Dueling Theodicies

Robert Young claims that the controversy over Darwinism in the 19th century was not so much a religion-v.-science controversy as a duel between competing theodicies. At one level, he argues, “the protagonists in the debate were in fundamental agreement. They were fighting over the best ways of rationalizing the same set of assumptions about the existing order,” especially the assumption, shared by pro- and anti-Darwinians, that nature was all red in tooth and claw. The conflict was between “an explicitly theological theodicy,” which “was being challenged by a secular one based on biological conceptions and the fundamental assumption of the uniformity of nature.”