Charles Darwin didn't undermine Christianity. He only undermined liberal Christianity. Those who took the Bible and only the Bible as the sole truth still have it. They weren't seeing its contradictions before Darwin came along (and they had been pointed out with more or less subtlety by Hume, Paine, etc.). Geologists were discovering deep time, in the late 18th century, and the Genesis creation story was undermined, but they weren't seeing that either. They weren't moved from their rock by some Quaker scientist's new theory.
But if you read Jefferson and the American Enlightenment thinkers, you see the pantheists and deists took nature as "God's other book." And they set its supposed beauty and order and bounty against the cruel and petty Old Testament God. Darwin took that away from them. Their descendants, liberal and humanist Christians who would fight the fundamentalists on the field of religion, now find themselves disarmed.
Paine and Jefferson both were derided by their enemies as atheists (and are embraced by modern atheists as confreres), and both vigorously denied it. Jefferson, John Adams and many of the deistic Founders of America were "creationists" in the positive sense of that word: not as reactionaries against science, but as active students of the natural world who saw in it magnificent evidence of design, skill and power.
They marveled at the balance of forces that kept the planets moving, the suitableness of the earth to man's needs, and the adaptation of every creature to its habitat. When Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark across America to catalogue everything, it was in the spirit of a pilgrimage. Natural history was worship and the laws of nature were the laws of God and these they saw as eternal, rational, creative, and benevolent.
They often spoke of this nature with a female pronoun. Instead of "God," they preferred the word "Providence" -- that which provides.
Human nature was a part of nature just as man was a part of creation. Jefferson's only book, "Notes on the State of Virginia," takes nature as a guide to human government, religion, and society. In "Age of Reason," Paine implored his readers to "Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation."
The discovery of mammoth bones in upstate New York excited Jefferson. In 1801, he encouraged Charles Willson Peale's expedition to unearth them, in part because Jefferson was sure such a wonderful animal must still exist, alive, somewhere. His Providence would not destroy what it had created. "Such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken."
After Darwin, all that was scientifically untenable. Now thinking men and women saw nature as a messy, random affair, and certainly no evidence of a just and loving God. The natural world is seemingly stable from one human life to the next, but it oozes change over deep time. Thousands are born where only few can survive; the fitness of species and habitat is a result of gradual adjustment that costs millions of creatures suffering or starvation.
Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" is one of his last books and his best. Americans are proud to live in the land of free thought, but sadly free thought isn't always clear thought, and Sagan devoted his career to rousing Americans to drop their dread of science. He knew we had to embrace scientific thinking, not just scientific inventions, to survive -- much less thrive -- in a world driven by technologies. In this book he muses on science, pseudo-science, and anti-science in contemporary America. He bashes the irrational in energetic, entertaining style, taking on everything from alien abduction to faith-healing, creationism to channeling. Even when he's dismantling a potentially lethal bit of unreason, his writing is upbeat, focused on the essential goodness of the human mind. He also argues that science can live with spirituality. But the best thing about the book is its "baloney detection kit" which a reader can internalize and use to think through political, social or religious questions. This is the stuff they used to teach you in logic 101 and rhetoric. Its absence in the modern American curriculum would make the Founders' hair stand on end.
One of the positive side-effects of Oliver Sacks is that he has called attention in America to the works of the great Soviet psychiatrist Aleksandr R. Luria, many of which have been translated from Russian into English. "The Mind of a Mnemonist" is a slim book that tells the story of a man identified only as "S," whom Luria knew and worked with for decades, a man who literally could not forget. Like other such bottomless memories, "S" was a side-show curiosity whose ability was a burden as much as a gift. Luria details the difficulties "S" had in grappling with daily life, where thinking clearly depends so much upon forgetting the useless. I have no idea whether Borges had ever seen this book when he wrote "Funes the Memorious," which is a wonderful fictional account of just such a mind.
The book also takes a fascinating detour into the condition that somehow gave "S" his powers, synesthesia. People with synesthesia can "hear" colors and "see" sounds. Smells have textures. Shapes have sounds. This seems to be a natural condition in infancy, but most people lose it, except for remnants of this when people talk about "warm" colors or "cold" sounds.
The composer Scriabin was among those who retained a complex synesthetic sensitivity into adulthood. S. was another. "What a crumbly, yellow voice you have," he told one psychologist. For him, numbers had personality: "5 is absolutely complete and takes the form of a cone or a tower -- something substantial. ... 8 somehow has a naive quality, it's milky blue like lime ...." And Luria gives this account of an experiment: "Presented with a tone pitched at 2,000 cycles per second and having an amplitude of 113 decibels, S. said: 'It looks something like fireworks tinged with a pink-red hue. The strip of color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has an ugly taste -- rather like that of a briny pickle ... You could hurt your hand on this.' " Experiments were repeated over several days at the Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow, with dozens of tones, and the results were invariably the same. This synesthesia of sound is the essence of poetry, too. Dante divided words into "pexa et hirsuta," combed and unkempt (or "buttered and shaggy" in Ezra Pound's translation). S. used exactly the same words -- "prickly," or "smooth" -- for sounds, voices, words.
One of the most unforgettable scenes I've ever seen on a television was in Bronowski's landmark BBC series, "The Ascent of Man," filmed in 1972. The scientist and humanist stood on the soggy gray ground behind the crematoria at Auschwitz, where the ashes from the ovens had been flushed. That flat field was the mortal remains of millions of people, including many of Bronowski's family, and the old man in the dark formal suit stooped and picked up a handful of the muck, and said, "When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave."
I think that was all the 20th century in one strip of celluloid, or as much of it as you could get: the Renaissance man amid the mass murder. Bronowski, in the shadow of the evil of human capability, was the age's great champion of the human mind. His "Science and Human Values," was written at even closer range to the horror, in 1956, yet in fewer than 80 pages he crafts a shining affirmation of the human spirit of inquiry. His humanism is muscular and unflinching and he saw better than those who turned aside from the freedom of the mind and blamed it for the Third Reich.
The little pamphlet -- it's hardly long enough to call a book -- makes three points. The first is that science, whether practical or theoretical (he really denies a distinction) is an imaginative act on par with the arts. Both involve stunning leaps of imagination, and both take as their goal the search to find order and meaning in our experience. Both do so by explorations of hidden likenesses. In fact, he says, there is no distinction between science and art, between Blake and Newton, but both are aspects of a single creative activity.
His second point is that science is an ethical schooling in "the habit of truth," which is the mental process of "testing and correcting the concept by its consequences in experience." And from this he traces his third argument, that "the values which we accept today as permanent and often as self-evident have grown out of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution." The echo of the language of the American Declaration of Independence is deliberate, I think, as at one point he compares it to a proof by Euclid.
Those values, chiefly, are independence of thought; tolerance for others born of respect for them; and the realization that the ends does not justify the means, that there is no distinction between them. This is ultimately a humanist manifesto based in science, which is "the creation of concepts and their exploration in the facts. It has no other test of the concept than its empirical truth to facts."
It's a warm-hearted, life-affirming book written under a dark shadow in a ruined world (the opening is in Hiroshima after the bomb), and you can probably be moved by it without wholely accepting Bronowski's assertion that the mind of scientific inquiry is the only one sufficient for ethical inquiry, or his firm faith in the superiority of modern Western culture over its neighbors ("the bland, kindly civilizations of the East") or its own past ("that servile and bloody world," the Middle Ages). When he writes of Bruno, burned at the stake for his free inquiries, he does so with a personal passion that looks forward 16 years to his visit to the ugly little Silesian railroad town and that black marsh at Auschwitz.
I wish I had followed through on a plan I had many years ago, to keep a list of every book I found that footnoted Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It's probably safe to say that no book published since 1962 has been more widely cited, and in more diverse disciplines: I know I've encountered it in books on language, literature, history, education, psychology and probably somewhere there's a microwave range repair manual that refers to it.
Kuhn presents a vision of science, not as a gradual accumulation of facts that approaches closer and closer to describing reality, but as a world de Tocqueville would understand, where sudden revolutions of ideas replace old orders with new versions of reality, only to succumb, after long peaceful interludes, to new revolutions. "[A] discovery like that of oxygen or X-rays does not simply add one more item to the population of the scientist's world," he writes, it creates a crisis, which is resolved over time, through a predictable series of events and reactions in the scientific community, by the creation of a fresh way of seeing the world. This model of "paradigm shift" is what has been taken up so eagerly by other disciplines. Kuhn's book is about more than science; it's about human ways of perceiving reality. He prepared for it by reading Jean Piaget and the Gestalt psychologists.
It's well under 200 pages, but it's not an easy read. The book packs an astoundingly sweeping theory of philosophy into a tight, but tangled, prose. That's probably because it was written as volume II number 2 of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, and thus was severely constrained for length.
I find myself convinced by the arguments of neo-Darwinists, who wish to explain a great deal of modern human behavior in terms of evolutionary biology. Good, layman-accessible accounts of this science can be found in "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley, Helen Fisher's "Anatomy of Love," and anything by Richard Dawkins.
Some intelligent, thoughtful people have dismissed me when I suggested that genetics might have something to do with why men find themselves sexually aroused by certain arrangements of female anatomy. It seemed to me that nothing can be more clear, but a great many people are so terrified by the bogeyman of "sociobiology" and eugenics -- the horrible, sloppy misapplication of Darwinian thought to social problems -- that they have declared a taboo on any notion of a biological influence on human behavior. In doing this, alas, they closet themselves with creationists and flat-earthers.
The neo-Darwinists politely but insistently push for a re-admission of their ideas into the acceptable paradigms of sociology and psychology. They claim that much idiocy could be avoided by finding biological explanations for basic human behaviors.
Scratch a Saab-driving suburbanite and you'll find intact the super-charged ferocity that carried the human species through two million years of precarious existence: the relics of Serengeti battles with cat predators three times our size. We are, among other things, a bundle of instincts inherited from 2 million or 3 million years of existence as a species. These instincts allowed us to survive the Ice Age and make homes in climates from the rain forest to the tundra. We attack first, question later; threaten anything new; kill with efficient ruthlessness. But these instinct may not be what we need now, to live in a technological, crowded civilization. As larger groups of people began to try to build nations out of tribes, kingdoms from villages, these enormous instincts of fight-or-flight, predator-prey, had to be shunted aside. I think they poured, in most societies, into sports and games, and, in some individuals, into the vast available space of sexuality and creativity. At any rate, it's better to face that these instincts exist, and craft solutions with that existence in mind, than to deny them and keep falling over them time after time.