ABSTRACT
Misadventure is a two way street. Humanists too have overreached in their quarrel with Darwinism. In his recent book Darwinism and Its Discontents, Michael Ruse makes brief reference to the discontents, not all humanists. The believer in God, unlike her naturalistic counterpart, is free to look at the evidence for the Grand Evolutionary Scheme, and follow it where it leads, rejecting that scheme if the evidence is insufficient. In 1941, Jacques Barzun published Darwin, Marx and Wagner in which he took each to task for his materialist approach to science, society, and the arts respectively. In Barzun's account, materialism becomes the dominant way of looking at the world in the nineteenth century. There is an equivocation in the Barzun/Butler view between an argument for an organicist or vitalist approach and a concession to a materialist approach to physico-chemical aspects.
