The child is the father of the man.

Michael was born in 1940 and raised very intensely as a Christian, as a member of that Protestant sect known as Quakers – the Religious Society of Friends. They are notable for having no priests, dogmas, or set services – they sit in silence unless moved to speak and are fervently pacifist. Three things stand out from his childhood. First, taking the Sermon very seriously on the Mount and the obligation to serve others. Second, an almost mystical approach to the Godhead – God is the Unknown and Unknowable, except in glimpses. The third is the need – the obligation – to think for oneself. These have guided him all his life – together with the Parable of the Talents, the belief that to whom much is given, from whom much is expected.

Around the age of twenty, his faith faded, never to return. He is not sure why exactly. He still has great affection for his childhood religion – He is about as far from a New Atheist Christian-hater as possible, but he is a non-believer. Thinking for himself was important here – He does not mean that he was left without help and guidance, but ultimately it was for him to decide. The mystical side of Quakerism also kicked in. He is atheistic about Christianity (Ruse 2015). Although the moral teaching still guides him, he does not believe that Jesus was the son of God or that he rose from the dead or any of that stuff.

He certainly does not believe that Christ’s death on the Cross redeemed us from our sinful natures, the result of Adam eating that apple. However, overall, he is agnostic. As the geneticist, J. B. S. Haldane used to say: “My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose” (Haldane 1927: 286). That is not smuggling in God by the back door. Just awe at the mystery and meaning of existence.
“The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” As the Quaker influence, with its stress on each of us making decisions for ourselves, eased his path from Christianity, it drew him to philosophy, the great privilege of his life. He has been a university professor since he was 25. He is now 81 and in his 57th year of teaching. His real joys are teaching first-year undergraduates and working with his graduate students. The Quaker’s urge to serve others was a factor, but he teaches because he loves it. Plato told us that the only thrilled people are those helping others. If he ever were to have a tombstone, it is that that he would want engraving upon it.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY
Teaching first, then research. (For him, there is not much difference.) He was always interested in science, so it was natural that he became a philosopher of science. He (and one or two others, most notably David Hull) broke the mould back in the 1960s because he became very interested in biology, particularly the evolutionary theory that is the legacy of Charles Darwin. Trained as an analytic philosopher, with the emphases on language and logic and fine detail in arguments, he worked intensively on the modern version of Darwin’s theory, evolution through natural selection brought on by the struggle for existence, made possible by the units of inheritance, first Mendelian genes and then more recently DNA, the double helix.

TELEOLOGY
One thing puzzled him even back then. It has continued to puzzle him right through his career, to the extent that he has published the second of two full-length books on the topic (Ruse 2003, 2017). In physics, since the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, teleology – Aristotelian final causes – have been verboten. You can ask why the moon circles the earth rather than flying off into space. You cannot ask about the function or purpose of the moon. At least, if you say that the moon exists to light the way home for drunken philosophers, you are joking – even if, as with the Lunar Society in the eighteenth century, it does, serve this purpose (Unger 2002). It is not a claim that can be made in physics. Regular talk, efficient causation, refers to past things – the noise came from the hammer banging on the nail – and so cannot be worried about changing things. Teleological talk, final causation, refers to things future – the nails were being bashed into to build the house – and can be worried by things changing. You might fail to get planning permission and so have to tear it all down.

SOCIOBIOLOGY
He gets ahead of himself. He had made a good start as a promising young philosopher of science. It did not last. Within ten years, by the late 1970s, his reputation was on a slide down to the lowest depths. In 1975, the eminent Edward O. Wilson of Harvard published a big book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), where he argued that with the coming of “sociobiology” – the study of the animals’ social behaviour from a Darwinian perspective – a whole new area was declared for evolutionary studies. It is true that, in the Origin, Darwin had a chapter on social behaviour – the bees and so forth – but although he had some profound insights – particularly about natural selection always working at the individual (“selfish gene”) level rather than for the unrelated group – he did not have the genetical tools to dig very far beneath the surface (Richards and Ruse 2016). Following him, given the difficulties of studying such behaviour, combined with the rise of the social sciences where, when you have seen one rat, you have seen the whole of the animal kingdom, social behaviour had lagged far behind other fields like palaeontology, biogeography and systematics. Now, argued Wilson, we can grasp the evolution and biology of social behaviour. Through hundreds of pages, he pursued his goal, looking at insects, lower vertebrates, mammals, apes and finally, humans.

THE DEBUNKING ARGUMENT
By now, around the 1980s, probably disillusioned by his trials in the sociobiological controversy, he had started to lose enthusiasm for doing the analytic philosophy of biology. There was, however, one interesting, and he would like to think, the critical side effect of his engagement with sociobiology. Something that for the only time in his life led him into the territory of regular philosophy, with – as you will learn – somewhat mixed results. He went into the controversy about the causes of human social behaviour with the beliefs, the prejudices, of the analytically trained philosopher. That meant he followed people like G. E. Moore, assuming without argument that even though Darwinism may be true, it has nothing to say to us about the foundations of philosophy, especially morality. To think otherwise is to commit the so-called “naturalistic fallacy.” That, of course, is a version of Hume’s prohibition against going from “is” to “ought.” For all that he liked his science, this at once put him firmly against Edward O. Wilson, who started up front with his belief that Darwinism had everything to do with morality.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION
Naturally, he wrote a book or two on the topic, burnishing his abilities and reputation (Ruse 1982, 1984, 1988). It helped that some of his more philosophical colleagues wrote powerfully against his courtroom appearance, feeling that behaving like that in public demeans the profession. Of course, he included them in a collection, heaping coals of fire on their heads, and pointing out that the issue was not whether Creationism Science (as the literalists labelled their position) was bad science – which is what they wanted to argue – but whether Creationism Science was religion – which is what he argued and what the court needed. Teaching lousy science is not unconstitutional. Teaching religion is. That battle over, he turned back to his program, of which more in his next (and final) episode. Indeed, he did little more work in that direction for fifteen years. Conceptually Creation Science is not that interesting, and he felt (and feel) much the same about the smoother version – Creationism-lite – known as “Intelligent Design Theory” that sprang up in the 1990s. It is true that early in the new century, with a leading proponent, he did co-edit a collection on the topic, comparing Intelligent Design to Darwinian theory. However, he looked upon that as more a political act – keeping people up to date on things – than anything particularly philosophical or scholarly (Dembski and Ruse 2004).

ACCOMMODATIONISM
Agree that science and religion, Darwinism and Christianity, can coexist. The question still to be answered is why they can coexist? Stephen Jay Gould (1999) had an insight into the problem. He argued that science and religion are different Magisteria – world views and approaches – and cannot clash. The problem is that he thought that science deals with facts, whereas religion deals only with ethics. The world is round as opposed to loving your neighbour. That is inadequate. Religion – the Christian religion – does want to make factual (ontological) claims. God exists, humans are made in His image, Jesus was the son of God, eternal salvation is possible. The answer, he argues, lies in the metaphorical nature of modern science (Ruse 2010). Until the Scientific Revolution, what linguists call the root metaphor of science – the metaphor that underlies everything – was that of an organism. That is why final causes were so crucial. In some sense, the world was a living being – Gaia – and we understood things organically. Despite a robust recent revival of this idea – another book! – the metaphor then changed to be that of a machine (Ruse 2013). Robert Boyle was good on this. He argued that the world is “like a rare clock, such as may be that at Strasbourg, where all things are so skilfully contrived that the engine being once set a-moving, all things proceed according to the artificer’s first design, and the motions of the little statues that as such hours perform these or those motions do not require (like those of puppets) the peculiar interposing of the artificer or any intelligent agent employed by him, but perform their functions on particular occasions by the general and primitive contrivance of the whole engine “ (Boyle 1688: 12-13).

VALUES IN SCIENCE
In 1979, he published his book The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Then, as explained, he got diverted to other issues, first sociobiology, then Creationism, then ethics and the debunking argument. His interest in the history of science continued and, as he somewhat jokingly explained, although in philosophy he was a pretty straight shooter – logical empiricist, thinking in terms of laws and axiom systems and theoretical entities and the like – in history, he inclined to social constructivism. Like some postmodernist thinkers, he could never have been an out-and-out idealist, arguing that reality does not count in science and is all culture and subjective desires and interests (Collins 1981). However, he did take very seriously the idea that culture is an essential part of science. Having just written a book arguing that his Anglican past profoundly influenced Darwin’s theorizing, how could he not? So, his philosophical problem – remember, he was never a straight historian but always a historian of ideas, wanting to use history to solve philosophical problems – was how to avoid the Scylla of rigid objectivity (what Popper (1972) called “knowledge without a knower”) while at the same time escaping the lures of the Charybdis of rank subjectivity.

• The Darwinian Revolution (1979)
• The Darwinian Revolution (2021)
• Is science sexist? and other problems in the biomedical sciences (1981)
• Darwinism defended, a guide to the evolution controversies (1982)
• Sociobiology, sense or nonsense? (1st ed. 1979, 2nd ed. 1985)
• Taking Darwin seriously: a naturalistic approach to philosophy (1986)
• The Philosophy of biology today (1988)
• The Darwinian paradigm: essays on its history, philosophy and religious implications (1989)
• Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. (edited with Michael Travis) (2009)
• Evolutionary naturalism: selected essays (1995)
• Monad to Man: the concept of progress in evolutionary biology (1996)
• But is it science? the philosophical question in the creation/evolution controversy (1996) (ed.)
• Mystery of mysteries: is evolution a social construction? (1999)
• Biology and the foundation of ethics (1999)
• Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? the relationship between science and religion(2001)
• The evolution wars: a guide to the debates(2003)
• Darwin and Design: Does evolution have a purpose? (2003)
• Darwinian Heresies (edited with Abigail Lustig and Robert J. Richards) (2004)
• The Evolution-Creation Struggle (2005)
• Darwinism and its Discontents (2006)
• Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species(edited with Robert J. Richards) (2008)
• Philosophy after Darwin (2009)
• Defining Darwin: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology (2009)
• Science and Spirituality: Making room for faith in the age of science (2010)
• The Philosophy of Human Evolution (2012)
• The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (2013)
• Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know (2015)
• Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution, Oxford University Press (2016)
• On Purpose, Princeton University Press (2018)