Darwin is no problem to Christian thought. The facts gathered by biologists — including evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and brain-scientists — are themselves no problem. Certain thinkers, evolutionary biologists and so-called philosophers, have interpreted those facts in terms of a skepticism of a sort charitably described as reductionistic materialism.
Such thinkers, as well as more rational materialists, are forced to become dualists just because they have no way of conceiving a coherent physical ‘place’ which might be the setting for what I have called a world — a physical universe, or Aristotelian Cosmos, seen as being morally ordered. That moral order cannot be part of a mere collection of environments, which is what you get with pragmatic philosophies and other pseudo-empirical modern forms of thought which try to construct a body of knowledge from catalogs of randomly assembled facts. Even when the existence of a universe is grudgingly — and inconsistently — acknowledged, the problem doesn’t go away.
You can’t force moral order upon an inherently amoral universe or Cosmos. That universe or Cosmos must itself be morally well-ordered, though that moral order might be seen as through a glass darkly. As a Christian, I believe that God has given us knowledge that we could not have seen ourselves from our place in Creation, but a substantial body of moral truths can be seen in the physical universe itself. Without a well-ordered physical universe, or Aristotelian Cosmos, you have two choices in any effort to retain some sort of morality:
- Invent moral rules. Each man can choose his own food, or poison.
- Invent a transcendent realm of truths: this forces a more direct dualism often labeled Platonic though it’s not clear that Plato himself was advocating such a view.
It’s true that most modern Christians and Jews have become dualists in that same sense — they see us as being individuals passing through physical ‘places’ which are not morally ordered as such. Consequently, they have to draw moral truths from a Transcendent realm. On their part, this strategy is superficially more plausible since the Bible seems, to modern literalistic minds, to be a set of revelations from such a realm.
Creation, as a whole, is morally ordered and even this phase of Creation, the physical universe, is not just a neutral setting for human beings to engage in moral or immoral dramas. More to the point, we have moral natures because we evolved in a universe deeply conducive to moral order. If we could see through God’s eyes, we would, in fact, see this universe as being a true world, morally well-ordered.
The facts of evolutionary biology can be brought into a coherent form so far as their moral implications go. All of those facts about rodents acting in the interests of their genetically close relatives, the fact that wolves have stronger instincts than men against killing members of their own species, the general behavior of animal mothers and especially those from the species of birds or social mammals, tell us that the moral aspects of animal natures have evolved as much the other aspects of animal natures. The evidence strongly indicates that the universe is highly conducive to the development of moral natures.
Unlike the ideological Darwinists, I can legitimately engage in speculations about morality just because I work from an understanding of the physically well-ordered universe of Einstein. That Einsteinian universe can then be seen as a world, a morally well-ordered universe, in light of my Christian faith. Coherent moral thinking is not possible if we were to try to start with just the bottom-up perspective of ideological Darwinists or others who deny that it is possible to think in terms of a universe and even in terms of a world.