a new sun before there are new arguments under one.
.

George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, was the very model of a Victorian establishment insider. He was a close associate of Prince Albert and served under a number of Prime Ministers in various positions such as Lord Privy Seal, Postmaster General and Secretary of State for India. He was also a well-known scientist of his day or, perhaps more correctly, as the present Wikipedia entry puts it -- delicately -- "an eminent publicist on scientific matters." An opponent of Darwin's theory but not of the man, Argyll may have come up with one of the more ingenious arguments in favor of intelligent design ever, as recounted by Neal C. Gillespie in his book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation:

The old episteme, with its emphasis on the union of theology and science in the study of nature, had no more devoted champion in the years after 1859 than this Scottish nobleman. Argyll's primary strategy in his effort to preserve a unity of science and religion by means of the design doctrine was to insist that purposeful teleological language (which scientists, try as they might, seemed unable to avoid) was necessary in carrying on scientific work because a complete scientific explanation must involve the idea of purpose. "It is well worthy of observation," he wrote in the 1880s, "that in exact proportion as [scientific] phrases do avoid [teleological language], they become incompetent to describe fully the facts of science." For example, describing the various stages in the unfolding development of an embryo as "differentiations" failed utterly to encompass the goal-directed nature of those changes. The element of preparation for future use was the linkage that connected the entire process. Scientists of positivist bent, Argyll further charged, who, in an attempt to avoid religion and metaphysics, renounced teleological concepts in their work, were only substituting a metaphysics of their own: materialism. This was a bad metaphysics because it excluded a priori evident aspects of reality. ... The fullness of nature was not to be found in a "sameness of material" or in an "identity of composition" or in "mere uniformity of structure." It lay in a unity of "aims" or "action' -- in short, of mind. But positive science, moved by the philosophical needs of its method, relegated these elements of nature to theology and so dismissed them from "the category of scientific facts.

Argyll recognized that these teleological elements could justly be classed as theological but he denied they should be excised from science merely for that reason. They were, he believed, a necessary part of any complete understanding of the universe.

Those who used purposeful language -- as any honest scientist would, and must -- and denied its reference to mind, were giving the attributes of mind to matter. The metaphysics of language, then, was an issue greatly needing analysis; and the heart of that problem was metaphor and, of course, analogy.

The essence of Argyll's interpretation of language is found in two phrases: "I hold that the unconscious metaphysics of human speech are often the deepest and truest interpretations of the ultimate facts of nature" and "all metaphor is essentially founded on the perception of analogies.

As evidence of the first proposition, he pointed to the similarity of "folk taxonomy" to the binomial classification system as finally worked out by Linnaeus. As to the second and far more important of Argyll's propositions:

Teleological language in science, the significance of which some scientists tried to evade by pleading the use of metaphor, recommended itself to them in the first place only because of its evident appropriateness. Cuvier's work had been filled with it -- not from choice, however, but because "it was the automatic impression made by external facts upon the receptive structure of Cuvier's mind. He could no more have abandoned it, or departed from it, than he could have abandoned the use of speech." Similarly, "Mr. Darwin does not use this language with any theological purpose or in connection with any metaphysical speculation. He uses it simply and naturally for no other reason than that he cannot help it. . . . The greatest observer that has ever lived cannot help observing [purpose) in Nature; and so his language is thoroughly anthropopsychic," that is, teleological, as a consequence. The excuse of mere metaphorical color would not wash: the analogy was genuine, the perception true.

For once, Herbert Spencer, who so often managed to distort public understanding of Darwin's work, did good service by producing a credible explanation for this linguistic difficulty:

"The general truth," [Spencer] wrote in the Principles of Sociology, is "that the poorer a language the more metaphorical it is, and the derivative truth [is] that being first developed to express human affairs, it carries with it certain human implications when extended to the world around. . . ." Spencer spoke, in this case, of primitive language, but his remark was equally apropos of scientific language during a "primitive" stage such as evolutionary biology was experiencing in the nineteenth century. Not the least noticeable feature of the Origin is Darwin's struggle to express ideas for which an adequate language had not yet been invented. As biology matured its vocabulary, metaphors and "anthropopsychisms" tended to disappear.

The irony of all this was that Darwin ended up adopting a phrase coined by Spencer, at the urging of Alfred Russell Wallace (who thought the term "natural selection" too metaphorical) which would wind up causing no end of mischief ... "survival of the fittest."
.

Here is another nice discussion from Neal C. Gillespie's book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation:

It has been generally agreed (then and since) that Darwin's doctrine of natural selection effectively demolished William Paley's classical design argument for the existence of God. By showing how blind and gradual adaptation could counterfeit the apparently purposeful design that Paley, the Bridgewater writers, and others had seen in the contrivances of nature, Darwin deprived their argument of the analogical inference that the evident purpose to be seen in the contrivances by which means and ends were related in nature was necessarily a function of mind. This inference, in which human and divine purpose were identified, had been its whole strength as a proof. In natural selection Darwin substituted an alternative hypothesis that was both logically adequate to account for the forms of organisms and philosophically more appealing to the positive outlook.

Darwin's argument ... did not, of course, disprove design in any possible formulation. One could, if so inclined, continue to believe that natural processes in general were purposeful and that the ends which they accomplished were designed.

Philosophically, at least, this is an important distinction. The destruction of the power of the argument of Natural theology did not, in turn, constitute an argument against the existence of God. However, there were those who still wanted to make nominally scientific arguments in favor of God:

Darwin downed Paley, but found himself already outflanked by the designers: design was now found in the rational order of creation and in the process, in the laws, by which a general progressive end was achieved. This view of design was not new, of course; and interestingly, it was not one that Darwin himself found entirely unacceptable. In point of fact, Agassiz and Owen had both rejected a sole reliance on Paleyesque adaptive contrivance to prove design prior to 1859. ...

But in giving up Paley's simple and direct empiricism for an idealism which substituted an intuitively perceived plan behind the adaptations for the adaptations themselves, the design argument was, to the positivist, on less relevant ground scientifically. It had, by abandoning the empirical world, removed itself from the area of science and entered that of religion. When, eventually, belief in design became an act of faith in an incomprehensible divine wisdom and its ends, the idea of design ceased to have any potential value as a scientific explanation: its assertions were unverifiable and hence useless. When the Duke of Argyll, Mivart, and other advocates of design answered the Darwinist criticism that nature showed a wasteful economy of means that was contrary to the idea of a wise and provident designer by saying that "we have no antecedent knowledge of the Creator which can possibly entitle us to form any such presumption as to His methods of operation," they were, in effect, admitting that the benign and frugal character of the Creator was not inferable from nature; rather, it was an article of faith that was held despite what nature indicated, a faith that nature was, somehow, rationally managed.

To further demonstrate that there is nothing new under the sun of Intelligent Design creationism (as if that was needed), consider the following:

The [similarities in embryological development in vertebrates] Futuyma cites may exist because a Creator employed them for some inscrutable purpose; or they may reflect inheritance from specific common ancestors; or they may be due to some as yet unimagined process which science may discover in the future. The task of science is not to speculate about why God might have done things this way, but to see if a material cause can be established by empirical investigation.
..........- Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial

[G]enetics has revealed that we are even programmed to die! Indeed, unfortunately, many individuals with many diseases face a shortened lifespans. Does that mean we were not designed? Perhaps we were intelligently designed to die because it was not a part of the designer's final reason for creating us that we should live in these physical bodies forever. One might think that the designer is therefore cruel, but remembering that this is a theological issue, it can be pointed out that Christianity explains how "evil" in the world is ultimately not the fault of God.
..........- Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center, "Some things appear 'unintelligently designed' or are poorly designed. Is ID falsified by 'sub-optimal design'?"

The reason such questions [about imperfection and evil] have traction in biology, however, is because the designer in biology is widely supposed to be a benevolent and omnipotent God. And this, in turn, is supposed to raise the classic theodicy problem (if God is good and all powerful, whence evil?). There are answers to the theodicy problem, but they are theological answers ...
..........- William Dembski, "Addicted to Caricatures: A Response to Brian Charlesworth"

This is, of course the heart of the problem, as Gillespie lays out:

To the positivist, who was committed to understand all natural processes only in terms of law and natural causes, Paleyesque design was merely incredible and its idealist successor irrelevant to the tasks of science; the invocation of a divine engineer, in any capacity, was a causal redundancy.

Thus the unstable Newtonian legacy of nature as matter in motion coupled with the idea of a supervising Creator finally fell apart. Its materialist, or positive, tendencies had long been gaining ascendency and had long been an increasing source of worry to its supporters. Design was the means by which it had been anchored to a theological base. Without design, a material science was almost irresistible. The virtual disappearance of natural theology from scientific discourse by the century's end signified more than the passing of a generation of scientists who had been born and educated in a more devout era. It indicated a change in the way scientists thought about nature and science, and in the practice of science. Not impiety but positivism had banished both theological explanations and concerns from the minds of working scientists.

That's why ID advocates must, in the end, resort to advocating a change in the very nature of science. It is an argument they lost long ago but cannot accept. ID is the sad tale of people who worry at the frayed ends of old disputes instead of moving on to new concepts and possibilities.
.

"Chance" is a word that plays a significant but, I think, underestimated role in the war creationists wage against science. I think that a close reading of creationist usage of the term reveals that by "chance" they invariably mean "without conscious intent," though they will often be happy to equivocate about that meaning for rhetorical effect.

The meanings given the term by scientists are more varied but are well illustrated by Neal C. Gillespie's discussion in his book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation of Darwin's uses of the word.

[I]t often meant only "our ignorance of the cause." Sometimes he used it in' the conventional sense of purposelessness, although by that word Darwin usually meant without a place in the structure of nature ... Hence, in the Descent of Man he wrote both of "the grand sequence of events" in living nature not being "the result of blind chance," that is, without a higher purpose and also, "it is incredible that all this {that is, sexual characteristics} should be purposeless," meaning without a function in nature. At other times, he used chance in the sense of random, fortuitous opportunity:

It is improbable that the unions of quadrupeds in a state of nature should be left to mere chance. It is much more probable that the females are allured or excited by particular males, who possess certain characters in a higher degree than other males. . . .

And conversely, in relation to natural selection, he wrote, "I had always perceived that . . . the preservation of even highly-beneficial variations would depend to a certain extent on chance," that is, on varying, haphazard, and coincidental circumstances. But far from building his doctrine on absolute chance, Darwin insisted that all phenomena are governed by laws and so are potentially subject to scientific study and explanation. At no time did he see the world as the result of fortuity in a metaphysical sense. This was contrary to both his science and ... his theology.

Absolute chance, or the happening of events without any identifiable cause in nature, was as anathema to Darwin's concept of science as accepting unique or preternatural causes. All such causes would be opaque to the means available to science. It was, as far as Darwin was concerned, a methodological concern:

The assumption of a uniformity of lawful causality, by which absolute chance was ruled out, made possible the employment of analogy, which was the real backbone of theory-building.

Understanding the interplay between "chance" or "random" events and the law-like regularities that we call "natural" is one of the keys not only to the creation/evolution wars but to the change in the method of science that culminated with Darwin's destruction of the last citadel of scientific supernaturalism.

Well, Larry Moran found my last post concerning Neal C. Gillespie's book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, "fortuitous" because of his intent to write about Marcus Ross, a young-Earth creationist who obtained a Ph.D. in paleontology from the University of Rhode Island, as well as Kirk Durston, a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics at the University of Guelph, an Intelligent Design creationist who Larry encountered in a course on ID taught by, of all people, Denyse O'Leary.

I went around with Larry on the Ross matter, differing more on the practicalities of dealing with such people rather than the impulse to somehow keep them from using degrees they attain from giving them the appearance of doing science when they are not. Fortuitous or not, I found this from Gillespie that is, I think, relevant to the discussion:

The old science was theologically grounded; the new was positive. The old had reached the limits of its development. The new was asking questions that the old could neither frame nor answer. The new had to break with theology, or render it a neutral factor in its understanding of the cosmos, in order to construct a science that could answer questions about nature in methodologically uniform terms. Uniformity of law, of operation, of method were its watchwords. The old science invoked divine will as an explanation of the unknown; the new postulated yet-to-be-discovered laws. The one inhibited growth because such mysteries were unlikely ever to be clarified; the other held open the hope that they would be.

Note that the difference is not a matter of one side having "truth" or even "evidence" on its side. The change was nothing more than a methodological change based on an unproved (and, I think, ultimately unprovable) assumption that whatever answers we can find, will be found by chasing after uniform "laws" of nature.

After discussing Darwin's brief dalliance with Auguste Comte, Gillespie goes on:

[T]heology became merely redundant. Positive science, conceived as a system of empirically verifiable facts and processes and the theories linking them, required the radical desacralization of nature. There could be no out-of-bounds signs and, despite its emphasis on a rational correspondence of the divine mind and man's, the old science did erect such barriers. God's initial processes of creation and his ultimate purposes were unknowable. Too much of the content of the old science was the result of intuition that was in principle unverifiable, either directly or indirectly.

What, then, were the reigning principles of Darwin's view of science when he wrote the Origin? He assumed, like most positivists, a system of natural causes operating according to uniform laws of nature. Neither unique causes nor absolute chance could be predicated to exist in the universe. But, unlike some, he did not turn this assumption into a system of materialist metaphysics. In point of fact, Darwin held a dual notion of natural law. In a higher sense, ... the laws of nature were God's creation, expressions of his will that regulated the world processes. Ideally, these were also the objects of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge, however, was made up of man's relative and fallible understanding of these laws. [Emphasis added]

Certainly early in his career, at the age of a modern grad student, Darwin, then an admirer of William Paley, would have had some difficulty getting past Larry's filter. And yet, Darwin got along well enough to attain some little notoriety in his field.

Under the rubric of there being nothing new under the Sun, one of the more interesting facts brought out by Neal C. Gillespie in his book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, is how a "biblicist mode of thought" hung on among nineteenth century scientists despite the positivist practice taking hold even among the faithful.

Charles Lyell was particularly opposed to that sort of thinking, in no small part because he was contending against catastrophism in favor of his uniformitianism, but he was hardly a critic of religion itself:

But the orthodox did not -- perhaps could not -- see it that way:

One might almost suspect Agassiz of alleging that the theologically-inclined were being Expelled from science.
.

Returning once again to Neal C. Gillespie's book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, that problem was not a scientific one or even religion masquerading as science as in modern Intelligent Design Creationism:

While, in our day, that pervasive assumption within science has been shattered, the same contestants remain in play:

An example of the former would be Louis Agassiz, the premier American scientist of the 19th century, who held that, of the three possible modes of the origin of new beings -- spontaneous generation by the operation of natural laws, the operation of creative laws established by God, and the immediate intervention of an intelligent Creator -- only the last was, in his view, supported by science, though the methods of how God created were unknown.

Such positions obviously linger today, represented by such Biblical creationists as Answers in Genesis' Ken Ham and his museum to nowhere, joined by the more circumspect but no less miracle-addicted ID advocates.

Charles Lyell, on the other hand, along with other nomothetic [law based] creationists, favored an unknown mode of divine action that "stayed within the confines of the laws of nature and, while involving a continuing divine initiative, did not require disruptions of that order." This was a creation no less mysterious than the more Biblical variety but less capricious.

The modern "theistic evolutionists" (a rather misleading term probably coined in talk.origins more for its ease of use in rhetorical battle than any consideration of accuracy) exemplified by Ken Miller come close to this latter view.

But what made the assumption of some form of creation so pervasive in the scientific community was not faith so much as practicality:

Darwin took away that need and, like a sudden release of pressure from behind a watertight door, it permitted the way to the recognition of the transmutation of life to be thrown open and the acceptance of evolution within the scientific community proceeded with almost unseemly haste.
.

When last we left Neal C. Gillespie's book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, the completion of the change to the positivist episteme, begun in earnest by Copernicus and culminating in the collapse of the creationist episteme in its last great bastion, biology, was already under way when Darwin delivered the coup de grâce. But just as science was changing, religion, at least among those who wanted to practice both, also had to change:

The dilemma of the theist who practiced science within the new episteme was not the least of the various and complex changes that promoted a religion of faith which paralleled the acceptance of a positive science. Just as science shifted from a theological ground to a positive one, so religion -- at least among many scientists and laymen influenced by science -- shifted from religion as knowledge to religion as faith. The attempts to defend science from the charge of irreligion, which were so common among this group, necessarily required real, if subtle, redefinitions of religion and especially of Christianity.

In short, science increasingly usurped the function of delivering human understanding of the material world. And, as science out-competed religion in that arena, religion had to adapt in order to make its way in a new and changing environment or face extinction. But as we've seen, the change in epistemes had happened over time and religion proved itself as flexible as the organisms that carry it out:

This, of course, involved no novel approach to either theology or the Scriptures. Prescient theologians had prepared the way well beforehand. The Bible as history had gone the way of the Bible as science and had given way to the Bible as myth. Myth was thought of, not as error, but as symbolic theological truth. Ethics replaced ritual purity and behavioral conformity as the center of concern. Christianity became hard to distinguish from theism and theism from a vague belief in some sort of spiritual dimension in life. The influence of scientists in weaning a large portion of the public away from biblical literalism and changing the nature of that public's understanding of Christianity should not be underrated ...

If nothing else, the lesson of history is that those who hope to stamp out religion with science have a more formidable foe than they might wish.
.

I've been neglecting my intended discussion of Neal C. Gillespie's book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation.

First, to set the stage, I want to recall Francisco J. Ayala's contention, in Darwin And Intelligent Design, that the "Copernican Revolution" and the "Darwinian Revolution" "may jointly be seen as the one scientific revolution, with two stages":

The discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had gradually ushered in a conception of the universe as matter in motion governed by natural laws.

That mechanistic view, however, was yet to be extended to the biological realm:

Supernatural explanations, such as Paley's explanation of design, depending on the unfathomable deeds of the Creator, [still] accounted for the origin and configuration of living creatures -- the most diversified, complex, and interesting realities of the world.

It was Darwin's genius to resolve this conceptual bifurcation. Darwin completed the Copernican revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a lawful system of matter in motion that human reason can explain without recourse to extra-natural agencies.

While Ayala's version of the change is more nuanced than the standard account, as Gillespie points out, there is more to it than that. The change from the creationist to the positivist episteme in biology was not all Darwin's doing:

Owing to increasingly refined practice and to the increasing volume of successful science, practitioners began to feel that a theological domain in nature which neither yielded to nor permitted scientific investigation was an actual obstacle to the full development of scientific knowledge. ... [W]hat must not be overlooked is that many Victorian scientists were uneasy or skeptical about the role of religion within science, and as the century wore on their numbers grew. This was the focal point of the conflict, and it turned on the question of knowledge. The episteme shift under consideration did not require the repudiation of religion as such. It only required its rejection as a means of knowing the world.

Although Darwin's "genius," as Ayala puts it, can't be discounted, there were other forces at work. John Wilkins, in discussing classification and, in particular, what counts as natural kinds, and how the terms have themselves evolved over time, makes a point that I think is equally valid here:

Darwin and Wallace were not mere historical ephemera instantiating the ineluctable progress of science. Nor were they the crucial individuals in every aspect of the development of future biology, lone geniuses who discovered what could not otherwise have been. They are neither dwarfs on the shoulders of history, nor giants in a featureless plain with neither precursors nor peers. History is not that simplistic ...

... but people who think it is abound.
.

In my prior post about Neal C. Gillespie's book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, I discussed Gillespie's proposition that Darwin spent so much time addressing special creation in the Origin of Species as part of the change between the "episteme" of creationism and that of posivitism.

Primary to understanding Gillespie's account of Darwin's approach is the nature of these epistemes. The creationism episteme in Darwin's time was not simple Biblical literalism, because the needs of a burgeoning science had already made inroads into mere acceptance of dogma. Thus, these epistemes were not discontinuous:

[E]pistemes [do not] follow one another in neat sequence through time. Men may dwell side by side and yet work within different ones. Men may move back and forth from one to another before making a final commitment; some may never make one. And others, like Darwin, may promote one episteme while never breaking free of another.

Insofar as creationism and positivism shared certain scientific beliefs a common discourse was possible, and it was along the bridge of this discourse that men passed from one episteme to the other. What did they have in common? They shared the legacy of a joint scientific heritage: laws of nature (however differently rationalized), the imperatives of evidence, the canons of proof and prediction. In its pure form creationism predicted that no purely physical explanation of speciation would be found, that no transitional fossils would be discovered, that no argument for evolution could be constructed that would plausibly link supporting evidence. [However], there were creationists who were more committed to a protopositivism within natural history than they were to the theological elements in their episteme, and these were the ones who, for the sake of their science, crossed the bridge; the others did not. Creationism, then, was not only a definite stance on the origin and nature of species, but was itself unstable owing to the development of positivism within it. And this was owing to the gradual modification of the tools of science through work.

So, by 1859, the old episteme was a mixture of:

... Newtonian nomothetic [divine action through natural law] and the Baconian inductionist traditions from the physical sciences with biblical theology and a type of philosophical idealism, [sanctioning], in the idea of special creation, or so it appeared from the new positive perspective, a pseudoparadigm that was not a research governing theory (since its power to explain was only verbal) but an antitheory, a void that had the function of knowledge but, as naturalists increasingly came to feel, conveyed none.

The positivist episteme, on the other hand, was:

... that attitude toward nature ... which saw the purpose of science to be the discovery of laws which reflected the operation of purely natural or "secondary" causes. It typically used mechanistic or materialistic models of causality, rejected supernatural, teleological, or other factors which were in principle beyond scientific examination as legitimate aspects of scientific inquiry, and -- whatever the desires or beliefs of individual practitioners, many of whom were theists or even good Christians -- embraced and promoted those far-reaching cultural tendencies conventionally known as secularism and naturalism. This development resulted in a consensus, virtually unquestioned among followers of science by the century's end, that science had a unique and prescriptive approach to knowledge which was superior to all others and was exclusively the way to understand the world of nature.

Most important to an understanding of the rise of science as we know it ... and how it might change again:

These systems, positivism and creationism, were realized in the lives of men, and that may best be understood by focusing on the reality of men thinking and working through time, out of one mode of discourse and into another. So much, I think, is true for the generation that makes the transition. Those raised within the confines of the new mode will be, of course, inclined to take its characteristics as self-evident, but only so long as it suits their needs. When conscious theory no longer fits their "silent practice" they, too, will inaugurate an epistemological shift.

Neal C. Gillespie, who was Professor of History at Georgia State University, wrote an interesting book (unfortunately no longer in print) entitled Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, that sought to answer the question of why Darwin spent so much effort in the Origin of Species attacking the notion of the special creation of species. As Gillespie puts it:

I am concerned, then, with might be called the existential dimension of Darwin's work: his attitude toward human knowledge and its possibilities, towards religious faith and its place in human experience.

Darwin's seeming preoccupation with creationism has been grist for more than one author's mill, with varying degrees of polemic success. Gillespie seeks to explain Darwin's theological forays as part of the delivery pains of a new "naturalistic" biology. As a result, he rejects attempts to downplay Darwin's theological language as merely poetical touches or rhetorical flourishes or part of an elaborate strawman.

Gillespie borrows a term from Michael Foucault and speaks of an episteme. In a broad sense Foucault's "episteme" is a historical communal presupposition about knowledge and its nature and limits. It is not unlike Thomas Kuhn's paradigm. However, Gillespie rejects what he calls Foucault's "extravagances" (Gillespie calls his usage an "illegitimate offspring" of Foucault's) and does not adopt Kuhn's model of scientific change. For one thing, Gillespie does not accept what he takes to be Foucault's insistence on a single episteme at any one time or Kuhn's notion of sequential, nearly instantaneous, "conversions" from one paradigm to another.

In the end, Gillespie means "episteme" as a kind of a collective social set of assumptions that all scientists, including Darwin, either worked under or at least had to address. The episteme that existed before the Origin was published, that Gillespie, perhaps unfortunately, labels "creationism," necessarily had to change if it was to be accepted. However, "positivism," the resultant episteme, was not so "incommensurant" (in Kuhn's terminology) with creationism that the change from one to the other was necessarily complete or immediate in any individual.

The nature of the episteme Darwin faced, including the changes it were already undergoing, and Darwin's method of dealing with it is the subject of Gillespie's book, about which I intend a number of posts.

However, one point Gillespie makes is important not only to understanding his project but is of particular import against those polemicists who would try to label Darwin's work as a "mere" cultural or theological movement, thus "lowering" Darwin's science to the level of religion or "raising" religion to the level of science or both. Gillespie rightly decries any attempt to identify the historic nature of science -- i.e., the understanding of science as a historical and cultural product -- with "a radical subjectivity of judgment so that scientific opinion is dissolved into a relativity of time and place."

Surely this is to confuse two very different things. To say that scientific judgments are not objective -- by this I mean cannot be objective, for no one denies that scientists any more than historians may be influenced by outside factors -- but rather follow the desires and assumptions of scientists is to imply that the processes of objectivity (evidence, tests and experiments, logic, and so forth) have nothing to do with shaping those desires and assumptions. On the contrary, it would seem that these things are closely interrelated and that interrelation may best be seen on the workaday level of science ... [T]o say that the ideas of scientists are subjective or ideological because of their being influenced by a given social matrix, and to conclude, therefore, that they are not true -- presumably because they do not result from some quest of pure reason untouched by the world -- is surely a gross instance of the genetic fallacy. The source of an idea is irrelevant, in the strict logical sense, to its success in a scientific system or in any other. The procedures of proof in any knowledge system are logically independent of the circumstances of the origin of the ideas involved. We need to know such things in order to fully understand science as a historical and social entity, but such knowledge, while it may caution one about scientific theories, cannot determine their truth.