Darwin’s Detractors: A Reassessment of Responses to Natural Selection in German Science and Theology

This article focuses on responses to Darwinism among German scientists and theologians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Christian thinkers foregrounded in this study all commented at length on Darwinism and critically examined theories of natural selection. In doing so, they did not resort to what we now label "fundamentalist tropes," or, as I call them, "anti-modernist tropes." Rather, they were willing to accept empirical evidence and thought in broad religious and philosophical terms about evolution's mechanisms. The arguments that these scholars offered against materialists' employment of Darwin's ideas fit within the broader "revolt against positivism."