Come fu che un quacchero perse Dio e trovò Darwin

In this article, Michael Ruse, one of the leading philosophers and historians of science of our time, looks back with the benefit of hindsight on his intellectual journey. While he was born and brought up as a deeply committed Christian – a Quaker – about the age of 22 his faith simply went away and to this day he is a non-believer – although he prefers to picture himself as an agnostic not as an atheist. Thus, at one level his is a story of a dramatic change – a paradigm shift, as it were. Still, since Quakers have strong beliefs, for instance they are notoriously uncompromising pacifists, but have no dogmas and children have to work things out for themselves, Ruse detects a deep-rooted link between his whole-life commitment to philosophy and what he was taught to do as a child: believe that there could be more to existence than we can imagine. Not only, he concludes, is the world queerer than we think it is, it is queerer than we could think it is.