The Sacred, Secular, Scholarly, and Scientific

Abstract

Abstract Following the 1967 untimely death of co-editor Raymond Nogar, in 1973 young John Deely bravely proceeded to publish The Problem of Evolution: A Study of the Philosophical Repercussions of Evolutionary Science. In the utopian vision of philosophy and theology, drawing on Teilhard de Chardin together with Dewey’s psychological theory, and buttressed by Darwin’s theory of evolution, the co-editors and authors would argue against the popular paradigms of Existentialism, Marxism, and Communism thriving in that era. Deely focused on the spiritual condition of humankind, but with a cross-sectional perspective acting as a web-like fabric of evolutionary man (and woman). Man is subject to free choice in cultural traditions, but does not conform himself to a religious program or ethical policy. According to the further contributors to Deely’s volume (Adler, Dobzhansky, White, Steward, Bidney, Ayala, Waddington, Huxley, Eiseley, and other thinkers), man can grow from “primitive”, less sentient animals into the rational mind of humanity. Man has moral and theological principles proclaiming, in the face of evolution, revolutionary terms for the semiotic doctrine that comes to dominate Deely’s life.