A sense of alienation from the Anglican creed had been a growing trend in British public life long before Darwin arrived on the scene¹ and this was doubtless a factor which gave him some advantage in presenting his naturalistic magnum opus to the British reading public in 1859. Precisely why the empirically unsubstantiated Origin of Species was given such an easy “pass” by later Victorians and their successors is suggestively documented in Church historian David Newsome’s classic, The Victorian World Picture (London: Fontana, 1997). In sum, Newsome’s historical researches show that Richard Dawkins was by no means the first person to charge that the God of the Old Testament was “the most unpleasant character in all of fiction.” For by Darwin’s day there were those who were beginning to question the fundamental moral legitimacy of the Bible. Furthermore, the dissenters were not restricted to the “usual suspects” swelling the burgeoning ranks of the British secularist movement such as Charles Bradlaugh (the first atheist Member of Parliament) and his ally, Annie Besant. 

Ethical and Ecclesiastical Dissent

Casting a critical eye over some of the Old Testament narratives, renowned poet and mystic William Blake had asked how it could be right for God to punish the innocent in lieu of the guilty. His fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, possessing a considerable knowledge of German Biblical scholarship, had stated that it was simply wrong to require human sacrifice to appease God’s wrath. Coleridge was also affronted by the doctrine of Hell, that doctrine which so shocked Darwin because it seemed to represent the ultimate destination of many free-thinking members of his own family. And, if Darwin were proved correct, Newsome observes, other traditional pillars of Christian belief would also fall. The Garden of Eden would go and with it Adam and Eve, the Temptation and Fall of Man and his Redemption (many of those narratives radically reframed and reinterpreted in the 20th century turn towards demythologization).

Even members of the Anglican Church’s inner circle were to succumb to forms of Victorian doubt. Historian James Henry Froude (1818-94) in early life had enjoyed a close association with the ultra-conservative Oxford Movement with its hankering for a partial return of Roman Catholic principles to Protestant England. Later in life, however, he felt dissuaded from his original avocation to become an Anglican minister. His dissent was to bear literary fruit in his The Nemesis of Faith (1849) which portrayed some Old Testament representations of God as being “fiendish.” Froude raised other troubling questions such as: How could anyone worship a God who sanctioned the massacre of the Canaanites and imposed vile punishments on “the unchosen”? What was to be made of a God who tempted his subjects to sin, then visited the effects of that sin on future generations?

A more established Churchman than Froude, Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s (Wales), also professed himself repulsed by some of the ethics of the Old Testament, finding them difficult to reconcile with the true spirit of Christianity as he construed it. All these voices represented an important part of the matrix of ideas dominating the century in which Darwin lived and worked. This factor may go a considerable way to explaining why Darwin, who once questioned why anybody should even wish the Christian religion to be true, was moved to plan his life’s work on the presumption that the Christian religion was not worth the belief and respect which previous generations had accorded it. 

Messianic Quest

Against the background of such ambivalence Darwin was to embark on a quest to find explanations of the natural world that did not rest on the acceptance of Christian faith, and of course this meant exclusively naturalistic and non-theistic explanations. His conceptual model was firmly in place before he ever put pen to paper. In formal philosophical terms, he was pursuing the path not of Baconian induction (= let the data speak for themselves) but of deduction (= interpreting the facts to make them fit into a preconceived worldview or conceptual model). It was axiomatic for that model that God did not exist, and so everything was to be interpreted in light of the model’s exclusionary parameters. Hence Darwin’s researches were concerned with the validation of a world view as much as they were with engaging in dispassionate exploration: it was necessary that the two endeavors should proceed in tandem.

As the late Tom Wolfe commented, Darwin’s motivation involved what Wolfe termed “cosmogonism,” defined by him as the quest to explain the enigma of existence.² His highly ambitious quest was to find out what Goethe’s Faust figure had once referred to as “that which ultimately holds this world together” (“was die Welt im Innnersten zusammenhält”). Given the insuperable difficulty of that eternal challenge, Darwin may perhaps be pardoned for resorting to some Procrustean theorizing in his attempts to explain what would otherwise remain eternally inexplicable (in naturalistic terms). Constrained by his philosophic point of departure, he was led to paper over a host of logical cracks in his arguments and to shoehorn certain data to fit what he termed his “one long argument.” So much was this the case that for some contemporaries his ideas have appeared rather less credible than a suitably demythologized reading of the account of creation in the Book of Genesis.³

For the Genesis account has the distinct advantage of lying within the parameters of our generally accepted standards of logic and probability as they bear on the matter of cause and effect. By contrast, the present mainstream science theory inaugurated by Darwin — invoking as it does only purposeless, non-teleological processes, stretches credulity to the utmost. That is because that which we call chance is not an agency which causes anything to move or react. It is in fact as far away as can be conceived from what the Victorians referred to as a motive force or vera causa.⁴ To put matters bluntly, that whole narrative is something of a conceptual cul-de-sac, hence heuristically barren.

Chance and Providence

A year after the publication of Origin and under pressure from friends who urged that witless nature could not “select” anything at all, Darwin admitted in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell written in the fall of 1860 that “natural preservation” would have been the more accurate term to have used. Although the term “natural selection” is often bandied about today as if it were a universally accepted and unproblematic term, it really represents little but a misleading canard. As David Hanke has trenchantly observed, “There is no selection, only differential survival.”⁵ Hence the current popularity of the term is more reflective of what many may want to believe in disregard or else ignorance of Darwin’s recantation. 

The contradiction of postulating chance as an “agency” capable of producing all the lawful regularities of the organic world, then, contradicts our empirical observations of what is possible, whereas the creator hypothesis confirms our common experience of every effect requiring a cause. Between those two explanatory poles there can be no probabilistic equivalence. God, however conceived and defined, may lie beyond full human understanding but, unlike the alleged sovereign empire of mere chance, does not lie entirely beyond logical reach. By the very paucity of credible evidence adduced,⁶ Darwin and his successors have done the opposite of what they intended. By which I mean that they have involuntarily furnished presumptive evidence for the role of a special dispensation behind the origin and evolution of life on earth.⁷

This central Darwinian fallacy was already clear to some Victorians. Darwin’s geological mentor, Sir Charles Lyell, had made this point in the 1860s when he objected that Darwinism did not and in the very nature of things could not provide convincing answers to the problems it claimed to solve. Lyell saw that the existential issues Darwin attempted to confront lay beyond empirical science’s limited methodological parameters. In our own day leading astronomer Paul Davies has endorsed Lyell’s point by stressing how such benign cosmic arrangements as we enjoy could hardly have arisen by chance. Davies adds that it is a merely semantic point whether you conceive of the shaping force behind this providential-seeming arrangement as being the Christian God or some other unseen power, for some agency there must have been.⁸ With this clear division in educated opinion in mind, I turn to the question of what people really believe about Darwinism today? What is its precise phenomenological status today?

Present-Day Reception and Views

In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Origin in 1959, Sir Julian Huxley once excitedly declared that natural selection was now a fact rather than a mere theory. For Huxley, the phenomenological status of Darwinism was clearly nothing less than that of unalloyed truth. Yet that understanding has been much debated. In the same anniversary year, less audible than Sir Julian’s triumphalist tones accompanying the centenary celebrations, there emerged a dissenting voice in an article appearing in a specialist American journal.⁹ There American cultural critic Stanley Hyman reported on his somewhat “underwhelmed” reaction to a reading of Darwin’s Origin. He argued that the Origin was, when properly decoded, no more and no less than an unwitting form of “scripture.”¹⁰

What did Hyman mean by this? Essentially, he meant that Darwin succeeded in little more than a transposition of linguistic registers (from metaphysical to biological). By paying close attention to the verbal texture of the Origin, Hyman detected that Darwin was essentially paraphrasing the Biblical narrative in suitably scientific-sounding phraseology. So, for instance, what Darwin termed development and embryology was at root an attempt to re-narrate Genesis in appropriate terms for a scientific age. This same point had in fact been pointed out as early as 1891 by a German critic who wrote that the term “natural selection” was little more than a verbal maneuver which Darwin devised to circumvent (umgehen) the traditional, supernatural theory and replace it with his newly invented Selektionstheorie.¹¹

A Metaphysical Dimension 

Nor did Darwin succeed in excising a metaphysical dimension from his narrative. When discussing Nature, avers Hyman, she is transformed into a female divinity with consciousness and will. Darwin had in effect preserved the Paleyan teleology but naturalized the terms he used to describe it: “In reality of course Darwin’s teleology was as sacred and supernatural as Paley’s, but with all-seeing Mother Nature substituted for God the Father.”¹² Natural selection was in this way able to assume the place of the Creator as the now more acceptable face of the creative Designer. As American scientific educator John A. Moore more recently pointed out, it was one of the most ironic episodes in intellectual history when Darwin drew on the very database of knowledge accumulated by natural theologians to support his evolutionary ideas:

The beautiful adaptations could not be denied, all that was required was to switch the explanatory hypothesis from divine will to natural causes.¹³

Since the appearance of Hyman’s article, other critics have studied the ways in which Darwin was influenced by theological ideas without necessarily apprehending them as such.¹⁴ Darwin did not, for instance, seem to have questioned why a process he insisted was blind should somehow be automatically in favor of progress. The fact that natural selection was effectively a theory of progressive (arguably even providential) development as much as of ad hoc or merely opportunistic adaptation appears to have been a matter of unquestioned faith for him. All of which might pose the question as to whether Darwin’s idiosyncratic brand of Nature mysticism did not in fact make of him something of a closet theologian!

Darwinism and Lamark

Doubts about Darwin have had a long pedigree and, however surprising it may seem, Darwin was afflicted by a number of doubts of his own. A decade after the publication of Origin he published The Descent of Man (1871) where he showed signs of losing faith in the sufficiency of natural selection to effect outcomes. In order to put together a coherent explanation for the ape-to-humankind transition, for instance, we find him appealing in Descent to what he had once denounced as the Lamarckian heresy. The officially frowned-on Lamarckian idea of the use/disuse of organs in promoting evolution is here conspicuously pressed into service as a necessary adjunct to his own theory of natural selection.¹⁵ It is unsurprising that Darwin felt at such a loss to explain the alleged ape-to-(wo)man transition. As veteran science writer John Gribbin noted recently:

Even on a cosmic scale our existence is highly improbable. And even [evolving] complexity doesn’t necessarily imply the evolution of our kind of intelligence. After two billion years of eukaryotic evolution, it took an improbable set of circumstances to turn an African tree-ape into Homo sapiens.¹⁶

A Wider Teleology

At a later stage of his life Darwin began to suspect that natural processes might conceal what Thomas Huxley once referred to as “a wider teleology” hidden from humankind. Moreover, it is perhaps insufficiently realized that the founders of the so-called New Synthesis in the early 1940s were by no means unanimous in their thinking, despite popular perceptions that the four scientists (Fisher, Julian Huxley, Mayr, and Dobzhansky) had set an irrevocable seal on Darwinism. Dobzhansky was not even completely convinced that mutation+natural selection accounted for evolution. In reviewing their work Denise Carrington-Smith details how doubts about whether even the vast age of the earth could have accounted for a glacially slow formation of so many varied species. In a sense, she concludes, the four scientists were aware of having to argue against the evidence. Their doubts “told them of the astronomical amount of time which would be needed to for a beneficial mutation to occur and become established. However, evolution by natural selection had become the dominant paradigm and it was upheld despite rather than because of the emerging evidence.”¹⁷

Comparable forms of ambivalence have persisted up to the present day. The impression one gains on recording the reaction of many contemporaries is that they are willing to assent to Darwinism only in part. This was precisely the ambiguous reaction reported by Richard Dawkins in an interview with the BBC’s Mark Urban on Newsnight in late 2019. Dawkins ruefully told Urban that many assented to Darwinism when speaking with one side of their mouth whilst telling a different story when talking from the direction of the other facial hemisphere.

Enlightenment and Postmodernity

Against the background of our postmodern world Darwin’s misgivings seem to bear a fetching halo of proper scholarly reserve. As we have now come to realize, the Enlightenment philosophy Darwin derived from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, has been subverted by the unsettling specter of “quantum weirdness” which first entered our public consciousness with the promulgation of Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in 1927. Indeterminacy and probabalism have emerged to subvert the Enlightenment conception of a predictable clockwork universe. In particular, we have been forced to acknowledge that the dimension of reality we know is merely the observable, visible part but that this in turn rests on and is sustained by invisible trestles of substrate reality in the microscopic quantum world to which Cartesian notions of predictability and comprehensibility simply do not apply. 

Hence the proverbial mystery of mysteries remains unsolved: Why should a small orb only 25 thousand miles in circumference have developed life in such stark contradistinction to the chaotic and sterile mortuary kingdom surrounding it? There is after all no point of comparison between the living and breathing Earth cradled in its proverbial Goldilocks zone and the endless deadness and ceaseless violence of the surrounding universe. We appear to represent a cosmic exception so singular as to require a separate form of explanation altogether from the rest of the universe. Indeed, the absolute disparity in existential status between our living cosmos and its surrounding chaos of jostling corpse planets prompts the inference that sentient life could not have developed without some form of foresight and an accompanying instrumental power to realize some originary vision by way of a selective abrogation of the laws of chaos reigning elsewhere in the universe. Hence, to postulate the operation of chance in any of its claimed aspects (natural selection, self-organization, jostling atoms miraculously cohering et al.) to account for the underlying nature of things can represent only a side-stepping of the unsolved mystery. And this applies as much to the present day as it did two millennia ago when first proposed by the Atomist philosophers, Epicurus and Lucretius. 

The bottom line is that it is logically impossible to conceive of our planet as an arbitrary and accidental collocation of atoms, objects and life-forms — as both ancient Lucretianism and Lucretianism’s modern legatee, the present-day orthodoxy of evolutionary biology, insist in the teeth of a slew of counter-indications. Even if we are obliged to concede that the ultimate seat of authority cannot be apprehended in anthropomorphic categories of understanding, a basic respect for the balance of probabilities should dictate that the existence of such an albeit unfathomable agency should at least be taken seriously in our current conversations. 

Intelligent Design

Historically the unfathomable subtleties of our terrestrial environment have been viewed as in and of themselves empirical markers for design. Such was the conception defended by many of the most distinguished thinkers of the ancient world such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, whose conclusions informed European thinking right up to the century of the Origin of Species when William Paley famously devoted a whole volume to the subject of design. Cicero’s striking analogy of the sundial anticipated Paley’s famous watch-on-the-heath analogy¹⁸ by two millennia. Cicero wrote: 

When you look at a picture or a statue you recognize that it is a work of art. When you follow from afar the course of a ship, you do not question that its movement is guided by a skilled intelligence. When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence when it embraces everything, including these artefacts themselves and their artificers?¹⁹

Paley was of course an Anglican bishop but the example of Cicero — noted here yesterday by Nancy Pearcey — shows that the idea of intelligent design is just as much a common-sense observation as it is a formal philosophical theory or religious tenet — being as clear to most ancient Romans as it is two millennia later to many citizens of the modern world. It seems intuitively right without benefit of formal elaboration of the philosophical kind, and certainly requires no commitment to a particular creed to make it intellectually compelling. To put the matter more pointedly: you do not need to be a committed Christian to be convinced of the overwhelming explanatory merits of intelligent design.

Notes

1. See Dominic Erdozain, Soul of Doubt. The Religious Root of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford: OUP, 2015).
2. Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016). I discuss Wolfe’s contribution to the debate in an article of Evolution News for August 18, 2022 entitled “Language: Darwin’s Eternal Mystery.”
3. See Gregory A. Bierbaum, Scripture, Science and Creationism (London: Amazon, 2022).
4. On this point see Curtis Johnson, Darwin’s Dice. The Idea of Chance in the Thought of Charles Darwin (Oxford: OUP, 2015)
5. David Hanke, “Teleology. The explanation that bedevils biology” in Explanations. Styles of Explanation in Science, edited by John Cornwell (Oxford: OUP, 2004), pp. 143-55, citation p. 148.
6. Explanations in evolutionary biology tend to be couched in Delphic terms of organisms having ‘evolved’ from simpler systems without supplying any detailed descriptors of what precise physiological modalities may have occasioned such changes. See Neil Broom, How Blind is the Watchmaker? Nature’s Design and the Limits of Naturalistic Science (Downers Grove and Leicester: Intervarsity Press, 2001) p. 39, note.
7. This large issue is dealt with more fully by R.C. Sproul and Keith Mathison, Not a Chance. God, Science and the Revolt against Reason, second edition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014). 
8. See for instance Davies’s God and the New Physics (London: Penguin, 1990) and The Eeerie Silence. Searching for Ourselves in the Universe (London: Penguin, 2010).
9. Later integrated into the Darwin chapter of Hyman’s The Tangled Bank. Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Creative Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1962).
10. References will be made here to the pagination of the article, “The Origin as Scripture” in Virginia Quarterly Review 35 (1959), pp. 540-552.
11. Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Raymond, Űber die Grenzen des Welterkennens. Die Sieben Weltraetsel (Leipzig : Veit, 1891), p 84.
12. Hyman, “Origin as Scripture,” p. 548
13. John A. Moore, From Genesis to Genetics. The Case of Evolution and Creationism (Berkeley: California UP, 2002), pp. 55-6.
14. Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory. Natural History, Natural Theology and Natural Selection 1839-1859, second edition (Cambridge: CUP, 1995).
15. The mental powers of some earlier progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use; but we may confidently believe that the continued use and advancement of this power would have reacted on the mind itself, by enabling and encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought. [emphasis supplied] (The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 110.)
16. John Gribbin, Eight Improbable Possibilities. The Mystery of the Moon and Other Implausible Scientific Truths (London: Icon, 2023), p.113.
17. The Enigma of Evolution and the Challenge of Chance (Queensland: Storyixtus, 2018), especially pp.315-24, citation 319.
18. William Paley, Natural Theology, edited by Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 7-8.
19. On the Nature of the Gods, trans. Horace Mcgregor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 158-9.