Keywords: anthropology;Thomas Aquinas;Christianity;emotions;evolutionary biology;morality;personhood Abstract Christian ethics accentuates in manifold ways the unique character of human nature. Personalists believe that the mind is never reducible to material and physical substance. The human person is presented as the supreme principle, based on arguments referring to free-willed actions, the immateriality of both the divine spirit and the reflexive capacity, intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. But since Darwin, evolutionary biology slowly instructs us that morality roots in dispositions that are programmed by evolution into our nature. Historically, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, agreed with Darwin on almost everything, except for his gradualist position on moral behavior. Huxley's saltationism has recently been characterized by Frans de Waal as a veneer theory of morality. Does this mark the end of a period of presenting morality as only the fruit of socialization processes (nurture) and as having nothing in common with nature? Does it necessarily imply a corrosion of personalist views on the human being or do Christian ethics have to become familiar again with their ancient roots?
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Preece, Rod;
(2003)
Darwinism, Christianity, and the Great Vivisection Debate
(/isis/citation/CBB000774479/)
Article
Allhoff, Fritz;
(2003)
Evolutionary Ethics from Darwin to Moore
(/isis/citation/CBB000600335/)
Article
Hale, Piers J.;
(2013)
Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley's Water Babies
(/isis/citation/CBB001320622/)
Book
Huxley, Thomas Henry;
(2001)
Collected Essays of T. H. Huxley
(/isis/citation/CBB000102541/)
Book
Michael Davis;
(2006)
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country
(/isis/citation/CBB890472950/)
Book
England, Richard;
(2003)
Design after Darwin, 1860--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB000330936/)
Book
Bowler, Peter J.;
(2007)
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design
(/isis/citation/CBB000774288/)
Chapter
Sydow, Momme von;
(2005)
Charles Darwin: A Christian Undermining Christianity?
(/isis/citation/CBB000772009/)
Article
Van Wyhe, John;
Pallen, Mark J.;
(2012)
The “Annie Hypothesis”: Did the Death of His Daughter Cause Darwin to “Give up Christianity”?
(/isis/citation/CBB001232516/)
Article
Greg Priest;
(2017)
Charles Darwin’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: What Darwin’s Ethics Really Owes to Adam Smith
(/isis/citation/CBB287885002/)
Book
Peter J. Woodford;
(2018)
The Moral Meaning of Nature: Nietzsche's Darwinian Religion and Its Critics
(/isis/citation/CBB934342635/)
Book
Jonathan R. Topham;
(2022)
Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age
(/isis/citation/CBB391564552/)
Book
Umansky, Ellen M.;
(2005)
From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews
(/isis/citation/CBB000500373/)
Book
Schoepflin, Rennie B.;
(2002)
Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America
(/isis/citation/CBB000201545/)
Article
Ambrose, C. T.;
(2010)
Darwin's Historical Sketch---An American Predecessor: C. S. Rafinesque
(/isis/citation/CBB001031431/)
Article
Ishak, Mohd. Shuhaimi Bin;
Haneef, Sayed Sikandar Shah;
(2014)
Reproductive Technology: A Critical Analysis of Theological Responses in Christianity and Islam
(/isis/citation/CBB001201355/)
Chapter
Nys, Michiel;
(2013)
“An Undue Simplification”: Tennyson's Evolutionary Afterlife
(/isis/citation/CBB001422075/)
Article
Tarquin Holmes;
(2021)
Science, sensitivity and the sociozoological scale: Constituting and complicating the human-animal boundary at the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection and beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB079918903/)
Book
Dilley, Stephen;
(2013)
Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension
(/isis/citation/CBB001420122/)
Article
Engels, Eve-Marie;
(2005)
Charles Darwin's Moral Sense---On Darwin's Ethics of Non-Violence
(/isis/citation/CBB000933655/)
Be the first to comment!