Darwin’s Positivist Epistemology
Despite the failed attempts of Enlightenment epistemology to account for science, an atheistic view of science came to dominate the scientific establishment and other academic disciplines in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This triumph came through a scientist rather than a philosopher, but his attraction was his application of a philosophical idea to the science of biology. Darwin is credited by most intellectual secularists nowadays with having destroyed the design argument for God by discovering a natural mechanism known as “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest” that explains away all need to see intelligent design in nature. What is not generally known is that Darwin’s devotees in the latter part of the nineteenth century generally did not accept natural selection. They believed in Darwin’s claim of naturalistic transmutation of species, but they looked for their own mechanisms. Darwin didn’t know about genes since they had not been discovered yet. Not until the neo-Darwinian synthesis of genetic theory with natural selection in the 1930’s and 40’s did natural selection become widely accepted by evolutionists.[1] Continue reading