The Christian Science Monitor has a reasonable review of David Quammen's latest book, The Reluctant Mr Darwin, but there are a couple of interesting tells.
One of my pet hates is this sort of journalistic boilerplate:
Centuries before, Copernicus removed the Earth from the center of the universe; now Darwin had removed man as "God's chosen" among life forms.
First of all, Copernicus did not dethrone the Earth from the center of the universe. He elevated it to the same high status of the heavens, which was what people objected to. Prior to that, the Earth was the universe's garbage dump, where the corruptible elements went to fester and decay. Asserting that the Earth was part of the heavens meant either that the heavens were corruptible (and thus overturned the entire corpus of known physics of the day, which is why Galileo had to make a start on revising that physics to get his message across), or that the Earth was divine. Neither view was palatable at the time.
Second, Darwin did most explicitly not remove "man" from being God's chosen lifeform. In fact, nothing he said, or that evolutionary biology has been able to do since, bears in any way on that matter. Since claims that "Man" is somehow the acme of creation are based on special revelation, not science, unless that revelation makes factually incorrect claims, it is indefeasible by science. Believe that "Man" is special if you like - "He" still evolved from primates.
The other passage I find interesting is this:
After Darwin, looking for God and his creation in the physical world would become a harder task. (On the other hand, evolution can neither prove nor disprove the concept of a spiritual existence that is unfindable by, and unmeasurable through, material means.)
Which is my point above. If the previous claim was Quammen's. I am disappointed in him and expected better. But this is the Christian Science newspaper, so it's not surprising that they would mention an empirically immeasurable "spiritual existence", given that they think the world is roughly an illusion subjected to spiritual influences. I wonder if the reviewer was forced to put that bit in, or did so from personal conviction? Either way, it's good to see that the CSM is not taking the easy stupid creationist line, or the compatibilistic Intelligent Design line.
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> I wonder if the reviewer was forced to put that bit in,
> or did so from personal conviction?
The latter. Apart from the explicitly religious bits (like prayers), it's editorial policy --- genuinely --- that the CSM is not a religious paper. At least, that was very definitely the case when I used to read the international version regularly a few years ago. What's more, it's an excellent paper. I only stopped reading it because the cancelled the international version, and I recently discovered that it's back, so maybe I'll resubscribe.
Since claims that "Man" is somehow the acme of creation are based on special revelation, not science, unless that revelation makes factually incorrect claims, it is indefeasible by science.
I won't go into intermagisterial indefeasibility, except to note in passing I think that it's not a sustainable distinction. But I don't think it's correct to imply that all claims to acme-hood were based on special revelation. There have always been plenty of such claims that were evidence-based, centered on physical beauty and proportion, rational and linguistic capacity, and cultural and spiritual powers. What else was the whole "what a piece of work is Man" speech from Hamlet about, if not a series of empirical observations?
In that case it's based on the shared "great chain of being" approach out of Aristotle, via the neo-Platonists. All of these things are regarded as "obviously" better and more worthy. There has always been a moral dimension to the great chain, and I think the popularity of this view is based on the religious doctrines of the European societies. Aristotle and Plato clearly thought "Man" was the acme of the universe for reasons other than Christian theology, but the spread of that idea after the classical period is due to claims based on revelation.
Is revelation defeasible by science? That's an argument I think is hard to make. If a revelation makes factual claims (like, for instance, that the sun revolves around the earth, as in the Bible) then it can be defeated, and was. But whether there is a moral value to humans that doesn't apply to apes or other animals is not defeasible. No evidence can bear on that question decisively.