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Rachel Townsend's picture

Foundational non-narratives and narratives

In our breakout group on Thursday, professor Grobstein talked about the progression from non-narrative foundational stories of creation to foundational narratives to non-foundational narratives (emergence) as many others have mentioned in their posts.  I found the discussion of this very helpful as well as provocative.  This conversation helped me to understand better some of the objections to the teaching of evolution, the one which struck me the most being the idea that humans might not be the end all, be all of life on Earth.  Professor Grobstein then asked us whether we thought Darwin was a foundationalist.  My automatic thought was "Of course not!" but then I thought a bit more about what I know about Darwin being quite a religious man and that he struggled with his spirituality and his work for much of his life.  Knowing this, I wonder whether he was a foundationalist to begin with but once he had been working on his theory for long enough to publish it and then write On The Origin Of Species he could no longer ignore following his own train of thought that change happens simply because it happens and that we are not evolving toward perfection.  This conflict surely would have made life a bit confusing for someone like Darwin who was quite spiritual.

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