From the beginning, most Christian churches rejected Darwin's view, but most scientists accepted it as the most convincing explanation of the mechanisms of life. Darwin published his most important work on general biological evolution (On the Origins of Species) in 1859, and in 1871 he applied this theory to the origin of man (The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex). The impact of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution on religious thinking is beyond dispute. Lastly, I discuss the 18th century debate over theological analogy as part of the background relevant to understanding Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
Peter Browne (1665–1735) and William King (1650–1729) offered two competing conceptions of analogical predication that were debated through the 19th century, with interlocutors such as the freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729), theologian/philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), and skeptic David Hume (1711–1776). Contra Hyman, in this paper, I show early-modern atheism arose in a theological context in which there was an active debate concerning analogy. Gavin Hyman argues Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy was neglected prior to the early-modern period and the neglect of analogy produced the conception of a god vulnerable to atheistic arguments.
For multiple historical figures, a problem arose for religious language: how can one talk of God at all if none of our predicates apply to God? What are we to make of creeds and Biblical passages that seem to predicate creaturely properties, such as goodness and wisdom, of God? Thomas Aquinas offered a solution: God is to be spoken of only through analogy (the doctrine of analogy). Historically, many Christians have understood God’s transcendence to imply God’s properties categorically differ from any created properties. The primary focus is on Bertrand Russell, though other analytic philosophers such as Ayer, Neurath and Flew are also extensively discussed. Most analytic philosophers are atheists, but is there a deep connection between analytic philosophy and atheism? The paper argues a) that the founding fathers of analytic philosophy were mostly teenage atheists before they became philosophers b) that analytic philosophy was invented partly because it was realized that the God-substitute provided by the previously fashionable philosophy - Absolute Idealism – could not cut the spiritual mustard c) that analytic philosophy developed an unhealthy obsession with meaninglessness which led to a new kind of atheism that dismissed talk of God as factually meaningless (neither true nor false) rather than meaningful but false but d) that this new-fangled atheism (unlike the old-fashioned atheism of the founders) is false, since it relies on theories of meaning – verificationism and falsificationism – which are themselves false.
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