Darwin Loves You
Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
Chapter One
SECULAR RE-ENCHANTMENT
The gentle gentleman Charles Darwin, who was buried in Westminster Abbey,
lives in public consciousness within an adjective describing a brutally
competitive and mechanistic world, and as the author of a controversial
theory that has made him to many the Antichrist. He has survived not only
as the icon of a revolutionary shift in the way we think about origins and
humanity but as an unpleasant idea. And for those who think about such
things, in extending naturalistic explanation even to human behavior, he
is seen as perhaps the most striking embodiment of that scientific
rationalism that, in Max Weber's terminology, "disenchanted" the modern
world. Evolution by natural selection seems to have removed both meaning
and consolation from the world; those who discovered it and who now argue
for it often engage in a kind of triumphal rationalism that treads all
affective and extramaterial explanation underfoot. It is one thing to
believe that science can explain the movem ... read full excerpt from Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World ebook
