Thinking of materialists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini or non-materialist Thomas Nagel (and have doubtless missed some in both categories, sorry): Just because they write against Darwinism, doesn’t mean they are necessarily “moving toward faith.”
Maybe they are, I dunno. But unless you think that Darwinism is the central plank of atheism, that’s not why they are writing those books.
They are saying that Darwin’s theory (whether someone wants to call it neo-Darwinism instead or claim to not be “that kind of Darwinist” or whatever) has maxed out its value in the world of ideas.
I think that evolutionary psychology and evolutionary medicine were presumptive evidence of that fact, without any further books, but never mind.
The problem isn’t that these “fields” exist, but that—given the assumptions that Darwinism enforces—there is no way of controlling their outpour of nonsense. No one even tries.
And when a discipline has no discipline, it is not a discipline any more. It no longer matters how many organizations and institutions and governments and learned societies sign on and sound off —or get people fired or pass laws against their views—intellectually, it is just over.
And these guys are, by temperament, stuck with the intellectual life, which they understandably want to live and can no longer live under the constraints that cultural Darwinism requires. There was atheism before Darwin, and will doubtless be after him.
That is what I hear them saying. Thoughts? – O’Leary