Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Religions
Abstract
Tertullian provocatively asked (circa 200 AD), “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” The relationship between formal philosophy and religion has been a contentious battleground ever since. It has historically come into sharpest focus in biology generally, and evolutionary theory specifically. Charles Darwin clearly won the day in the short-term. His evolutionary functionalism looked like an inglorious abandonment of time-honored metaphysical realism for positivist empirical reductionism with a concomitant horizontalization of perspective that has secularized and flattened the intellectual landscape. But more recently the rise of evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology) and epigenetic factors have forced a reevaluation of his archrival, Richard Owen. This paper argues that the key to understanding Owen is rooted in his devout Anglicanism through his broad church theology which put Plato into the service of evolutionary theory only now beginning to receive our belated attention. The road to Owen’s evolutionary theory weaved its way from Athens through Jerusalem, finding itself in the contentious intersection of 19th-century Victorian science and religion. Inaccurately mapped by William Paley, Owen’s evolutionary structuralism offered an alternative through science, philosophy, and religion that is only now beginning to be appreciated.
DOI
10.3390/rel17060734
Publication Date
6-19-2026
College or School
UAB Libraries
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Supplemental Associated Link
Recommended Citation
Flannery, M. A. (2026). From Athens to Jerusalem: Platonism, Richard Owen, and the Road Not Taken in Biology. Religions, 17(6), 734. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17060734
