My first intimation of the role played by the “trickle-down” effect of advanced ideas held by a society’s elites and their subsequent influence on society as a whole came at the age of about nine. My primary school was an Anglican-endowed institution in South Wales where, one day in the late 1950s, a female teacher expressed some alarming reservations about the Old Testament. Her precise words escape me but, like all kids, I was more than capable of picking up on non-verbal cues and the teacher’s curious equivocation in matters Biblical appeared to speak volumes — so much so that her skeptical tone remains in my memory to this day.

A Lesson from History

Later in life I was able to “put two and two together” when I came to research aspects of 19th-century religious thought. At that point I came across the openly negative opinion of the Old Testament expressed as early as 1849 by the then Bishop of Saint Asaph (North Wales), Connop Thirlwall (his bust at Westminster Abbey is pictured above). This polymathic figure contributed to a whole host of cultural debates. Thirlwall made a distinctly invidious comparison between the God of the Old Testament and the gospel of love announced within the New Testament. The trajectory of Thirlwall’s magisterial verdict as it percolated down to seminaries and teacher-training colleges in Wales and beyond now became clear.  It was none other than the former Bishop who had posthumously revealed himself to have been the person who, ultimately, had “given permission” to my primary school teacher to voice such candid opinions within the hallowed halls of an Anglican foundation.

Early Responses to Darwin

Now it began to dawn on me that what was true of my then teacher could have applied equally to the early British reception of the Origin of Species. Darwin’s counter-intuitive and arguably contra-logical attempt to untenant the creation of its Creator may have drawn strength from recently promulgated, negative readings of God which would have given some of Darwin’s first readers license to “close their account” with the divine Father and transfer exclusive allegiance to the New Testament figure of Jesus.

Such a defection would of course have made nonsense of the doctrine of divine sonship but the doctrinal sticking-point will have resolved itself for those congregants who had decided to reframe their conception of Jesus as a great moral teacher rather than as the son of a now widely discredited Father. Within the increasingly secular parameters of British society, one could (and can) credibly claim allegiance to Jesus Christ without viewing the founder of Christianity as having any special kinship with the Old Testament God.¹

Inhibitions about seceding from the Old Testament will have been reduced after Darwin (soon to be reinforced by Nietzsche) issued unmistakable hints that God had become “obsolete.” Defections after 1859 would, then, have had the imprimatur of a distinguished man of science (with all that the term connoted in the country which had given birth to the Industrial Revolution).

Reassessing Darwin Today

Such reader responses would have been intelligible and indeed perfectly justified had Darwin in the longer run proved to be scientifically sound. But what would be the effect if Darwin’s ideas of evolution as a kind of biological autopilot were to be challenged, not on religious ground but on scientific ones? Could this lead to a renaissance of the God hypothesis, the case for which has recently been argued?²

Darwin may have gotten away with purveying speculation as fact thanks in part to his aura of being a perfect English gentleman with appropriately self-deprecating manners. However, his successors in the last half century have not been so mannerly. Why, asked Annabel Lustig rhetorically, is modern science so riven with accusations reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition? She continues,

Antagonists on all sides of the debate about evolutionary biology have wielded the language of holy warriors, declaring crusades to expunge heretics from the domain of biological science.³

That kind of inflationary mission creep has led to Darwin’s modest offering of his theory (“until a better one should be announced”) being catapulted to center-stage in the recent trend towards materialist proselytizing. Yet the very adversarial stridency of this new drive for converts has had the counterproductive effect that the original, Darwinian evidence is now scrutinized a little more closely and less indulgently. The last four decades have produced numerous independent studies which have all found Darwin wanting on purely scientific grounds. This, as intimated above, has clear implications for materialist philosophy since, if the only materialist theory accounting for the nature of things is discredited, this in good logic leaves only supra-natural causation on the table.

Return to the God Hypothesis?

How late law professor Phillip Johnson, during a sabbatical term in London in the late 1980s, came to read Richard Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker side by side with Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, has become something of a legend. His juxtaposition of what another has termed “Dawkins’s aggregation of factoids (…) underdetermined by the evidence”⁴ with Denton’s pioneering whistleblowing was to turn the previously quietist academic into an energetic anti-Darwin activist.⁵ At that point he began ruffling the sense of torpid follow-my-leaderism into which evolutionary studies were slipping in the aftermath of Dawkins’s combative The Selfish Gene (1976). In that regard Lustig has remarked with considerable justice that

Darwin’s work has a continuing textual and rhetorical importance for his successors that is unparalleled elsewhere (with the dubious exception of Freudian psychology) […] Many of the greatest names in biological science, in order to strengthen their own case, pore over the text of the Origin, Descent of Man and other works with the assiduity of Talmudic scholars.⁶

Such hyper-orthodoxy has been less universal since the wake-up calls administered by Michael Denton, Phillip Johnson, and others. For instance, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini mounted an uncompromising critique of Darwin’s notion of natural selection, pointing out its fundamental misconception in devastatingly simple terms:

Darwin was inadequately impressed by the fact that breeders have minds — they act out of their beliefs, desires and intentions and so on — whereas of course, nothing of that sort is true in the case of natural selection.⁷

Darwin’s impermissibly anthropomorphic and perhaps unwittingly vitalist comparison of stock-rearing with the purely inanimate tendencies of “natural selection” had already been pointed out to him by Alfred Russel Wallace and by Sir Charles Lyell who both objected that the analogy between resourceful nurture and dumb nature was untenable. Most gravely for Darwin, Lyell also pointed out that there could be no such thing in nature as natural selection (a process which would require cognitive abilities). What Darwin had meant to say, Lyell proposed, was natural preservation (which is wholly unpremeditated and in essence merely a statistic without creative power).

It was a criticism that Darwin rather grudgingly consented to accept but, despite his nominal concession, failed to explain how mere preservation  could lead to the kind of new biological pathways which would be necessary to “evolve” different kinds of limbs, physical frames, or superior brains. As Richard Milner has commented, “Natural selection is an eliminative process that does not explain the generation, proliferation and direction of varieties.”⁸

Non-Selective Evolution?

The question of whether evolution is logically coherent without natural selection is a very basic one but one in my opinion too infrequently asked. The neo-Darwinists after 1942 have tacitly passed over Wallace’s and Lyell’s foundational criticism or simply ignored it for being a merely semantic spat.  Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini even suspect a cover-up: “We have been told by more than one of our colleagues that, even if Darwin was substantially wrong to claim that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, we shouldn’t say so.”⁹

For myself the one discordant note in the two authors’ volume is that both profess themselves “quite prepared to swallow both the baboon and ancestral ape, but not that natural selection is the mechanism of speciation.”¹⁰ How come? I find equivocation about the matter of evolution without natural selection puzzling. The briefest account of the historical sequence of the ideas of, first evolution, then natural selection, will explain my sense of disquiet.

When Erasmus Darwin in company with like-minded French thinkers of the 18th century propounded the idea of evolution they were either ignored as eccentrics or else laughed out of court. Because there was no proof for the conjecture that a microbe might eventually evolve into a whale, the hunt was on to find a vera causaor functioning mechanism to explain the claimed metamorphosis of species. Enter Charles Darwin whose long sought-for notion of natural selection was intended to provide a credible vera causa for a process previously deemed incredible. His hope was that this theory (famously adapted from demographer Thomas Malthus) would put a stop to the mockery hitherto heaped upon his grandfather. Only after 1859 were people prepared to reappraise the idea of evolution on the sole understanding that natural selection truly had provided them with the fabled eureka moment — meaning a compelling theory underpinning and promoting the whole evolutionary process.

With reference to that brief chronological reprise, my point is: If some leading 21st-century scientists and philosophers are now picking (rather large) holes in the idea of natural selection, what price evolution itself? There is surely no logical necessity to accept the truth-status of evolution without natural selection, is there? Ideally, I would like to hear an answer to that question from a competent authority since I have a nagging feeling that I, a non-specialist, might be missing something here. At any rate it does not seem reasonable to accept the veridical status of evolution on the basis of what an increasing number of scientists are beginning to perceive as a “dodgy dossier” which nevertheless furnished the essential precondition for people’s acceptance of evolution in the first place.

Notes

1. Such persons are commonly referred to as Christians with a small c. For a stimulating discussion of the finer points of the theological position of that group touching on religious non-realism, agnosticism, and even atheism, see Robin le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2010), especially pp. 83-7.
2. See Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (New York: HarperCollins, 2021).
3. Darwinian Heresies, edited by Annabel Lustig, Robert J. Richards, and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), p. 1
4. Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion (London: SPCK, 2007), pp. xi and 14.
5. See for instance Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, third edition (Downers Grove II: Intervarsity Press, 2010).
6. Darwinian Heresies, edited by Abigail Lustig, Robert T. Richards, and Michael Ruse (Cambridge; CUP, 2004), pp. 70 and 9.
7. What Darwin Got Wrong (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2010), p. xix.
8. Richard Milner, Darwin’s Universe from A to Z, second edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 163.
9. What Darwin Got Wrong, Introduction, p. xx.
10. What Darwin Got Wrong, p. 2.