Kitcher has an intense interest in how secondary schools teach biology. Keeping Intelligent Design from being taught there was the motive for this book. 'Living with Darwin' is formulated "in a way that people with no great training in science, history or philosophy could appreciate." Those people would include, I suppose, school board members and jurists---that is, the people who are determining the K-12 science curriculum.
The book is laid out in five chapters and the middle three are where Kitcher is most sure of himself; but those three chapters were much less interesting to me; they were the Inside the Laboratory view of ID criticism of three principles of evolutionary science and the counterarguments of those working within the evolutionary science paradigm. I will not discuss those arguments here other than to say, as a good Kuhnian, I endorse Kitcher's proposal that IDers are doing "dead science". It seems to me that as long as IDers are pointing out hard cases and inconsistencies within the evolutionary science paradigm they are doing somewhat useful work. However, if they step outside that role and propose Intelligent Design as a solution without an accompanying program that defines "the problems available for scientific inquiry and standards for what counts as an admissible problem and solution"---that is create their own paradigm of "normal science"---I would suggest they are simply doing theology.
In the last chapter Kitcher moves to speculations about the future of religious faith, which is a much more ambitious and interesting topic. He narrows his audience to the "honest and worried" people who accept ID and want to keep their fundamentalist beliefs. I have several criticisms of the last chapter.
I believe 'Living with Darwin' would have benefited from a greater historical perspective. For some reason, Kitcher dates to the 18th century "what is wrongly viewed" as a conflict between science and Christian beliefs. However, one can get a better handle on Darwin if he is viewed as simply one more de-centering movement to Christian beliefs; a movement continuous with the revolution brought about by Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th century. At that time society was ordered and its worldview determined by Christianity to far greater degree than any of us can imagine today; a society with very limited secular activities outside of organized religion and independent of its authority. The Catholic Church famously reacted to Copernicus by placing his De Revolutionibus on the Index and making poor old Galileo recant. So the competition between science and Christian beliefs is not a new one centered on Darwin but a continuation of five centuries of Western intellectual thought in which great progress has been made in the secularization of Western culture.
I believe Kitcher makes a tactical mistake in the last chapter when he revisits such topics as why God would allow evil in the world, what is divine justice, etc. By doing so he unnecessarily gets himself entangled in 2000 years of theology created by some very smart guys (who I can guarantee have a better grasp of the issues than Kitcher), and fights the fundamentalist on his home turf----well, good luck with that. He makes another mistake when he reiterates what he calls "the enlightenment case" against supernaturalism. The enlightenment case puts a heavy emphasis on reason and casts the "honest and worried" fundamentalist as irrational in some sense. I would suggest to start a conversation with a fundamentalist by claiming she has her theology all wrong and is irrational would make that interlocutor defensive and more resistant to change.
Moreover, Kitcher does not come across as being a particularly trustworthy friend to the honest and worried fundamentalist. Kitcher is disingenuous when he tries to assure his fundamentalist reader with comments like "it would be arrogant to declare categorically that there is nothing that might answer our (that is, Kitcher's, not the evangelical's) vague conception of the transcendent" and "It would be wrong to maintain that we know sincere religious experiences are the products of delusion." For he turns around in other passages to authoritatively intone, "to believe in the genuine possibility of ...a reunion in the hereafter...would be self-deception", and "the promise is literally false---there is no God that will wipe the tears from our eyes", "eternal salvation---all that I repeat is literally false" and "churches provide a sense of hope, illusory to be sure." I think a reasonable response by our "honest and worried" fundamentalist is to tell Kitcher to get lost.
There is a tendency for Kitcher to associate religious experience with emotion, access to the divine and in one place explicit identification that "the core of the experience is an accurate sense of the transcendent." Instead of separating religious experience from religion, as Dewey did, he embraces religion because he thinks it is the only source of religious experience. He is less than convincing when he recommends what he calls "spiritual religion" to the fundamentalist as a replacement for their already organized religion. "Spiritual religion" is religion shorn of its dogma and tradition. To his credit Kitcher recognizes his problem: once he has eliminated the dogma and tradition he has no idea what the content of "spiritual religion" would be that would differentiate it from secularism. Perhaps the only difference Kitcher sees for the fundamentalists he converts is that they already own a place to meet once a week and sing songs.
At the present moment in America, converting Southern Baptists and Mormons to a "spiritual religion" is far-fetched. The best chance for success is for a new Mary Baker Eddy or Joseph Smith to arise and invent a religion that doesnt have dogma but simply preached love. We'll see.
Now this review will grade into a short essay. A more sensible approach is to leave religion to itself, and propose something that looks attractive to the unconverted. It is ironic, that the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia does not embrace and recommend Dewey's own approach. Dewey took a naturalistic stance in order to emancipate religious experience from religion and thereby allow religious experience to be safely used by secularists. In 'A Common Faith' he says, "Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality. Many a person, inquirer, artist, philanthropist, citizen, men and women in the humblest walks of life, have achieved, without presumption and without display, such unification of themselves and of their relations to the conditions of existence." (By the way, I must admit Dewey's attempt in the same book to hijack the word God for secular purposes was very unconvincing.)
What is more, Dewey provides what Kitcher thinks is lacking with secularists: Hope. (Kitcher, who thinks most people have a drab, painful, impoverished life, is remarkably pessimistic himself). For Dewey sees one of the happy by-products of science as the change in our view of the world from something we fear and must try to propitiate to something we can predict and/or control. It's a move from what Freud called a "pious worldview" to a causal one. This new worldview is the spur human beings need to reach maturity as a species. It's the prodding to realize all we have is each other and therefore we need to consciously and courageously take charge of our own future and, as Rorty says, stop masochistically abasing ourselves before some non-human authority. Dewey believed participation in democratic politics would be the vehicle by which humans would fight social evils and make life better for themselves and future humans. That is my hope as well, but we'll see if it pans out.
But even Dewey does not go far enough. As Kitcher notes, Darwin and science do not provide comfort at a funeral. I agree with Kitcher that the development of communities (political organizations, work unions, and continued cultivation of the family) to provide support at times of great personal distress is most important. Perhaps at future funerals, instead of songs about low swinging chariots secularists can sing songs of ourself. Perhaps ideas like people videotaping their own eulogies will catch on, and it becomes a moral responsibility like leaving a last will and testament; a self-eulogy where a person can give mourners a first hand account of what people, poems, and ideas were important to her and how she lived to make things better for others. Perhaps this is idle thinking. And a tough case remains: what are secularists to do for a parent when she loses a child, as Huxley did?
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