Insight Spring 2020

Teaching Darwinian Evolution: Preserving Enlightenment Thought Dami Kim ’20 Living in a Darwinian world, students learn evolutionary science in school starting with Darwin’s journey to the Galapagos on the Beagle. Their curricula introduce the concepts of survival of the fittest and natural selection as a “nurturing” force, typically introducing the example of finches with different beak shapes. As students absorb the information like they do arithmetic rules, they accept evolutionary theory as knowledge. This is an epistemologically dishonest method of education. For a proposition (i.e.

Darwin’s evolutionary theory) to be considered knowledge, it must satisfy three requirements: 1) proposition is true; 2) subject believes proposition is true; 3) subject is justified in believing that proposition is true (Steup).

Darwinian evolution fulfills only the second criterion. While evolutionary theory draws attention to logical flaws in other explanations of the universe’s origin, they conversely identify flaws in Darwin’s. Thus, when schools do not discuss the gaps that may undermine evolutionary theory, they lock away progress and modern thought through passivity. Although Darwinian evolution is widely accepted in contemporary science, educational institutions should guide students to critically evaluate the validity of Darwin’s and other theories of creation in light of their logical flaws, preserving epistemological honesty in Kantian enlightenment fashion.

Darwinian evolutionary theory undercuts the validity of intelligent design, providing an exception that destroys its deductive logic. Intelligent design claims that there must be some entity that created the universe.

William Paley, one of its proponents, argued that a watch found in the middle of a heath reveals “that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose” unlike a mere rock, suggesting that there must be “an artificer who understood [the watch’s] mechanism and designed its use” (Paley 43). Employing teleological reasoning, Paley proposed a traditionally religious answer: There exists a God who intends a purpose for His creations. Darwin, like many scholars of his time, studied Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, which contains the watchmaker analogy.

As such, Darwin’s rejection of intelligent design theory epitomizes enlightenment thinking, as he bravely challenged a preconceived, long-held belief in Creationism. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species drew much outrage, especially because his evolutionary theory refuted Paley’s religiously 20