Abstract

Those with a keen sense of the history of ideas will have noticed that just a few years before Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday was Darwin’s 200th birthday. Those with an even keener perception will have also seen the significance of the relation between these two bi-centenaries For Kierkegaard’s writings were a reaction to Darwin or, more broadly put, to the spirit of the times of which Darwin was the pinnacle. Both Darwin and Kierkegaard lived when it was becoming obvious that the claims of the Bible could not literally be true. The findings of science rendered the Christian account of creation untenable. It was during the rush to discover the mechanisms of evolution, a discovery that would ring the death knell for any objective truth in the Christian story of creation, that Kierkegaard came up with the idea that objective truth had nothing to do with Christianity. Kierkegaard thus can easily be seen as fighting a rear-guard action to salvage what was left of Christianity. For if the objective findings of science were raising questions about the objective truth of Christian beliefs, then one way to avoid answering these questions would be to argue that Christianity has nothing to do with objectivity. There is, however, a major problem with Kierkegaard’s attempt to save Christianity in this “retreat to subjectivity” fashion. For in addition to pulling the carpet out from under the evolutionists, he also pulled the carpet out from under himself. The reason for this is because, despite his claims about Christian truths existing only in subjectivity and Christianity having no existence in objectivity, it is quite clear that Kierkegaard wants various Christian claims to be objectively true and therefore for Christianity also to have an objective existence.