Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Quiz Aug 30/31

Write your quiz answers down on a sheet of paper, we'll go over them in class. You can claim a base for each correct answer (and a run on the scorecard for every four bases, up to 5 runs per class). Also claim a base for each posted alternate quiz question, discussion question, response to a discussion question, other comment, or relevant link. Keep track of everything you post in a dated personal log that will be collected later. Claim a RUN for posting a weekly 250+ word essay on the relevant topic of your choice. When posting comments (etc.), include your section # (6, 9, or 10)

DR, Intro
1. What approach to the story of philosophy does Anthony Gottlieb say he aims to take in The Dream of Reason?

2. When was western science created?

3. How did William James define philosophy?

4. What's distinctive about philosophical thinking?

5. What is the sequel to The Dream of Reason?

DQ (Discussion Questions):
  • What's your definition of "philosophy"? 
  • Do you have a favorite philosopher? 
  • Can you summarize your current, personal philosophy of life? 
  • Russell * says philosophy occupies the No Man's Land between science and theology (xiii). Are scientists and theologians not philosophical? Or are they philosophical in a way different from Russell's? Do you like his definition of philosophy? Are you philosophical, by his definition?
  • Is your duty to God more imperative than your duty to the state, to your fellow citizens, or to humanity? xvi
  • Does Copernican astronomy influence your personal philosophy? How? (Or, why not?) xviii
  • Do you acknowledge the authority of any individuals or institutions to interpret the truth for you? WHy or why not? xx
  • [I invite you to post your comments on these, and to post your own DQs as well. Keep track in your personal log of everything you post. You get to claim another base on the scorecard for each posted comment, DQ, relevant link, or alternative quiz question you can document.]
  •  


Also recommended: Look on the This I Believe website for essays you like, and post links to them; TIB II William James, Pragmatism lecture 1; WATCH:What's Philosophy for? School of Life (SoL). LISTEN: What is Philosophy?and Who's Your Favourite Philosopher?(PB Philosophy Bites)
==
* "Philosophy" is a word which has been used in many ways,
some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain. Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something inter- mediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable ; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge so I should contend belongs to science ; all dogma as to what surpasses definite know- ledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so con- vincing as they did in former centuries. Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so, what is mind and what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers ? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal ? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order ? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet ? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet ? Is he perhaps both at once ? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? If there is a way of living that is noble, in what does it consist, and how shall we achieve it? Must the good be eternal in order to deserve to be valuc'd, or is it worth seeking even if the universe is inexorably moving toward? death ?

-Russell's History of Western Philosophy
==
An old post:

Who's your favorite philosopher?

That's the Philosophy Bites question we take up today in CoPhi. If you think it puts Descartes before the horse you can visit What is Philosophy? first. (That was the first bad phil-pun I heard, btw, from a perky Scot called Cogan on my first day of Grad School back in 1980. Not the last. It was already an old joke.)





We don't all agree on what philosophy is. Not even we "Americanists," amongst ourselves. But we try to disagree agreeably. A little post-HAP 101 exchange between a pair of students once threatened for a moment to become disagreeable (unlike the class itself, which was thrilling in its impassioned civility). Almost made 'em watch the Argument Clinic. "An argument isn't just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes," etc. etc. But I don't want to argue about that.

Maybe a round of Bruces would be welcome today, simultaneously introducing several stars of philosophy, teaching us how to pronounce "Nietzsche" (and mispronounce "Kant") and disabusing anyone who falsely presumes our subject to be overly sober and serious about itself. If any doubt about that persists, just drop in on the Philosophy Club's Thursday Happy Hour - not that I'd want to reinforce the spurious conceit that philosophers are drunks. G'day.

I don't have a "favourite"... but my favorite (as I've already told my classes, on Day #1) is of



course William James.I don't always agree with him, but I almost always want to know he'd say about the topic du jour.

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices. SPP

My favorite living philosopher is John Lachs. He came for a visit last year, to my CoPhi classes.

It's no surprise that David Hume outpolls everyone on the podcast, given its Anglo-centric tilt, or that Mill and Locke pick up several votes. They're all on my short list too, as is Bertrand Russell (who definitely knew the value of philosophy).

I notice that my Vandy friend Talisse is one of the handful of Americans here, and he, like Martha Nussbaum, picks Mill. Sandel picks Hegel.) Other big votegetters: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.

No surprise either that James, Dewey, Peirce, Santayana, Rawls, and other prominent Yanks don't win wide favor across the pond. (But I hear the Rawls musical has been a hit with the Brits.)

I did hear an English philosopher praising James once, on the BBC's excellent "In Our Time." But generally they prefer William's "younger, shallower, vainer" (and more Anglophilic) brother Henry, who lived most of his adult life in Sussex.

The British roots of American thought do run deep, and the branches of reciprocal influence spread wide. Stay tuned for info on our Study Aboard course, as it moves from drawing board to future reality.

Why do I find WJ so compelling? Hard to put my finger on a single reason, there are so many. I was first drawn to him through his marvelous personal letters. Then, his essays ("On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," "What Makes a Life Significant") and lectures-cum-books (Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe). His warm, charming, playful, disarming, sympathetic personality shone through all. He was so great at tossing off wit, profundity, and practical wisdom with seeming effortlessness and concision. A born tweeter. But his health, physical and emotional, was a lifelong challenge. He expended vast effort to become William James.

Honestly, the best explanation for why I became a lifelong student of, and stroller with, WJ may just be that little moment in the Vandy bookstore back in my first year of grad school - the moment when my new mentor John Compton noticed me browsing the McDermott anthology o fThe Writings. John's warm and enthusiastic familiarity with "Willy James" hooked me. Thank you, John.

The thing James said that's stuck with me longest and made the most lasting impression, I think, is the little piece of youthful advice he once wrote to a despondent friend. I'm not quite sure why, but it lifts my mood every time I think of it:



Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos.

Is this true? Maybe. Is it useful? Definitely.

We're also looking today at Nigel Warburton's introduction to Philosophy: The Basics.(5th ed., 2013), in which he quite rightly points out that while philosophy can help you think about who you are and why you're here - about the meaning of your life - it isn't an alternative to other fields of study. "It is important not to expect too much of philosophy," to the neglect of literature and history and science and art, et al.

That's right. But it's equally important not to expect too little of yourself, and to think you're not up to the challenge of an examined life. To repeat Professor James's empowering declaration: "I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds." If you don't all know that yet, CoPhilosophers, we'd better get to work. Serious fun, dead ahead. 8.27.14
==

 The Biggest Misconception About Today’s College Students

You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss, spending each day moving among classes, parties and extracurricular activities. But the reality is that an increasingly small population of undergraduates enjoys that kind of life.

Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time. By contrast, a mere 0.4 percent of students in the United States attend one of the Ivies.

The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.

The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents.


AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

These students work extremely hard to make ends meet and simultaneously get the education they need to be more stable: A two-year degree can earn students nearly 20 percent more annually than just a high school diploma... (continues, nyt)

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Hillbilly Elegy




Some excerpts:
  • There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
  • Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.
  • That [school vouchers] debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”
  • What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.
  • If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
  • Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.
  • Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.
  • We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.
  • I don't know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.

goodreads


Introductions

Let's introduce ourselves, Fall 2017 CoPhilosophy collaborators. (I'll tell you in class why I call my version of the Intro course "CoPhilosophy." But maybe you can guess, from the William James quote in the masthead.)

I invite you all to hit "comment" below and reply with your own introductions, and (bearing in mind that this is an open site) your answers to two basic questions: Who are you? Why are you here? (in this course, on this campus, in this state, on this planet...)

Our first class meeting will consist mainly of introductions and a heads-up that this is an unconventional course in ways I hope you'll find delightful, instructive, and rewarding. If you don't like to move, breathe, and converse in the open air on nice days, this may not be the course for you. But if you don't especially like the conventional lecture-style academic model in which I talk and you scribble silently in your seats, it may be just what you're looking for.

We'll not go over the syllabus or get bogged down in the nuts and bolts of course mechanics on Day #1, there's plenty of time for those details later. But do peruse the blogsite and syllabus (linked in the right margin) before next class and let me know what's unclear. Meanwhile, read your classmates' intros and post your own.

I'm Dr. Oliver, aka (despite my best efforts to discourage it) "Dr. Phil." I live in Nashville with my wife and recently-graduated older daughter, two dogs (Angel and Scooter) and a cat (Zeus). Younger Daughter is a college freshman on another campus.

My office is 300 James Union Building (JUB). Office hours are Monday thru Thursday 4-5, & by appointment. On nice days office hours may be outside, check my office door for details. I answer emails during office hours, but not on weekends. Surest way to get a quick response:come in or call during office hours.

I've been at MTSU since the early '00s, teaching philosophy courses on diverse subjects including atheism, childhood, happiness, the environment, the future, epistemology, metaphysics, Anglo-American philosophy, and bioethics.

My Ph.D. is from Vanderbilt. I'm originally from Missouri, near St. Louis. I was indoctrinated as a Cardinals fan in early childhood, so I understand something about religious zeal. My undergrad degree is from Mizzou, in Columbia MO. (I wish my schools weren't in the SEC-I don't approve of major collegiate sports culture or football brain injuries, as I'm sure to tell you again.)

My philosophical expertise, such as it is, centers on the American philosophical tradition of William James and John Dewey. A former student once asked me to respond to a questionnaire, if you're curious you can learn more about me there.

What you most need to know about me, though, is that I'm a peripatetic and will encourage you all to join me in that philosophical lifestyle as often as possible during discussion time. (If you're not sure what peripatetic means, scan the right sidebar or read the syllabus or ask me. Or look it up.)

I post my thoughts regularly to my blogs Up@dawn and Delight Springs, among others, and to Twitter (@osopher), and am continuing to experiment with podcasting as a classroom tool this semester. Follow me if you want to.

But of course, as Brian Cohen said, you don't have to follow anyone. (Extra credit if you get that reference... and real extra credit if you realize that my "extra credit" is usually rhetorical.) However, if a blog or podcast link turns up with the daily quiz (which will always be posted on this site no later than the night before class), you might find it helpful to read or listen.

Enough about me. Who are you? (Where are you from, where have you been, what do you like, who do you want to become,...?) Why are you here? (On Earth, in Tennessee, at MTSU, in philosophy class)? Hit "comments" below and post your introduction, then read your classmates'... and bear in mind that this is an open site. The world can read it. (The world's probably busy with other stuff, of course - Drumpf and Kardashians and cooking shows and other examples of what passes for "reality" these days.)

Please include your section number in your reply, and in all future posts on this site:
  • #9 MW 12:40-2:05 WPS 200
  • #10 MW 2:20-3:45 DSB 103
  • #6 TTh 1:00-2:25 JUB 202



From a distance, philosophy seems weird, irrelevant, boring...
  
and yet also – just a little – intriguing.
  
But what are philosophers really for?
  
The answer is, handily, already contained in the word philosophy itself.
  
In Ancient Greek, philo means love and sophia means wisdom.
  
Philosophers are people devoted to wisdom.
  
Being wise means attempting to live and die well.
  
In their pursuit of wisdom, philosophers have developed a very
  
specific skill-set. They have, over the centuries, become experts in
  
many of the things that make people not very wise. Five stand out:
  
There are lots of big questions around: What is the meaning of life?
  
What's a job for? How should society be arranged?
  
Most of us entertain them every now and then, but we despair of trying
  
to answer them. They have the status of jokes. We call them
  
'pretentious'. But they matter deeply because only with sound answers
  
to them can we direct our energies meaningfully.
  
Philosophers are people unafraid of asking questions. They have, over
  
the centuries, asked the very largest. They realise that these
  
questions can always be broken down into more manageable chunks and
  
that the only really pretentious thing is to think one is above
  
raising big naive-sounding enquiries.
  
Public opinion – or what gets called ‘common sense’ – is sensible and
  
reasonable in countless areas. It’s what you hear about from friends
  
and neighbours, the stuff you take in without even thinking about it.
  
But common sense is also often full of daftness and error.
  
Philosophy gets us to submit all aspects of common sense to reason.
  
It wants us to think for ourselves. Is it really true what people say
  
about love, money, children, travel, work? Philosophers are interested
  
in asking whether an idea is logical – rather than simply assuming it
  
must be right because it is popular and long-established.
  
We’re not very good at knowing what goes on in our own minds.
  
Someone we meet is very annoying, but we can’t pin down what the issue is.
  
Or we lose our temper, but can’t readily tell what we’re so cross about.
  
We lack insight into our own satisfactions and dislikes.
  
That’s why we need to examine our own minds. Philosophy is committed
  
to self-knowledge – and its central precept – articulated by the
  
earliest, greatest philosopher, Socrates – is just two words long:
  
Know yourself
We’re not very good at making ourselves happy. We overrate the power
  
of some things to improve our lives – and underrate others.
  
We make the wrong choices because, guided by advertising and false glamour,
  
we keep on imagining that a particular kind of holiday, or car, or computer
  
will make a bigger difference than it can.
  
At the same time, we underestimate the contribution of other things –
2:51
 like going for a walk - which may have little prestige but can
contribute deeply to the character of existence.
   
Philosophers seek to be wise by getting more precise about the
   
activities and attitudes that really can help our lives to go better.
  
Philosophers are good at keeping a sense of what really matters and what doesn't.
  
On hearing the news that he’d lost all his possessions in a shipwreck,
  
the Stoic philosopher Zeno simply said:
  
‘Fortune commands me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’
  
It’s responses like these that have made the very term ‘philosophical’
  
a byword for calm, long-term thinking and strength-of-mind,
  
in short, for perspective.
  
The wisdom of philosophy is – in modern times – mostly delivered in
  
the form of books. But in the past, philosophers sat in market squares
  
and discussed their ideas with shopkeepers or went into government
  
offices and palaces to give advice. It wasn’t abnormal to have a
  
philosopher on the payroll. Philosophy was thought of as a normal,
  
basic activity – rather than as an unusual, esoteric, optional extra.
  
Nowadays, it’s not so much that we overtly deny this thought but we
  
just don’t have the right institutions set up to promulgate wisdom
  
coherently in the world. In the future, though, when the value of
  
philosophy* is a little clearer, we can expect to meet more
  
philosophers in daily life. They won’t be locked up, living mainly in
  
university departments, because the points at which our unwisdom bites
  
– and messes up our lives – are multiple and urgently need attention -
  

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Till we meet again

  

According to my research, that's a misattribution - one "Ludwig Jacobowski" apparently said it first. No matter, I'm smiling today because our course happened. You've all given me much to ponder.

To our graduates: congrats - "Oh the places you'll go!" (Dr. S did certifiably say that.)  I don't have just one word for you, but if I did it wouldn't be "plastic" (if you've seen Dustin Hoffman's "The Graduate" you'll get the joke). It's been real, even if our conversations have been conducted mostly in virtual space.

When the Fall semester begins I'll remove you guys from the author list, to make room for the new kids. But feel free to continue to use this space 'til then, and the comments section ever after, if mind or spirit moves you.

Let me know if any of you have suggestions for future MALA courses. One I've been pondering would focus on Wordsworth and Thoreau, and the link between poetry, philosophy, and the peripatetic life. Another might take a closer look at the parallels and convergences between the lives & work of Darwin and Lincoln. Another might go deeper into American philosophy: James and Dewey, plus Royce, Santayana, and (more recently) Richard Rorty. Or perhaps something on ethics & intellectual integrity in the age of misinformation and "fake news"...

Good luck, all. Don't be strangers, drop by 300 JUB if you're in the neighborhood (I'll be there just about every day starting Aug. 28). Enjoy the rest of your summers, and your lives.

jpo


Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Why is The Origin of Species such a great book?

Dear Dr. Oliver,

I want to echo the sentiments of the other students who expressed their appreciation to you for introducing us to the James brothers, John Stuart Mill, and Charles Darwin. I have always intended to read The Origin of Species, but never got around to it. As I read it, I was directed to other books and then I discovered that the James brothers and Mill would also have read it. There is something special about reading a book and imagining what it must have been like for them to read it, but my greatest delight came in discovering the Henry David Thoreau had also read it and it had a profound effect on him. I only wished he had lived longer so he could have shared more of how he felt.

And I want to thank the other students for their post they have enlighten me and I am most grateful and wish those who are moving on to a new life the very best and I hope our paths will cross.

Don

The four individuals we studied this semester were all born in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, 1806, Charles Darwin, 1809, Williams James, 1842, and Henry James, 1843. They were influenced by or influenced events and writings in the nineteenth century and beyond which deal with human beings’s relationship with each other and with nature. While their influence was predominantly in the Anglo-American sphere, Darwin’s influence extended globally. While Europeans led the way in advancing science and philosophy, William James was an early contributor in the new discipline of psychology and in pragmatism. “Many historians consider the 19th century, especially the latter half, to be the start of the modern era of science, because many of our current ideas and theories of the natural world were initiated during this time.”[1] Many of these pioneers challenged accepted theories and dogma that had been disseminated from those in power.
                Once human beings evolved to the degree that some members in each society could reflect on where they came from, they created stories to explain the origin of their society. The few who were literate created religious systems. These systems share several things in common: each attempt to address their origin and “each system provides directions for appropriate and expected behaviors and serves as a form of social control for individuals within that society. Religious sanctions that encourage conformity are strong.”[2]  However, even the most learned members were ignorant of the natural and physical laws that governed the universe. Ancient Egyptians observed the sun appearing and disappearing each day and associated its movement with a god Ra who blessed them with his appearance bringing light for them to see and for their plants to grow. Elaborate rituals were created by the priestly caste and performed daily to welcome the god’s arrival. They had no way of knowing that the sun was a mass of hot gases and that it was the earth that revolved around the sun. They were not alone, almost every primitive society worshipped the sun in some form and it is understandable when you consider how important it was in their lives.
Today, most of us know better, not because we are smarter, but because we have acquired the knowledge and created the tools to be able to observe our sun in our solar system in relation to other suns in other solar systems and other galaxies. That knowledge and those tools inundated the world in the nineteenth century. In the western world, Greek philosophers make small chinks in the foundation that claimed that the Earth and everything in it had been created six thousand years ago, and that there was nothing new under the sun. Those chinks were widened by a Polish monk, Copernicus, and an Italian astronomer, Galileo, who demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe, let alone the center of its own solar system. This was the first blow to the biblical account of creation because up to that moment almost everyone believed in a geocentric Earth.  Proponents of the heliocentric model of our solar system were branded as heretics and the church fought back with ferocity against them, realizing that not only the church’s spiritual well-being, but its financial well-being was at risk. The controlling powers demanded conformity and the individuality encouraged later by John Stuart Mill was crushed or burned at the stake – the fate of Giordano Bruno for defending the Copernican system. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1992 that the Catholic church acknowledged that Galileo was right.
The nineteenth century ushered in a new age of scientific breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology that would serve as wrecking balls to the foundation of biblical creation. When these discoveries were coupled with the technological advances related to communication and transportation, they created a global network for exchanging ideas and cultures and caused internal conflicts for individuals in the Western world who had been trained from childhood to believe that everything written in the Hebrew bible was to be taken literally as divinely inspired. Thus, began the conflict between science and religion that exists to this day, “Four in 10 Americans believe God created the Earth and anatomically modern humans, less than 10,000 years ago, according to a new Gallup poll.”[3] Also, a National Science Foundation study found that one of four Americans thought that the sun revolved around the Earth.[4] Some of us may remember that Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin thought the Earth was less than seven thousand years old and contended that she had seen images of human footprints in dinosaur fossils. This ignorance of scientific facts is not confined to the United States, other countries have similarly high percentages.
Geology was the second of three blows to the biblical creation story. No one had an effective and accurate way to measure the age of the Earth. Bishop Ussher from Ireland estimated the date as 4004 B.C. based on biblical chronologies and this became set in church stone and appears on the first page to this day in most bibles. When Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology, he was very careful to manage how it was released and to focus on divorcing science from religion so it would not appear that he was attacking the biblical narrative about creation. This would give time for it to receive a fair hearing. What it achieved was to share evidence of what Lyell and others had accumulated and then allow the reader to draw his own conclusions, Any reasonable person could only conclude that the Earth had existed for much longer than proposed by the Bible and that the processes that were occurring in the present had occurred in the past in the same fashion.
Lyell’s observations about a long-time line for Earth’s formation while controversial were accepted because of his position on another issue that endeared him to religious leaders. He was a fervent opponent of evolution. “If evolution was true, Lyell believed, no divinely implanted reason, spirit or soul would set human beings apart; they would be nothing but an improved form of the apes…with humans no more than better beasts and religion exposed as a fable, the foundations of civil society would crumble.”[5] Toward the end of his life after learning of the latest discoveries and reading the latest literature, he expressed his inner conflict, “‘it cost me a struggle to renounce my old creed.’ He could follow Darwin’s reasoning, but his ‘sentiments and imagination’ revolted against removing man from the exalted position in which the seventeenth-century philosopher Pascal had placed him as ‘the archangel ruined.’”[6] He was not alone, there were many learned individuals who had to come to terms with the apparent contradictions in the biblical creation story that they had been taught and what they were learning and observing.
                 Most of the early origin writers justified their stories as being divinely inspired and they were reluctant to accept or hostile to any suggestion that a god who created the universe would have known their assertions to be false. One example is the story of Joshua in the Hebrew bible commanding the sun to stand still when it is the earth that is rotating around the sun. If the writer possessed the knowledge we have today or the knowledge of a god, they might have described the event as a solar eclipse, but once it was clear that it was in error, they had several options: 1. Acknowledge that the writer was wrong and ignorant of astronomy and laws of gravity and therefore that the passage was not divinely inspired. 2. Insist that with god all things are possible and continue to teach that the sun stood still because to cast doubt on divine inspiration on any issue would raise a question of credibility on other assertions. 3. Create an alternative explanation which would justify the assertion to be understood in a figurative rather than a literal way. These same options were considered and used when fossils were discovered including one theory that god or the devil had planted them throughout the world for geologists and paleontologists to find and report on (Consider just some of the fossil finds in this year alone - https://www.livescience.com/topics/fossils and then search back over the last ten years and imagine if this information had been available and understandable to the early origin writers).
Most of the early scientific pioneers were conflicted with the guilt of wanting to conform their findings to their religious teachings and to not express anything which would question their beliefs even as they realized that what they observed challenged those deeply held beliefs. Some like Dr. Louis Agassiz, clung to their beliefs and defended certain assertions even when the evidence was overwhelmingly against them, some tried to integrate the new findings and create an updated religion -  creationism or intelligent design, some chose to question their faith in the writings of early writers but kept certain tenets of their religion, and some abandoned their religion.
Charles Darwin was one of those individuals who had internal struggles with his beliefs. He had the good fortune like American author Henry James to be born into privilege and had the time and resources to explore the world unencumbered with the need to earn a living and to focus on what interested him. Both had much in common. They both were detail driven and very observant. Both recorded their observations meticulously which enabled them to be master writers. Both excelled in travelogues. They had similar views on religion in the latter part of their lives. Christopher Stewart cites Kaplan as stating that James’s reply to the question “Is There Life After Death?”, thought that it was not likely, and Edel stated about the same question, that James, “believed there was none. Death was absolute.”[7] Darwin likewise, “Like many other educated men of his generation, had been slowly, almost imperceptibly, but surely, losing religious faith…Darwin was concerned with the physical realities of life on earth and probing their mysteries. He was temperamentally disinclined to probe the possibilities of life after death or to speculate on ‘salvation’.”[8] Darwin communicated some of his thoughts to Asa Gray an American botanists. “With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me. — I am bewildered. — I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars…”[9]
Before he reached this stage in his life, Darwin had devoted five years of his life traveling on the HMS Beagle collecting specimens from South America and Asian and shipping them home and then organizing his findings and notes when he returned in 1836. Over the next twenty years he continued to study, experiment, and observe nature. It is difficult to imagine the personal knowledge that he gained during this time, but one small example may give some insight into his efforts to gather as much information as possible before expressing any conclusions about what he believed. “I do not believe that botanists are aware how charged the mud of ponds is with seeds; I have tried several little experiments, but will here give only the most striking case: I took in February three tablespoonsful of mud from three different points, beneath water, on the edge of a little pond: this mud when dried weighed only 6 ounces; I kept it covered up in my study for six months, pulling up and counting each plant as it grew; the plants were of many kinds, and were altogether 537 in number; and yet the viscid mud was all contained in a breakfast cup!”[10] 
It was this attention to detail along with his earliest travelogue of his voyage on the Beagle that so captivated the readers even if they did not agree with his implicit conclusions. It is difficult to measure the impact of Charles Darwin’s book, the Origin of Species, published in 1859, on the psyche of people then who were just trying to grasp the more personal and relevant things like vaccinations, pasteurization, anesthesia, along with electricity, telegraph, telephone, and photography let alone the more esoteric concepts like absolute zero, gas and thermodynamic laws, and organic chemistry.   When you add in discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology, it is easy to see how Darwin’s theory of descent with modification or natural selection flowed as part of a continuum of scientific revolution. There were several reasons for his delay in publishing it until 1859. First, he had seen the response to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published anonymously in 1844 because the author feared the repercussions of his controversial stand that contended that the origins, growth, and development of the earth and living organisms on Earth were the result of a process later to be call evolution rather that the unique creation by god. Second, Darwin’s wife was deeply religious and he did not want to publish something even if he believed it that would be detrimental to her. Third, he wanted more time to gather more evidence to make his presentation as irrefutable as possible. The last reason was unexpected overthrown when he received a package in the mail in 1858 from Alfred Russel Wallace who outlined a theory of natural selection that was almost identical to Darwin’s.
After he consulted with some close friends, he submitted a summary of his work along with Wallace’s to the Linnaean Society and then proceeded relentlessly to write his book. It became an immediate success; the first edition was sold out within a day. It was popular in Europe and in America, where pirated copies were printed. On the cold wintry night of January 1, 1860 in Concord Massachusetts at the home of Franklin Sanborn, he, Asa Gray, renowned botanist, Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa Mae Alcott, Charles Loring Brace, cousin of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau met to discuss slavery and the recent execution of John Brown whom they had supported. Brace brought Darwin’s book with him and it would change the lives of those in attendance and it would change America.[11] Asa Gray became an early supporter of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and wrote a couple of powerful book reviews that propelled The Origin of Species to national attention at a time of impending conflict over slavery and made an argument for the position that if we were all related to an early progenitor that slavery was not justified. Gray later experienced internal conflict with the damage the theory might have on religion and wrote two more reviews that retreated from his original strong support.
The other individual at that meeting who was probably the most deeply affected was Thoreau. He was only forty-two but had acquired a reputation for his support of transcendentalism and for his literary credentials-- essays and  Walden. As he read, absorbed, and reflected on the Origin, he wrote, ‘“The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation.’ Constant new creation. The phrase represents an epoch in American thought. For one thing, it no longer relies upon divinity to explain the natural world… ‘The development theory’ suggested a natural world sufficient unto itself—without the façade of heaven. There was no force or intelligence behind Nature, directing its course in a determined and purposeful manner. Nature just was.[12]
According to Mark Brake, “The case outlined in The Origin of Species can be distilled down into three component concepts: Variation (each and every individual of any particular species is different), multiplicity (living creatures…tend to make more offspring and have bigger broods than the environment can necessary maintain), and natural selection (The individual differences between members of a species, coupled with the environmental forces highlighted by those like Malthus, shape the likelihood that a particular individual will last long enough to pass its characteristics on to posterity”[13] The Metaphysical Club at Harvard consisting of Chauncey Wright, Charles Peirce, William James, John Fiske, Nicholas Green, and Oliver Wendell Holmes discussed The Origin of Species with Pierce writing this, “Natural selection, as conceived by Darwin, is a mode of evolution in which the only positive agent of change in the whole passage from moner to man is fortuitous variation. To secure advance in a definite direction chance has to be seconded by some action that shall hinder the propagation of some varieties or stimulate that of others.”[14] With respect to William James, Wiener notes that “As Professor Ralph B. Perry remarks in his definitive work on James, ‘the influence of Darwin was both early and profound, and its effects crop up in diverse and unexpected quarters…With Professor Perry we must discriminate an early positivistic phase of James’s idea of evolution. In this phase, James pitted himself against his anti-Darwinian teacher of zoology, the famous Louis Agassiz”[15] While James was clearly knowledgeable about The Origin of Species, he may have concentrated on other works that gave him insight into the development of the human brain and nervous system and led to his pioneering work in psychology.
The Origin of Species was published at a pivotal point of the nineteenth century because it provided the impetus to the scientific revolution. Sir Julian Huxley writing in the Introduction to the centennial reprinting of it expressed the sentiments of those who understood its importance. “Why is The Origin of Species such a great book? First of all, because it convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: it provides a vast and well-chosen body of evidence showing that existing animals and plants cannot have been separately created in their present forms, but must have evolved from earlier forms by slow transformation. And secondly, because the theory of natural selection, which the Origin so fully and lucidly expounds, provides a mechanism by which such transformation could and would automatically be produced. Natural selection rendered evolution scientifically intelligible.”[16] But the last words about all of his collections, observations, research, work, writings, and reflections can best be expressed by Darwin himself. “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the ‘plan of creation,’ ‘unity of design,’ &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Anyone whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties that to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, -- to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.”[17]
Long ago, I read The Revised Standard Version (1946) of the Bible from cover to cover and finally after all of these years I have finally read Darwin’s Origin of Species. I still had questions as I read the text, but I know that many of them have been answered since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. However, even as a young boy, I doubted the literal version of Adam and Eve. I grew up on a farm and saw plenty of snakes and I did not know any women in my neighborhood that talked to a snake unless it was with a hoe chopping off their head, and I found it hard to believe that one snake in the Garden of Eden condemned all the snakes in North America who were supposedly walking around upright to suddenly crawl on their stomachs and lose their appendages; it did not make any sense. Sadly, for a long time, women have had to pay for that story through discrimination, abuse, and injustice.



[1] Michael Windelspecht, Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions and Discoveries of the 19th Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), xvii)
[2] Jeanne Ballantine, Kathleen Korgen, and Keith Roberts, Our Social World: Introduction to Sociology (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2016) 378.
[3] Tia Ghose. 2014. 4 in 10 Americans Believe God Created Earth 10,000 Years Ago. https://www.livescience.com/46123-many-americans-creationists.html
[4] Ibid.
[5] James A. Secord, ed., Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology (London, Penguin Group, 1997) xxxiii-xxxiv)
[6] Ibid., xxxviii
[7] Christopher Stewart, Colby Quarterly, Volume 35, no.2, June 1999, p.90-101
[8] Paul Johnson, Darwin: portrait of a genius (New York, Penguin Group, 2012) 51-52.
[9] Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 2814,” accessed on 9 August 2017, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-2814
[10] Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species: With an Introduction by Sir Julian Huxley (New York, Signet Classics Penguin Group, 2003), 410.
[11] Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation (New York, Viking, 2017) ix – 28.
[12] Ibid., 246-7.
[13] Mark L. Brake, Revolution in Science (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 139-140.
[14] Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (New York, Harper & Row, 1949) 3.
[15] Ibid., 99.
[16] Darwin, xi.
[17] Darwin, 500.