Abstract

That Darwinism has been immune generally from philosophical and scientific criticism says something about its iconic status as a paradigm. As Alvin Plantinga has said, “Darwinian evolution has become an idol of the contemporary tribe... part of the intellectual orthodoxy of our day.” After many decades of presumptive authority as a paradigm, some philosophers and scientists are at last examining whether Darwinian theory ought to be persuasive. Dennis Bonnette’s book is an outstanding addition to this important new examination. In fourteen chapters and an epilogue, compressed into 145 pages of exposition, Dennis Bonnette summarizes both the strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory. In the first four chapters of the book he tests whether evidence for macroevolution is convincing. Relying on the unpublished manuscripts of the Australian philosopher Austin M. Woodbury, he concludes that neither the fossil record nor the fact of microevolution justifies the enthusiastic conviction, so common in the academy and even the popular culture, that macroevolution is the case. In addition to criticisms marshaled by Woodbury, creation scientists have exposed over the past several decades a number of problems endemic to the way paleontologists have interpreted the fossil record. Still, Bonnette is willing cheerfully to concede that evolution may be true: “we should remember that the weakness of arguments favoring evolution does not necessarily prove that evolution does not occur”. As a Catholic and a philosopher, Bonnette wonders what its truth would mean for philosophy and theology. In accord with the way Catholic thinkers have commented on the subject, Bonnette argues that the doctrine of evolution, if rightly interpreted, coheres with a sound philosophy of nature, metaphysics, and theology. This conclusion, reiterated and justified throughout the book, and effectively summarized in the closing chapters, separates Bonnette’s position from that of the creation scientists, whom he treats with scrupulous fairness, as he does representatives of atheistic or naturalistic evolutionism.