The theology of the Old and New Testaments has been deployed to justify some very unpleasant behavior as well. Does that mean that Christianity is irrevocably tarnished and should be discarded for that reason?

If the conclusion is true, then the answer must be NO, Christianity is not irrevocably tarnished and should not therefore be discarded for that reason.

So what if the conclusion rests upon premises which are false?

Darwin’s philosophy has some bearing on his theory if it has been used (and possibly misused) to justify racism, genocide, and eugenics in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The theology of the Old and New Testaments has been deployed to justify some very unpleasant behavior as well. Does that mean that Christianity is irrevocably tarnished and should be discarded for that reason?

As long as social Darwinism exists, the philosophy of Charles Darwin will be debated. Get used to it.

Debate it all you like. Just get used to the fact that it is a fallacy to argue that it has any bearing on whether the biological theory is well-founded.

Darwin’s philosophy has some bearing on his theory if it has been used (and possibly misused) to justify racism, genocide, and eugenics in the 20th and 21st centuries.

As long as social Darwinism exists, the philosophy of Charles Darwin will be debated. Get used to it.

So whom did you vote for? (If you are a US voter)

I did not vote for either candidate. And no, I’m not a felon, lol.

You would have thought that biology has moved on a bit from Charles Darwin’s day.

However the biological evidence for the alleged evolution of the eye/ vision system is the SAME today as it was in 1859- namely that we observe varying degrees of eye/ vision system complexity and we “know” the original populations didn’t have either so they evolved!

And you accept that as a scientific explanation.

I find that a very sad state of affairs.

Thanks for your post Robert C. Your quote of Horkheimer regarding Darwinism’s “inherent humility towards nature” is (to me) more interesting for what it does not say. Horkheimer says that Darwinism has “encouraged the spirit of humility” on “many occasions” but then fails to give a single example of having actually done so, and, in fact, spends the remainder of his time explaining how it has not. He then claims that it is “superior to other doctrines” (presumably when it is acting in this “humble” fashion), but refuses to hint at what those “other doctrines” might be.

I don’t think these two sentences mean very much. They are Horkheimer’s doff of the cap as it were to the reigning paradigm before he settles into the real work of critique. They are characteristic of his all too frequent excursions into murky verbiage. In fact, the rest of his comments (as shown above) clearly negate – even contradict – them.

As to what Horkheimer might actually mean in these two sentences, one can only speculate. Presumably he’s referring to Darwinism in its “unpopular” as opposed to Darwinism in its “popular” form, but since he never really distinguishes the two it’s hard to see how they differ. True, he bemoans the social implications of Darwinism but Horkheimer’s attack on what Darwinism does to reason and rational humanity is rooted in its sweeping and unbridled formulation of natural selection, and this is a scientific problem as well as a philosophical and social one. Horkheimer says as much: “The doctrine of ‘survival of the fittest’ is no longer a theory of organic evolution making no pretense of imposing ethical imperatives upon society.” This is because the human mind itself is subsumed in blind natural processes, and, as Horkheimer points out, any system or theory that does so has profound moral and ethical implications.

Indeed it is the problem that all materialistic and positivistic theories have with the human mind. It was the source of Alfred Russel Wallace’s break with Darwin in 1869 and it’s the source of considerable controversy today. Steven Pinker may think that Darwinian evolution has solved the problem of the human mind, but others are less convinced (see Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere [1986], Edward Feser’s Philosophy of Mind [2006], James Le Fanu’s Why Us? [2009], and Bolhuis and Wynne, “Can evolution explain how minds work?,” Nature, Apr. 16, 2009: 832-833.).