Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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DAO

The root meaning of the Chinese word Dao is

“path” or “way.” It is more commonly known in

English by the older transliteration Tao and is one

of the few Chinese words that have been adopted

into the English language. This is largely due to the

broad appeal of an ancient Chinese text (c. fourth

century

B.C.E.) known as the Daode jing (or Tao-

te-ching), which, it is said, is the most widely trans-

lated book in the world after the Bible.

During the period in Chinese history known as

the Warring States (481–220

B.C.E.) the Zhou dy-

nasty empire had disintegrated into several smaller

states governed by rival feudal lords. This chaotic

state of affairs led intellectuals to ask “Where is the

Dao?” By this they meant: What path should lead-

ers follow to bring harmony and stability to the

country? Confucians said that the way lay in restor-

ing ancient moral and ritual codes. Legalists said

that the way lay in imposing by force a single lan-

guage and legal system upon the country. Daoists,

whose names are not known, compiled the Daode

jing, a collection of terse aphorisms, which states

that the way that humans should follow is pre-

cisely the same “Way” that governs the operation

of nature. This Way is “self-so” or “spontaneous,”

that is, it is naturally self-generating and cannot be

artificially engineered by human intelligence or

culture. To give a modern analogy, in nature

acorns marvelously grow into oak trees and the

various species live in an overall state of organic

harmony. Nobody tells acorns or the various

species what to do, yet somehow they develop

their innate potential (de) and entirely of their own

accord follow a path (dao) that leads to a state of

maximal perfection and harmony. The Dao may

thus be understood as the wellspring of natural

creativity that brings everything in the world

into an organic, harmonious existence. In this re-

spect there are many broad parallels with the

process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead

(1861–1947).

In his investigations into science and civiliza-

tion in China, the British biochemist Joseph Need-

ham (1900–1995) concluded that Daoists had a nat-

ural affinity with what is now called “science,”

since to investigate the Way, Daoists had to pay

close attention to the operation of things in nature.

The difference is that science holds nature to be in

principle explainable, whereas Daoists generally

understand the Dao to be fundamentally mysteri-

ous and beyond human understanding.

This wondrous aspect of the Dao led to a mys-

tical reverence for nature’s marvelous capacity for

self-transformation: Who could possibly have

imagined that an acorn would grow into an oak

tree? Some Daoists, such as Ge Hong (283–343

C.E.), became alchemists and aimed to capture for

themselves the extraordinary power for change

that is pregnant within nature, and to reverse it to

create an elixir of immortality. Other Daoists

revered this mystical aspect of the Dao in the form

of gods and spirits who have power over human

life and death. Still others cultivated this Dao

within themselves through meditation and Qi-

energy practices. All aimed through their various

methods to attain the Way for themselves.

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See also

CHINESE RELIGIONS AND SCIENCE; CHINESE

RELIGIONS, DAOISM AND SCIENCE IN CHINA;

HINESE RELIGIONS, HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND

RELIGION IN CHINA; PROCESS THOUGHT;

HITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH

JAMES MILLER

DAOISM

See CHINESE RELIGIONS, DAOISM AND SCIENCE IN CHINA

DARWIN,CHARLES

Author of the Origin of Species (1859) and the De-

scent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

famously challenged the popular belief that every

species had been separately and immediately cre-

ated by divine fiat. His theory of evolution by nat-

ural selection was based on what he considered an

empirical fact: the presence of variation among

members of every species. Darwin’s powerful ar-

gument was that, in competition for limited re-

sources, those variants having characteristics that

favored them in their struggle would tend to be

preserved and produce more offspring than those

less advantaged. Over many generations the grad-

ual accumulation of advantageous variations

would lead to the emergence of a new species

markedly different from its progenitor. Applied to

humankind the argument was particularly con-

tentious for the continuity it affirmed between an-

imals and humans, and because the idea of species

transformation was often associated with political

radicalism and materialism. Darwin himself re-

called that admitting the mutability of species had

been like confessing to murder.

Providing a naturalistic account of species pro-

duction and then of human evolution, Darwin

risked offending the piety of those, including his

own wife Emma Wedgwood, who wished to give

the moral sense a transcendental significance. If

humans had evolved from humbler species could

humans be said to be made in the image of God?

Was it possible to speak of an immortal soul? What

remained of the argument for design, which in

Christian natural theology had often presupposed

the perfect adaptation of organic structures to the

needs of the organism that possessed them?

Darwin was not the atheist vilified in ultra-

conservative religious literature, but he did be-

come increasingly agnostic. Attacked in the name

of religious orthodoxy, he found it “ludicrous” that

he had once intended to become a clergyman.

This was a reference to his Cambridge education,

which had followed an abortive preparation in Ed-

inburgh for a medical career. At Cambridge, the

young Darwin encountered divines such as John

Henslow and Adam Sedgwick who combined sci-

entific enthusiasm with reverence for nature as a

work of creation. In Edinburgh he had moved in

free-thinking circles and had been introduced to

the evolutionary theory of the French naturalist

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin also knew that his

grandfather Erasmus Darwin had proposed or-

ganic transformation, but Charles Darwin was not

yet a convert to such ideas. On leaving Cambridge

his destiny would be to find ways of explaining

the appearance of design in such intricate mecha-

nisms as the human eye without recourse to the

divine “Contriver” celebrated by the theologian

and philosopher William Paley in his Natural The-

ology (1802).

Darwin’s research

This destiny was shaped by a five-year voyage on

which Darwin embarked in December 1831 as

companion to Robert Fitzroy, captain of HMS Bea-

gle. The ship was sailing for South America, en-

abling Darwin to enlarge his horizons as a natural-

ist and geologist. Having been captivated by the

travelogues of Alexander von Humboldt he soon

luxuriated in the rain forests of Brazil. As Adrian

Desmond and James Moore have observed, their

sublimity afforded a surrogate religious experi-

ence: “twiners entwining twiners, beautiful lepi-

doptera, silence, hosanna” (p. 122). Thoughts of a

Christian ministry gradually receded as Darwin

was enchanted by the study of nature, delighted

by the discovery of fossil bones, staggered by the

number of species that had become extinct. He

was intrigued by resemblances between lost and

living forms, by tantalizing patterns in the distribu-

tion of flora and fauna, and by disruptive natural

forces. Entering the city of Concepción in Chile he

found the cathedral shattered by an earthquake. At

the Southern tip of South America natives of the

Tierra del Fuego were struggling to survive in one

of the most inhospitable regions on Earth. The

world was perhaps not the “happy world” of

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Paley’s English garden. Even before reading econ-

omist Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population in

September 1838, Darwin had been “well prepared”

to appreciate the struggle for existence that

Malthus’s arithmetic on reproductive fecundity

convinced him was inexorable.

Of his visit to the Galapagos Islands it is often

said that Darwin recognized that each island had

its own distinctive species, eventually concluding

that the different finches, for example, had di-

verged from a mainland ancestor, molded by na-

ture to occupy different niches. But there was no

such “Eureka” moment. Darwin had muddled his

finch specimens from various islands and it was

not until March 1837, following his return to Eng-

land, that the ornithologist John Gould broke the

exciting news that three forms of mockingbird,

from different islands, were genuinely different

species. Gould identified fourteen species of finch

from Darwin’s specimens. The enthralling question

was why so many similar species lived in such

proximity, but Darwin was unable to prove that

the geographical isolation of each island had been

responsible for the proliferation.

Darwin’s earliest speculations on evolutionary

change preceded his reading of Malthus. They

show him playing with the idea that nature em-

ploys bisexual reproduction as a way of introduc-

ing variation into each new generation, so permit-

ting continuing adaptation to changing conditions

of existence. Darwin flirted with, but quickly re-

jected, the possibility of sudden mutation as a

source of evolutionary change. As with the natu-

ralist Alfred Russel Wallace later, it was when read-

ing Malthus that the penny finally dropped and a

theory of natural selection took shape.

The metaphor of “natural selection” allowed

Darwin to exploit a simple analogy. Domestic ani-

mals and birds showed a degree of plasticity as

breeders chose which specimens to mate when se-

lecting for characteristics they wished to accentu-

ate. Darwin crossed social barriers in fraternizing

with pigeon fanciers and he emphasized the diver-

sity of form ultimately derived from the common

rock pigeon. Even a trained ornithologist, he ar-

gued, would be tempted to think that the pouter,

runt, and fantail were not merely different varieties

but different species. If, through human “selec-

tion,” such effects could be produced, might not

nature achieve much more in the millions of years

at its disposal? For insight into the age of the Earth

and for an emphasis on the incompleteness of the

fossil record, which would help him to explain the

absence of transitional forms in the fossil record,

Darwin was indebted to the geologist Charles Lyell.

Darwin’s view of religion

Did the metaphor of “selection” imply a divine se-

lector in the management of the evolutionary proc-

ess? Some of Darwin’s contemporaries believed so.

Darwin’s own emphasis, however, was on the in-

terplay of unconscious forces. Without denying a

creator on whom the existence of everything ulti-

mately depended, Darwin rejected the kind of

deity who might be micromanaging the process.

Rejecting the argument for design as formulated

by Paley, Darwin’s extension of natural law to ex-

plain how new species had arisen did not preclude

a transcendent legislator. In his first transmutation

notebook, he wrote of a “Creator who creates

through laws,” one who had “impressed” certain

laws on nature, as a consequence of which beau-

tiful organic forms had evolved. Darwin resembled

earlier deists, admitting the existence of a creator

but doubting there had been divine revelation or

intervention

In certain respects his science corroded a

residual faith. The more people know of the fixed

laws of nature, he wrote in his Autobiography, “the

more incredible do miracles become” (p. 86). As

his wife recognized, the questioning mentality de-

manded of a scientist could induce skepticism. De-

bating the question whether evolution was under

divine control, Darwin stressed the elements of

randomness in the process. His conclusion was

that the variations on which natural selection

worked appeared without a prospective use in

mind. The presence of so much pain and suffering

also affected Darwin deeply. This was difficult to

square with belief in a beneficent deity, but was

consistent with his hypothesis of natural selection

and with what in the first full sketch of his theory

(1842) he called the “concealed war of nature.”

To ascribe Darwin’s agnosticism to his science

would, however, be simplistic. During the Beagle

voyage he was already asking himself whether an

intuitive sense of God was universal among hu-

mankind, concluding it was absent among Fue-

gians and native Australians. Some Christian teach-

ing he found morally repugnant. Aware of high

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moral standards among the freethinkers he met in

the circle of the English writer and social reformer

Harriet Martineau, he declared in his Autobiogra-

phy that the idea of eternal damnation for those

outside the fold was a “damnable doctrine” (p. 87).

Although opinions differ as to when he finally re-

nounced Christianity, the death early in 1851 of

his young daughter Annie produced a crisis in

which belief in a beneficent God became unsus-

tainable. His agnosticism was to be peculiar since

he retained the conviction that the universe as a

whole could not be the result of chance. But so

nuanced was his thinking that he came to mistrust

his own conviction. If the human mind was itself

the product of evolution, what guarantee was

there that it could be trusted when engaging such

metaphysical issues?

Religious responses to Darwin’s science

Religious responses to Darwin’s science have var-

ied enormously. From 1859 until the 1930s, when

a powerful new synthesis of genetics and Darwin-

ian theory appeared, the controversial status of

natural selection left plenty of scope for supple-

mentary or alternative mechanisms for evolution in

which divine control was affirmed. Strictly speak-

ing, as the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley in-

sisted, Darwinism had no implications for the cen-

tral tenets of theism. Huxley even conceded that it

was still possible to assert design in an original

cosmic state from which all had developed

through natural processes. Modern atheists and

materialists, by contrast, frequently stress the ap-

parently directionless aspects of biological evolu-

tion, weaving them into a completely secular and

naturalistic world view.

Within the Christian churches the theory of

evolution, not surprisingly, continues to be a divi-

sive issue compounding the problems posed by

historical criticism of the Bible. In some religious

communities it has become the symbol of secular

and liberalizing values and is still vehemently re-

sisted. Yet religious writers have also appropriated

Darwin’s theory for constructive purposes, as did

one of Darwin’s early converts, Charles Kingsley,

who concluded that a deity who could make all

things make themselves exhibited greater wisdom

than one who simply made things. Might a unified

process of evolution testify more eloquently to a

single creator than piecemeal creation? Darwin’s

American correspondent Asa Gray, a botanist,

even suggested the theory might assist the theolo-

gians with their greatest difficulty—the problem of

suffering. If competition and struggle were the pre-

requisites of a creative process, without them there

could not have been the evolutionary develop-

ment that had culminated in human intelligence

and responsiveness. Darwin himself had toyed

with the idea that a deity who had created the pos-

sibility for humans to evolve might be considered

less directly responsible for the uglier facets of na-

ture that had also been possible in such a world.

Sophisticated theologians have invoked the Dar-

winian theory to illuminate what they see as God’s

self-limitation rather than coercive agency. Others

have seen in evolution evidence of divine imma-

nence and participation in the world. It was the

view of nineteenth-century Oxford theologian

Aubrey Moore that, under the guise of a foe, Dar-

win had done the work of a friend, destroying in-

fantile images of a conjuring god who was inactive

except when intervening.

See also CREATIONISM; CREATION SCIENCE; DEISM;

ESIGN; DESIGN ARGUMENT; DIVINE ACTION;

VOLUTION; EVOLUTION, BIOCULTURAL;

VOLUTION, BIOLOGICAL; EVOLUTION, HUMAN;

VOLUTION, THEOLOGY OF; GENETICS;

MMANENCE; INTELLIGENT DESIGN; REVELATION;

COPES TRIAL

Bibliography

Bowler, Peter. Reconciling Science and Religion: The De-

bate in Early-twentieth-century Britain. Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 2001.

Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: Voyaging. London: Pim-

lico. 1995.

Burkhardt, Frederick, ed. The Correspondence of Charles

Darwin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1985.

Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

(1876), ed. Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958.

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man (1871). Amherst,

N.Y.: Prometheus, 1997.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of

Natural Selection (1859). New York: Bantam, 1999.

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. London and

New York: Penguin, 1986.

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Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable. London

and New York: Penguin, 1996.

Desmond, Adrian, and Moore, James. Darwin. London:

Michael Joseph, 1991.

Durant, John, ed. Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evo-

lution and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.

Haught, John. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution.

Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000.

Hodge, Jonathan, and Radick, Gregory, eds. The Cam-

bridge Companion to Darwin. Cambridge, UK: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2002.

Kohn, David, ed. The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1985.

Kohn, David. “Darwin’s Ambiguity: The Secularization of

Biological Meaning.” British Journal for the History of

Science 22 (1989): 215–239.

Larson, Edward. Evolution’s Workshop: God and Science

on the Galapagos Islands. London and New York:

Penguin, 2001.

Livingstone, David. Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The En-

counter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolution-

ary Thought. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987.

Moore, James. The Post Darwinian Controversies: A Study

of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Dar-

win in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900. Cam-

bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Numbers, Ronald. The Creationists. New York: Knopf,

1992.

Roberts, Jon. Darwinism and the Divine in America:

Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution

1859–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1988.

Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Rela-

tionship Between Science and Religion. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Ward, Keith. God, Chance, and Necessity. Oxford: One

World, 1996.

JOHN HEDLEY BROOKE

DARWINISM

See DARWIN, CHARLES; EVOLUTION, BIOLOGICAL;

VOLUTION, HUMAN; NEO-DARWINISM

DARWINISM,NEO

See NEO-DARWINISM

DARWINISM,NEURAL

See NEURAL DARWINISM

DARWINISM,SOCIAL

See EVOLUTION, BIOCULTURAL; SOCIOBIOLOGY

DEATH

Within the popular Western Judeo-Christian tradi-

tion, death has usually been understood to be a

consequence of original sin. This has, of course,

not been a scientifically informed belief. And

where theology has been in conversation with sci-

ence on this point, or when theology is indirectly

informed by a growing ecological consciousness,

natural death in and of itself is increasingly seen

as a natural piece of the creation that God

called good.

Western religious perspectives

The growing perspective that death according to

natural processes is not necessarily a consequence

of sin would cohere with the early Christian tradi-

tion, as well as with Eastern Orthodox theology.

The second-century Christian theologian Irenaeus,

for example, emphasized how the first parents, as

described in one of the Genesis accounts, were

driven out of paradise so that they would not eat

of the tree of life after they had sinned. Their being

secured from that temptation by expulsion into a

hard life was thus a gift—for who would want to

live eternally estranged from God?—and presup-

poses that they were mortal beings. Indeed, death

was already part of the natural order designed by

God. Eastern Orthodoxy reiterates this anthropol-

ogy with its emphasis on the incarnation as more

a leading of humanity into the next aspect of

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God’s creative work than of rescue from sin and

evil; the need for Christ to redeem the creation

from the new exigency of sin was, as it were,

added to the original agenda of leading the cre-

ation into the new age.

Western theology is beginning to adapt this

perspective. Christian theologians like Karl Rahner

(1904–1984) and Karl Barth (1886–1968) at the be-

ginning of the twentieth century already recog-

nized this impulse, and such thought is more ad-

vanced in this ecumenical age. Death is not so

readily understood as an “evil.” It is, rather, a

“problem” in Christianity because sin became at-

tached to it. Sin constitutes alienation from God,

and thus the experience of death most often is at-

tended by fear, loneliness, and loss. Though bibli-

cal scholars still debate the meaning of the apostle

Paul’s assertions that the wages of sin are death

(Rom. 5:12) and that the travails of the creation are

attributable to human sin, more and more exegetes

are less willing to claim biblical warrant for the

dominant Augustinian idea that physical death,

along with physical suffering and corruptibility, are

consequences of the Fall. Further, an ever more

scientifically informed consciousness, one that ever

more understands how consciousness itself has

evolved from simple matter, is also less inclined to

fix material processes, including natural physical

death, in dualistic terms of good and evil. Concur-

rently, such consciousness may recognize that its

own knowledge of finitude—and so, an intuited

transcendence—is precisely the “problem” that is

occasioned by fear of death.

Other religious perspectives are less ambiva-

lent in asserting a spiritual origin to death, and will

ascribe death more to God’s direct agency than to

natural processes. Islamic thought, like some Chris-

tian perspectives, links natural death more specifi-

cally to the will of God. The Qurhan teaches of

death that God determines the span of a person’s

life: “He creates man and also causes him to die”

(Qurhan, XLV:26). How this might cohere with

Western religious notions of divine agency, design

of creative processes, and so forth, are a ripe field

for exploration as the science-theology dialogue

begins more to engage Islamic scholars.

Eastern religious perspectives

Hindu tradition, with all its variety, is distinguished

by the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul,

that is, the passing at death of the soul from one

body or being to another. Life and death are as-

pects of an eternal cycle, as over and against the

linear understanding of time embedded in Western

science and theology. This process of samsara

refers to journeying or passing through a series of

incarnational experiences. One’s karma accompa-

nies one through these stages, and can be roughly

defined as the moral law of cause and effect. Some

popular reflection attempts to correlate karmic

doctrine with Newtonian physics. The thoughts

and actions of the past determine the present state

of being, and in turn present choices influence fu-

ture states. This karmic process characterizes the

ever-changing flow of everyday experience, as

well as the successive rounds of deaths and re-

births. Each moment conditions the next, and

karma impacts the reincarnational flow of being.

An interesting new trajectory might yet be ex-

plored with respect to the linking of the spiritual-

ity of Hindu self-abnegation and new science. Ac-

cording to Hinduism, underlying the apparent

separateness of individual beings is a unitary real-

ity. Just as the ocean is composed of innumerable

drops of water, so undifferentiated being manifests

itself in human experience as apparently separate

selves. The goal of life—lives—is, in the end, to re-

alize the eternal self, or Atman, which by nature

defies description. This assuredly difficult task (of

the realization of something beyond description)

aspires to deliverance from a potentially endless

cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. To achieve de-

liverance, one must act with pure insouciance and

detachment, with no attentiveness to cause or ef-

fect or reward; “one must act without desire or

purpose, independently of the results of the action

(Kramer, p. 33).” Thereby the detached self dies to

self and into Krishna, becoming a “True Self.” The

goal of Hindu religion, in other words, is to tran-

scend or leave karma and its cause and effect ac-

tivity behind, which is perhaps not unlike new sci-

ence’s movement away from Newtonian physics.

The general understanding of death in Bud-

dhism in all its varieties (Zen, Tantric, etc.) is not

greatly different from Hindu thought. Generally

(there are notable variations in Buddhist thinking)

Buddhism understands death as a transition toward

either phenomenal rebirth or release from the phe-

nomenal realm into pure nibbana (nirvana). Prac-

ticing a life that would ensure the latter, or at least

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ensure a return to a desirable station after rebirth,

requires total moderation of self-will and desire.

Death itself involves grieved losses; thus, a certain

kind of pastoral care obtains at Buddhist funerals.

Even so, death is a phenomenon to be tran-

scended, and so a reality that is not as real or as

significant as the transcendent. A Buddhist, in

other words, might well question the relevance of

an entry about death. Likewise with other Asian re-

ligions. Confucianism, the philosophy of Lao Tze,

and Daoism, for example, significantly moderate

the Buddhist perspective of death, and locate the

meaning of life more in practiced simplicity and

propitious behavior than in preparing for a here-

after. There are ritually correct ways to conduct life

and death, and so human consciousness is at its

best simply when it is attentive to the fullness of

the present.

Death and ultimate destiny

Finally, the question of whether death is an end is,

to be sure, energetically discussed. This, of course,

is where religious faiths diverge from final entropy

as the last word. Christians believe in a resurrec-

tion of the dead—though not necessarily in physi-

calist terms—which is subject to a coming judg-

ment by God and the possibility of eternal joy

(heaven) or despair (hell). Within Judaism, only

the most mystical and apocalyptic fundamentalists

share any similar concept. In the main, Judaism

understands the legacy of a person’s life as the

moral example left to the next generations. Bio-

physically there is nothing more. Islamic thought,

on another hand, is more detailed with respect to

an afterlife and the Qurhan vividly describes the

spiritual cum physical states of bliss or torment that

await after death. Some of the above, though cer-

tainly not all, could cohere with contemporary sci-

entific perspectives. Natural science understands

death as the final expenditure of energy, as dissi-

pation into stasis. Yet, that which has decomposed

may well be fodder for the recycling of life. Stars

turn to dust, stardust has come to mind in human

being, human being may become again stuff for

stars, and untold other phenomena. Nevertheless,

death as a modus unto new, organized, and sen-

tient life is not a theme that natural science readily

explores or articulates.

See also ESCHATOLOGY; FALL; ETERNITY; KARMA; LIFE

AFTER DEATH; TRANSMIGRATION

Bibliography

Hefner, Philip. The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and

Religion. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1999.

Kramer, Kenneth, The Sacred Art of Dying: How World Re-

ligions Understand Death. New York: Paulist Press,

1988.

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Anthropology in Theological Per-

spective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. Philadelphia:

Westminster, 1985.

Reynolds, Frank E. “Death as Threat, Death as Achieve-

ment.” In Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World

Religions, ed. Hiroshi Obayashi. New York: Green-

wood Press, 1992.

Reynolds, Frank E., and Waugh, Earle H., eds. Religious

Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and

Anthropology of Religions. University Park: Pennsylva-

nia State University Press, 1977.

DUANE H. LARSON

DEEP ECOLOGY

The term deep ecology was coined by Norwegian

philosopher Arne Naess (b. 1912) in 1973 to con-

trast two different approaches to environmental

concerns. Whereas shallow ecology merely seeks to

avoid excessive pollution and resource depletion,

deep ecology advocates the need for fundamental

shifts in perception, values, and lifestyles. Its basic

premises are the intrinsic value of nature, the cri-

tique of industrial materialism and technology, and

the application of ecological principles to human

moral evaluations and actions. The word deep

refers to the level at which human purposes and

values are questioned. The goal of deep ecology is

to clarify value priorities when establishing policies

and practices.

Naess, influenced by Dutch philosopher

Baruch de Spinoza and Indian political and spiri-

tual leader Mohandas Gandhi, advocates a philos-

ophy of ecological harmony and equilibrium (ecos-

ophy) through four levels of questioning:

(1) ultimate premises based on a person’s world-

view, for example, a particular religion or philoso-

phy; (2) eight “Platform Principles” as common

core principles independent of worldview; (3) gen-

eral consequences derived from the platform; and

(4) concrete decisions chosen by individuals and

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groups. Deep ecology challenges religions to re-

spond to the concerns of environmental philoso-

phy and so encourages the interconnection be-

tween religious and philosophical worldviews,

scientific and empathetic studies of nature, and

public policy and ethics. Deep ecology has been

criticized for insufficient attention to gender issues,

biocentric egalitarianism, and not adequately ad-

dressing economical and political injustices.

See also ECOFEMINISM; ECOLOGY; ECOLOGY, ETHICS

; ECOLOGY, RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL

ASPECTS; ECOLOGY, SCIENCE OF; GAIA HYPOTHESIS

Bibliography

Devall, Bill, and Sessions, George. Deep Ecology: Living as

if Nature Mattered. Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith,

1985.

Naess, Arne. “The Shallow and the Deep: Long-range

Ecology Movements.” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95–100.

Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, trans. and

ed. David Rothenberg. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 1989.

Reed, Peter, and Rothenberg, David. Wisdom in the Open

Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology. Minneapo-

lis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Rothenberg, David. Is It Painful to Think? Conversations

with Arne Naess. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of

Minnesota Press, 1993.

Sessions, George, ed. Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First

Century. Boston and London: Shambala, 1995.

ROALD E. KRISTIANSEN

DEISM

Deism is the belief in a creator God who does not

have any subsequent influence upon the world.

Deism became influential in the West beginning in

the seventeenth century, when it was seen that

modern physics is compatible with an initial act of

supernatural creation but appears to leave no

room for subsequent interventions by God into the

natural order. Although deism stands in marked

contrast to traditional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim

accounts of God’s providential activity in the

world, it is often advanced as an answer to the

problem of evil: If God is unable to act in the

world, God cannot be responsible for the suffering

that arises within it.

See also CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE; EVIL AND SUFFERING;

OD; MONOTHEISM; NATURAL THEOLOGY;

ANENTHEISM; PANTHEISM; THEISM

PHILIP CLAYTON

DESCARTES,RENÉ

René Descartes’s philosophical importance for the

advent of the modern scientific age is matched

only by the difficulty of fully evaluating what his

doctrines imply for religion. Born in Poitou,

France, in 1596, Descartes lived most of his adult

life in Holland, incurring the opposition, but also

gaining the support, of Catholics and Protestants

alike. He died in 1650 in Stockholm, where Queen

Christina of Sweden had invited him to reside and

instruct her in philosophy.

In his lifetime, he published works in both

French and Latin, aimed at two slightly different

audiences: Discourse on the Method of Rightly

Conducting Reason and Reaching the Truth in the

Sciences (French, 1637), Meditations on First Phi-

losophy (Latin, 1641), Principles of Philosophy

(Latin, 1644), and Passions of the Soul (French,

1649). Descartes also left unfinished works, no-

tably Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Latin),

The Search for Truth (Latin), The Universe or Trea-

tise on Light (French), and Treatise on Man

(French), as well as a voluminous correspondence

in both French and Latin.

Method and faith

As a boy, Descartes attended the Jesuit College of

La Flèche. Recalling his education in Discourse on

the Method, Descartes denounces bookish learning

and the vain pretense of scholastic philosophy, but

favorably cites his love of poetry, his delight in

mathematics, and his reverence for “our” theology.

He emphasizes being firmly taught that revealed

truths are above human intelligence. Stating more-

over that the truths of faith have “always been first”

in his beliefs, he explicitly says that these truths

must be “set apart” from human opinions and must

not be subjected to his method of universal doubt.

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Descartes consistently maintains this position

throughout his work, from the early and unpub-

lished Rules for the Direction of the Mind to the ma-

ture Principles of Philosophy, where article seventy-

six gives divine authority unambiguous precedence

over human reason. Youthful diaries dating from

his years of wandering and soldiering (1618–1620)

reveal a feverish, unconventional, religious imagi-

nation, coupled with devout impulses.

A critical aspect of Descartes’s mature philos-

ophy for issues of science and religion is that his

theory of mind (res cogitans) explicitly privileges

free will over cognition. During an extended stay

in Paris from 1620 to 1627, Descartes had frequent

exchanges with leading religious figures: Marin

Mersenne (1588–1648), who was also educated at

La Flèche; Guillaume Gibieuf, a priest of the Ora-

tory busy writing a book on freedom of the will;

and Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, who encouraged

Descartes to pursue his reform of philosophy as a

duty and vocation. In Rules for the Direction of the

Mind, composed in the immediate wake of these

meetings, Descartes affirms that revealed truths

are held with even greater certainly than natural

truths since “faith rests, not on an act of intelli-

gence, but an act of will.” He also distinguishes

between cognition as such and the faculty of “af-

firming and denying” in an attempt to explain

error, but the second faculty is not yet clearly

identified with the free will, as it will be in the

Meditations (1641) and in article thirty-two of the

Principles of Philosophy (1644).

In 1628, Descartes moved to Holland in search

of solitude. A letter to Mersenne dated April 15,

1630, reveals the extent to which physics and

metaphysics were indivisibly combined in this

search. Descartes explains that he would not have

discovered the foundations of physics if he had

not started with the rational discovery of self and

God, which is indeed everyone’s “first duty.” God,

Descartes maintains further, is “the first and most

eternal” truth from which “all other truths pro-

ceed.” Most dramatically, Descartes affirms that

eternal truths are created: God has freely decreed

that two and two make four, so that mathematical

truths “depend on God’s will no less than crea-

tures.” By 1630, while solving problems of me-

chanics and conducting dissections in his home,

Descartes thus conceptualized divine freedom, the

new physics, human self-knowledge, and depend-

ence on God as intricately connected.

Cartesian naturalism

When Descartes learned of Galileo’s condemnation

in 1633, he cancelled plans to publish the cosmo-

logical Universe or Treatise on Light designed to un-

veil his new philosophy, citing at a later date “those

whose authority has hardly less power over my ac-

tion than my own reason over my thoughts.” In-

stead, he published the Discourse on the Method

anonymously in Leiden in 1637, along with “sam-

ples” of what his new method could achieve in

geometry, optics and meteorology. Presenting his

proof of self and God as pivotal to his own intel-

lectual awakening, Descartes launches a framework

in which physical phenomena, including biological

phenomena, can be investigated experimentally ac-

cording to materialist principles, while special men-

tal events exhibiting voluntary features and charac-

teristic of human beings are set apart and assigned

to a distinct immaterial principle. In the Discourse,

Descartes proceeds naturalistically in so far as he

cites the empirical evidence of languages to con-

clude that the human “rational soul” is “in no way

drawn from the potentiality of matter” and is there-

fore “not liable” to die with the body.

Cogito and freedom

Objections from all sides greeted Descartes’s radi-

cal move to explain biological phenomena by

means of inert microcorpuscular processes, as well

as Descartes’s bold noetic proof of self (“I think,

therefore I am”) and God. In 1639, desirous to clar-

ify his views and to answer his critics, Descartes

began writing his masterpiece, Meditations on First

Philosophy, published in Paris in 1641. Composed

in Latin, the text of the Meditations is followed by

objections and answers, and is dedicated to Paris

theologians. This time, the reader is led through a

six-day journey of introspection and analysis de-

signed to purge the mind of naïve empiricism, se-

cure new grounds of noetic truth by rooting the

human soul in God, and promote scientific inves-

tigation of the material universe (res extensa) as a

way to cultivate personal happiness while working

for the common good. From the demonic ordeal of

the first day to the orderly reintegration of soul

and body on the last, Descartes’s core concern is to

champion the inalienable gift of freedom that

marks human beings as created in God’s image.

God, Descartes explains, has “left it in my power

not to err” since he is always free to suspend judg-

ment when evidence is insufficient. No evil

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DESCARTES,RENÉ

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demon, however powerful, can compel him to af-

firm as true what is merely doubtful. Human free-

dom thus manifests the will’s inherent predilection

for what is good and true, even in the absence of

any known good or truth. Moreover, clarification in

Meditation VI that the senses are meant for imme-

diate survival and must therefore not usurp the

function of reason in proposing to our freedom

truths to be affirmed allows the same responsible

exercise of judgment afforded by geometry to ex-

tend to the physical and experimental sciences.

The moral value of the scientific project thus

lies primarily in the special opportunity it provides

for deliberately searching out and affirming the

truths that God has freely decreed. Significantly, in

the Principles of Philosophy, charmingly dedicated

to his favorite pupil Elizabeth of Bohemia, the

principle of human freedom (article six) precedes

the principle of cognitive certainty or cogito (article

seven): The freedom to abstain from error is even

more fundamental than the first cognitive certainty

I think; I am. And as article thirty-seven goes on to

explain, a human being’s principle perfection lies

in having a free will, and people act worthily

whenever they deliberately choose what is true.

Further development of Descartes’s views re-

lating to proper use of the free will, truth, and

human happiness, is found in Descartes’s numer-

ous letters to Elizabeth, and in the treatise on The

Passions of the Soul, published in 1649. Descartes

distinguishes between autonomous acts of will that

terminate in bodily actions and those that termi-

nate “in the soul itself, as for example, when we

resolve to love God, or more generally, apply our

thought to some immaterial object.” Acts of the will

that are based on false opinions leave one vulner-

able to regret and remorse, while those that are se-

curely based on knowledge of the truth lead in-

stead to happiness and inner serenity. Descartes’s

letter to Queen Christina dated November 20,

1647, may serve to summarize Descartes’s integra-

tion of religion and science since he declares that

the highest good, for each and every human being,

consists in “a firm will to do what is good and in

the serenity to which this leads.”

Influence

Although what is crudely described as Cartesian

dualism has been mostly rejected by later philoso-

phy, the problem of human freedom raised by

Descartes and explained by him on the basis of a

distinct, substantial, and immaterial spiritual princi-

ple (res cogitans), has be no means disappeared.

The linguist Noam Chomsky has repeatedly drawn

attention to some of the advantages of Cartesian ra-

tionalism for the defense of universal human dig-

nity. In France, the philosopher Nicolas Grimaldi

continues to emphasize the relevance of Cartesian

freedom, while Jean-Luc Marion has in turn used

Descartes as a springboard to elaborate new per-

spective on ethics. Most importantly, Cartesian

scholars continue to discover seminal ideas in

Descartes regarding the spiritual dimension of sci-

ence. Daniel Garber, in particular, has shed light

on the distinctive metaphysical features of Carte-

sian physics; Gary Hatfield has called attention to

the deeply religious character of Descartes’s no-

tion of force; and Matthew Jones has initiated new

questions on the spiritual dimension of Descartes’s

mathematics.

See also CARTESIANISM; FREEDOM; MODERNITY

Bibliography

Chomsky, Noam. Language and Thought. Wakefield, R.I.:

Moyer Bell, 1993.

Cottingham, John, ed. Descartes. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1998.

Cottingham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to

Descartes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1992.

Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam

and Paul Tannery. Paris: Cerf, 1897–1913.

Garber, Daniel. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Grimaldi, Nicolas. Six Etudes sur la Volonté et la Liberté

chez Descartes. Paris: Vrin, 1988.

Hatfield, Gary. “Force (God) in Descartes’ Philosophy.”

Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 10

(1979): 113-140.

Jones, Matthew. “Descartes’s Geometry as Spiritual Exer-

cise.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2000): 40-71.

Marion, Jean-Luc. Sur la theologie blanche de Descartes.

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981.

Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, ed. Essays on Descartes’ Medita-

tions. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-

nia Press, 1986.

Rodis-Lewis, Genevieve. Descartes. Paris: Librairie Gen-

erale Française, 1984.

ANNE A. DAVENPORT

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