Darwinism as Religion What Literature Tells Us about Evolution

Through the lens of poetry and fiction, Darwinism as Religion tells the history of evolutionary theory, arguing that Charles Darwin was the significant figure in this story, that his Origin of Species published in 1859 was the key work, and that the revolution he brought about was less one of scienc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author Ruse, Michael
Format eBook
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Oxford University Press 03.11.2016
Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Edition1
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Summary:Through the lens of poetry and fiction, Darwinism as Religion tells the history of evolutionary theory, arguing that Charles Darwin was the significant figure in this story, that his Origin of Species published in 1859 was the key work, and that the revolution he brought about was less one of science and more one of religion. Evolutionary thinking focusing on Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection formed a rival worldview to the Christianity from which his ideas in major respects derived. Darwinism as Religion is unique in combing a deep feeling for literature with a synoptic knowledge of the theory of evolution and its past, from the early days when it was essentially a pseudoscience resting on the back of enthusiasm for the ideology of Progress, a direct challenge to the Christian commitment to Providence, through the years after the Origin when it was the great popular science of the museums and lecture halls, and on to the professionalism of the genetically informed twentieth century. Drawing on novelists including George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence and poets including Alfred Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, the tale is told of Darwinism growing and rivaling and challenging Christianity, continuing the story to the present, through such Darwinian writers as the poet Philip Appleman and the novelist Ian McEwan, and such Christian writers as the poet Pattiann Rogers and the Calvinist novelist Marilynne Robinson.
ISBN:0190241020
9780190241025
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190241025.001.0001