By the early 1970s the initial furore attending the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man seemed little but the ghostly remnant of a long-forgotten controversy. Over the decades it seemed that an informal concordat had been reached by all parties concerned, acknowledging that evolutionary theory and religion were discrete epistemological spheres of apprehension and discourse — separate magisteria in the phrase coined by the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould. The accommodationist modus vivendi was, however, to be rudely reneged upon in 1976 with the publication of The Selfish Gene by Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Little though we knew or even suspected at the time, that volume was to be but the opening salvo in what was to become a veritable cannonade of atheist activism awaiting us in his further publications. 

Not Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie

Yet the curious aspect of the Dawkinsian interventions for those of us who grew to adulthood in the pre-Selfish Gene era is how counterproductive they have turned out to be. Laying out the Darwinian case in laborious detail in works such as Climbing Mount Improbable or The God Delusion has impelled many (the present author included) to seriously reconsider a hypothesis which I had previously let through “on the nod,” so to speak. Had not Dawkins come pounding at the door of history, I might have continued to remain in that comfortable state of intellectual repose. Instead of which I found myself so suspicious of Dawkins’s pseudo-certainties and the nagging feeling that he was “protesting too much” that I was driven to revisit the logical credentials of Darwinism afresh.  This resulted in my astounded realization that the whole Darwinian enterprise simply would not fly. In fact, for me it failed so spectacularly as to seem more like an involuntary defence of theism than a proof of atheism. This “law of unintended consequences” is an intriguing aspect of the whole Darwin/Dawkins affair that deserves further investigation, to which I now turn.

Dawkins’s “Own Goals”

The philosophical soundness or otherwise of what some have dismissed as empirically indefensible “selfish genery” has of course been much debated. In particular, the use of the anthropomorphic term selfish in the context of what were claimed to be the unwitting processes of natural selection was roundly criticized at the time by leading philosophers Mary Midgley and Anthony Flew, and by many others since.¹ Furthermore, the author’s use of the term selfish appeared to point not only to an all-too-human goal-directedness but — even more contradictorily — in the direction of (divine?) teleology and even providence. This presumably unwitting inconsistency was underlined more recently by Richard Barns in his combatively titled The Dawkins Proof of the Existence of God.² Just as Darwin himself had appealed to the eugenic analogy of artificial selection by animal breeders maximizing the quality of their livestock, so too, Barns observes, does Dawkins fall into similar logical traps. Barns notes,

Dawkins just cannot stop himself from giving analogies to evolution that rely upon intelligent government and control working towards a known end […] But evolution has no long-term end in view; it is not working towards a known target, and there is no-one to direct it. The amusing thing is that if this is an analogy of evolution, then it is not an analogy of atheistic but of theistic evolution!³

Disguised Theology

The concession that discourse about evolution might contain an oblique, albeit unacknowledged hommage to the Creator was a realization that dawned on Darwin rather late in life when, three years before his death, he described himself in a letter to a correspondent as a “theist.” Yet the Darwinian climb-down (together with Alfred Russel Wallace’s later disavowal of his own co-discovery) have been largely airbrushed out of history by present-day evolutionary scientists. The matter has, however, not been overlooked by other intellectuals, as is made clear in a recent collection of essays with the rather arch title, Coming to Faith Through Dawkins, edited by Dennis Alexander and Alister McGrath.⁴

A notable contribution to that volume by Louise Mabille takes as its theme ‘’The God Delusion and Probability.’’ Here she reinforces the point often made by previous scientists that Dawkins does not understand statistics. She chooses to illustrate that point by reference to the purely notional theory of “abiogenesis” (the claimed emergence of life by accidental chemical reactions). On that theme she points out that that there is no statistically inevitable “law” that Dawkins’s alleged “replicator gene” should have arisen by chance, however deep and distant may have been the timescale. Like the distinguished Scottish scientist Lord Kelvin, who pointed out over a century ago that the time-scale was a statistically irrelevant factor, Mabille makes a similarly disabused argument in an analogy whose import should surely be comprehensible to all:

If the wind continues to blow over the sand surfaces of an infinite number of planets for an infinite number of years, it still does not entail that life will spring from such action.” 

p. 168

It is therefore with some pardonable hyperbole that she concludes that Dawkins “has almost pulled off the impressive metaphysical feat of doing away with the notion of cause altogether.” (p.172)

Variation is Not Evolution

The contributors to the McGrath/Alexander volume have of course not been isolated dissenters. As early as 1860 Sir Charles Lyell in a letter to Darwin wondered out loud how the entirely conservative tendency of natural selection (which can only “select” or, more accurately, preserve what is already there) could possibly give rise to the revolutionary advances prerequisite to the production of additional physiological features and new species. Lyell’s enormous caveat is picked up again by Barns who charges that it is intellectually dishonest to insinuate that the evolutionary process could have some mysterious bias towards adding complexity:

Varying existing features is not the same as adding new features […] Natural variation might be the better term.

p. 39

With considerable justice he adds that Dawkins’s books depend entirely on there existing in nature a process by which extra instructions can be added to the genome — but of course no such process has ever been identified. It is therefore not warranted to just airily presuppose that chance mutations causing random changes to genes could turn into the instructions necessary to create new physiological (much less neurological) structures. The notion that “random corruption can produce new meaningful information” is bereft of any empirical or even theoretical support, he concludes.

For such reasons the theory of evolution itself must remain in doubt. For to get from a bacterium to a (wo)man requires the addition of a truly vast array of genetic instructions to the genome. A bacterium has no bones, limbs, liver, lungs, kidneys, hair, heart, blood, etc. So in order to get from ground zero to humankind in the way proposed is scarcely conceivable. The present author has often scratched his head over this shrieking anomaly. It is in fact difficult not to be involuntarily reminded of the words of the old Royalettes/Deniece Williams song, “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle.”

The Evolution of Evolution

The speculation about the common descent of all sentient beings first occurred to a number of 18th-century French thinkers and at roughly the same time to Charles’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. In his Zoonomia (1794) Erasmus contended that all warm-blooded animals had “arisen from one filament.” He speculated that that “the great first cause” had endowed creatures with life and vitality, “with the power of acquiring new parts.” What that power of acquiring new parts consists in precisely is not divulged but it is probable that he was thinking along the (now discredited) Lamarckian lines of animals being able to “will” bodily improvements in order to cope with changed or otherwise challenging environments (e.g., the mythical giraffe that “evolves” a long neck to forage at the top branches of trees).

Erasmus’s unsatisfactory vagueness on that issue was the subject addressed by former medical practitioner Nirushan Sivanesen in his Objections to Evolution (London: Amazon, 2019). Sivanesen writes,

The idea of speciation is conceptual. No scientist has ever proposed an exact method of change from one species to another and how this could occur. By this we mean a detailed hypothesis of specific changes in DNA leading to specific changes in the organism leading to specific selection leading to specific evolution.

pp. 30-1

In other words, the most crucial modalities pertaining to the claimed processes of evolution have never even been considered, making the theory as a whole little better than a baseless conjecture. Hence, Barns further concludes, even though evolution has been the most important weapon in the armoury of atheism, “atheists are fighting with an ineffective weapon.” (p. 181) Furthermore, because evolution depends so absolutely on the chance event of abiogenesis, this makes the notion as satirizable as the reincarnation scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the comic potential of which was fully exploited in Mel Brooks’s farcical reprise, Young Frankenstein (1974). This is Barns’s wry take on the something-from-nothing myth:

One moment there was nothing and the next moment there was life, brought about by a few elements and molecules colliding with each other and possibly aided by lightning to give it a good mix.

p. 202

How to Explain (Away) Miracles

Many today may sense the notions of a universe from nothing, leading to chance evolution helped along by natural selection, to be unbelievable constructs of the human imagination — but what then?  How do we pursue the enquiry further? The profounder and most important dimension of the whole problem concerns the identity of the actualdesigning presence behind the natural order. This is of course a harder question which humanity has stumbled over for millennia, and one very durable strand of theological opinion has tended to the somewhat defeatist conclusion that the ultimate power behind the universe is ineffable, unsayable. As Johannes Steenbuch puts it in his recent Negative Theology, “How do we speak of God if God is ineffable?”⁵ For the “apophatic” path or via negativa ultimately leads only to the single conclusion that “the deepest truths about the universe and human existence cannot be put into words.” (Steenbuch, Preface, p. i)

There is no doubt historically that negative theology has hit a raw nerve in people’s experience. For instance, the Old Testament contains numerous passages referencing the “hidden” nature of God. God is one who hides himself (Isaiah 45:12); he has made darkness his hiding place (Psalm 18). Moses encounters God only in “a thick cloud of darkness” (Exodus 20:21). Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC-50 AD), the first recorded negative theologian of the early Christian era, would in fact take the Moses story as the very locus classicus for the hiddenness and ineffability of God.

Negative theology, with its latent hints of pious agnosticism, appears to be at odds with the Christian gospel considered as positive revelation, that is, the belief that God can be and is perfectly knowable through the figure of Jesus Christ. For the advent of Christianity brought with it new and radical claims. God was no longer hidden behind some impenetrable Mosaic penumbra but became visible in the shape of His son. The hidden God of the Old Testament was now replaced by one we can all know through the participatory emotion of love:

No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us. 

1 John 4:12

The Doctrine of Divine Sonship

Of the four gospels it is that of John which most explicitly foregrounds the divinity of Jesus. The doyenne of New Testament studies, Elaine Pagels, recollected, “only in graduate school, when I investigated each gospel in its historical context, did I see how radical is John’s claim that Jesus is God manifest in human form.”⁶ The doctrine of divine sonship has then not surprisingly been central to Christian tradition and it went on to be formally endorsed at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), a foundational convocation which had the effect of writing many doctrines into ecclesiastical law, so to speak.⁷ A majority of members of the convocation insisted that the Son is “of one substance with the Father” and condemned propositions that the Son is metaphysically or morally inferior to the Father, being in fact of the created order. 

Yet in the early Christian centuries the doctrine of sonship was to become a contentious issue during the period of the so-called Arian controversy. The Alexandrian prior, Arius (c. 256-336), claimed that Jesus was not consubstantial with the divine Father but rather a created being. Even some early Church Fathers could implicitly tack towards the Arian line by espousing some form of via negativa. Justin Martyr described God as the label used to designate something we cannot properly explain whilst Tertullian of Carthage held that God was beyond all our conceptions.⁸ Hence if God is truly beyond all comprehension then, in good logic, nothing worshipped in the name of God can be identical to the true God, Tertullian reasoned. It might then be inferred of Justin Martyr and Tertullian that their “trumpet gave forth an uncertain sound” and that some version of the Arian view was never definitively overturned. Indeed, history records that the apophatic tradition has continued to be a part in the lives of many Christians from the time of Philo (himself a Jew), to that of the mystical writers Meister Eckhart and Mechthild von Magdeburg in late medieval Germany, to the anonymous Middle English Cloud of Unknowing, and thence right up to the present day.

From Negative Theology to Atheism

 It should be pointed out that negative theology within the Christian tradition has been no obstacle to faith but rather has merged with and become part and parcel of a larger mystical tradition. Meister Eckhart’s sometimes exhibitionistic verbal pyrotechnics (such as his statement that God was no thing) did indeed get him into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities in 14th-century Erfurt but, glossed sympathetically in the way it was intended, that statement was merely an albeit provocative-sounding paraphrase of the idea that God is beyond all routine human means of perception and description.⁹ For 18th-century intellectuals in the wake of Voltairean materialist philosophy, on the other hand, the concept of an unknowable God impossible to describe in human terms could have encouraged the idea that God did not exist. As Erasmus Darwin might have understood matters, an unknowable God might all too easily be paraphrased as a non-existent God.

Erasmus’s grandson, on the other hand, seems latterly to have been less convinced of the materialist creed (otherwise he would not have been able to refer to himself as a theist in a letter to a correspondent in 1879). Possibly Charles may have been swayed by the new zeitgeist in England which emerged after his grandfather’s day. Throughout the first half of the 19th century there was a notable turn back towards a pre-Reformation spirituality in the Oxford Movement, which strove to integrate Roman Catholic elements into Anglican practice. This trend was made visible in Augustus Pugin’s neo-Gothic architecture and in the growing popularity of Medieval art. Meanwhile, the Romantic movement had led to a new valorization of Nature and some poets, such as Wordsworth, had the tendency to all but sacralize the natural environment. Such cultural openness and willingness to give a new hearing to a pre-Enlightenment sensibility certainly gave license to a more critical stance towards materialism and, in Charles Darwin’s case, may have caused him to reconsider his commitment to the familial tradition of atheistic thinking.

From Negative Theology to Natural Theology

Meanwhile, the earliest negative theologian, Philo, would come to demonstrate that negative theology did not in any sense represent a theological impasse. In a subtle exegesis of the Biblical account of Moses’s encounter with God, Philo continued to insist, as he had stated before this time, that the ultimate nature of God might remain unknown; but added that the existence and characteristics of God might legitimately be inferred from His works in creation.¹⁰ With Philo’s openness to a third way, it seemed as if the polarities of his theological vision were changed from negative to positive. His “thinking out of the box” produced a very powerful and productive idea with an immeasurable potential for global outreach. For there is patently nothing hidden about our natural surroundings. What are routinely labeled the miracles of Nature can be observed by all people at all times. Philo could not have known that almost two millennia later his idea would be taken up again not just by theologians like John Ray and William Paley but also by many modern scientists and others with no direct link to formal theology but who nevertheless sense that there is a design in the universe which strict materialism cannot explain.

Notes

1. See the range of critiques in Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (London: Vintage, 2001).
2. Richard Barns, The Dawkins Proof of the Existence of God (London: Amazon, 2010).
3. Barns, The Dawkins Proof, p. 45.
4. Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: Twelve Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity, edited by Dennis Alexander and Alister McGrath (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2023).
5. Johannes Steenbuch, Negative Theology: A Short Introduction (Oregon: Cascade, 2022), Preface, p. i.
6. Elaine Pagels, The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 37.
7. On this long-running controversy see Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, second edition (Lonon: Penguin, 1993), pp. 125-51.
8. Steenbuch, pp. 13-14.
9. See Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, translated by Oliver Davies (London: Penguin, 1994), Introduction.
10. Steenbuch, p. 9.