Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 272 pages
- Published by: Harvard University Press September 30, 2007
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0674026152
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0674026155
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Book Dimensions:
8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 15.2 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Bowler, a professor of the history of science at Queen's University in Belfast, aims to show that the renewed state of war between fundamentalists and atheistic Darwinists is not the only game in town, because there have always been religious thinkers looking for a middle way to integrate Christian and evolutionary ideas. While not himself an advocate of any middle way—Bowler is a religious skeptic—he believes this stream of thought deserves more attention. Alongside outbreaks of controversy such as the Huxley-Wilberforce debates, the Scopes trial or contemporary battles over science education, Bowler portrays a broad movement, spearheaded by liberal Christians and religiously inclined evolutionists, to interpret evolution as God's plan. Integrating cultural and political factors into the historical description, Bowler sees a great deal at stake. Political and social beliefs about competition, cooperation, and human improvability also come into play, as well as classic theological questions of suffering, freedom, and moral responsibility—or more recently, the value of animals and the environment. Although breadth sometimes comes at the expense of depth—Bowler treats some topics superficially and admits to finding some academic theology totally incomprehensible—overall this is a well-balanced survey that does justice to the complexity of the encounter and the variety of possible responses.
(Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Bowler's exemplary review of debate over Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution indicates that they have been beleaguered since before they were published, more by other scientists than by churchmen. A great many other scientists were and are religious and, like most other religious people, feel uneasy about the challenges to divine omniscience and omnipotence that Darwin's concepts raised. Lamarck's pre-Darwinian notions about change through quasi-intentional mutation rather than random natural selection ministered powerfully to such unease, leading even Darwin's great, ostensibly atheist champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, to differ with the master (Lamarckism wasn't laid to rest until well into the twentieth century). A real eye-opener for many arrives with Bowler's demonstration that the anti-Darwinian creationism and intelligent design movements are newcomers to the conflict that represent a much more intransigent strain of dogmatic Christianity than pre-1950s Darwinians faced. A nonbeliever himself, Bowler yet concludes that physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne's heady theological arguments are preferable to the rampant atheism of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006) for defending Darwin's indispensable theories. An invaluable resource. Olson, Ray
Reader ReviewsPeter Bowler is one of the authorities on the history of evolution. Professor of the History of Science at Queens University, Belfast, he has written extensively on the history of the science of the "Darwinian Revolution" as well as on the moral and political responses it has provoked. _Monkey Trials_ is a short and easy read that is almost deceptively packed with a vast survey of scholarship, while at the same time providing real insight into the history of the present relationship between evolution and religion in America. Bowler justifies this work as his own contribution to the American phenomenon of the apparent "debate" between the science of Darwinian evolution and the Creationist "Intelligent Design" movement that has made such headway among the religious right, and which continues to threaten science standards in schools in many southern states despite recent rulings against teaching religion as science by the courts. Bowler is open about his own religious skepticism, but much like Michael Ruse, does not think it productive to go down the path of strident atheist advocacy pursued by Daniel Dennett and the Richard Dawkins. As a European, Bowler claims to offer an outsider's perspective, but it is Bowler's perspective as an historian that really allows him to see the wood as well as the trees. Bowler's book sheds much needed light. The opening chapters of _Monkey Trials_ give a brief but comprehensive overview of the history of the development of Darwin's thought, of earlier evolutionary ideas, and the range of Victorian moral reactions to the idea that humanity might share a common ancestor with apes. Bowler shows that despite the efforts of many to portray this as a "God or Darwin" black or white choice, history shows that this is at best a caricature of the much more complex and multiple responses to contemporary developments in biology. Bowler provides a deftly written history of those developments, that lead through the "eclipse of Darwinism" - the preference of many biologists for alternative mechanisms of evolution to Darwin's "natural selection", to the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 40s. The main thrust of Bowler's story, however, is to recount the many efforts by liberal "Modernist" theologians to accommodate evolution into their religious understanding, a move that was met by many scientists in the early 1900s, (amongst them even Julian Huxley, one of the key authors of the synthesis), who accepted that the apparent purpose they saw in evolution might also provide a ready compromise. This oft uncomfortable middle ground was not shared by religious conservatives, however, and similarly became increasingly untenable to scientists in light of the advances in genetics that laid the groundwork of the synthesis of Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics. Indeed, the synthesis increasingly undermined any basis for seeing purpose or direction in nature at all. If God was the divine architect at work, (as the geneticist R.A. Fischer continued to believe), He was very much an unmoved mover - a view that was - and remains - an unsatisfactory conception of God for a great many believers. Nevertheless, Bowler does show that, despite the apparent polarization of science and religion that gets the headlines, there remains a number of significant liberal theologians, such as John Polkinghorne and John F. Haught, who are willing to do the hard work of seriously thinking through a modern synthesis of their own: that of bringing together the apparently non-directed and purposeless character of modern evolutionary biology with a belief in a compassionate and caring Creator. In short, Bowler's work is an important synthetic work in the history of religious responses to the changing nature of Darwinism from the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ in 1859 to the present, but it is also more than this. Hopefully, _Monkey Trials_ will underline the fact that the debate need not be as polarized as the present American episode in debating the moral implications of evolutionary biology suggests
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