Why all the fuss about Darwin?
May 21st, 2009 by Bill
Why all the fuss about Darwin?
The 12th of February was the 200th anniversary of the birth of a man whose life and work have helped shape the modern world in no small way. A fearlessly independent thinker, he held out bravely against the forces ranged against him, inviting hostility and polarising opinion to an extent rarely paralleled before or since his time. Tolstoy said of him that ‘he was so great he overshadows all other national heroes’. What’s more, his legacy lives on, and all of us here have cause to revere his memory as we enjoy the intellectual and moral freedom his influence and his example have bequeathed to us.
I speak of course, about Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Abraham Lincoln was born on exactly the same day as Charles Darwin, and these two men contributed more than most to their own century, and each has left a legacy which endures into our own. But Abraham Lincoln doesn’t get his picture on the cover of the Inquirer; his life and work haven’t merited seconding a minister to produce an information pack; his name has probably not been spoken in hallowed tones in every Unitarian church on this side of the Atlantic for the best part of a month. I haven’t noticed any television programmes devoted to Lincoln, no special books being issued, no museum displays. And yet, if you think about it for a moment – if you really think about it – Lincoln has had far more of a positive impact upon your life and mine than ever Darwin has had. Lincoln it was – among others, it’s true – who helped to forge the United States, the twentieth century’s greatest cultural and military power. Lincoln it was who helped defeat the slave owners of the American South and so start a movement for emancipation and equality which has, finally, brought us America’s first black president, a link not lost on President Obama, who drew attention to it by using Lincoln’s Bible at his swearing in ceremony. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered in 1863, is considered one of the most important political speeches ever made, declaring unequivocally his belief in the principle of human equality, and ending with the great rhetorical flourish, ‘that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’. And Lincoln was martyred for his opinions, assassinated as he sat in the theatre by John Wilkes Booth, who was incensed by Lincoln’s promise to grant voting rights to people of colour. Darwin died in his bed.
Of course, one reason we Unitarians revere Darwin is because we claim him as one of our own. Although he was at one time thinking of taking Anglican orders, he had genuine Unitarian genes. Both his grandfathers were freethinkers, and both were associated with Shrewsbury Unitarian chapel, where Charles would have attended worship as a little boy. Charles’ wife, Emma, was a Unitarian by birth, and even the Anglicanism of her later life was undoubtedly tinged with an unbending Unitarian outlook, as Edna Healey’s biography of Emma makes clear.
But Darwin’s tenuous association with Unitarianism is not the reason for the current spate of hagiography which surrounds his anniversary – hagiography the like of which I haven’t witnessed in my twenty year association with the Unitarian movement. The two hundredth anniversary of Emerson’s birth in 2003 came and went almost without notice, and Emerson, called ‘the father of American literature’, lived and died a Unitarian, and for three years was a minister. So: why all the fuss about Darwin? What does it tell us about ourselves?
The current fuss about Darwin demonstrates that we have gradually espoused a philosophy which is threatening to destroy us as a genuinely open and inquiring religious body. I’m not referring to Darwin’s theory of evolution, or the mechanism of natural selection. These stand or fall by the scientific evidence and I for one am not competent to assess this. I’m referring to the philosophy of materialism, or, more precisely, of naturalism, which holds that everything in the universe has a material cause and a material explanation. Darwin may not himself have held such an extreme view, but his ideas have been used by those who do. Karl Marx, for example, was overjoyed by the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, seeing it as the final nail in the coffin of those philosophies – mainly religious philosophies – which postulate the existence of non- material causes; and Richard Dawkins in our own day says that Darwin finally made it possible to be an atheist – that is, he removed the need for supernatural agencies, for teleology – purpose -, as explanations of phenomena. Darwin, said Douglas Futuyama of the University of New York State, ‘made theological and spiritual explanations of life superfluous…..The theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of materialist science.’
Many scientists have spelled out the consequences of this philosophy. George Gaylord Simpson, writing in the middle of the 20th century, put it like this:
Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely materialistic factors…..Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.
More recently, Britain’s foremost neuroscientist, Professor Colin Blakemore, tells us that even the mind is a fiction:
The human brain is a machine which alone accounts for all our actions, our most private thoughts, our beliefs. It creates…..the sense of self. It makes the mind….we may feel ourselves to be in control of our actions, but that feeling is itself a product of our brain, whose machinery has been designed by means of natural selection.
The implications of this unwarranted and unscientific assumption are staggering: no God, no angels, no life after death, no ‘self’, no soul, no free will, no purpose. We human beings are just the chance outcome of millions of chemical processes, and all the things we hold dear are illusions. Even altruism, putting the interests of others before personal interest, is just a trick played upon us by our genes the better to replicate themselves. A mother’s love is just blind nature’s way of ensuring the continuation of the species; the selfless heroism of the people involved in the recent air crash in the Hudson River is just another example of willingness to sacrifice self to the group in order to ensure the group’s survival. There is no real call for praise or censure. In this, as in everything else, people are just doing what they are impelled to do, all the while tricked into thinking they are making choices. Richard Dawkins puts it like this:
They (the genes) swarm in huge colonies safe inside gigantic lumbering robots (ourselves) sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. We are their survival machines.
You may think that scientists have been forced into making these conclusions as a result of their investigations. Maybe, but that is only part of the story. Their primary motivation is the defence of a dogma – the materialist dogma. In the words of Richard Lewontin of Harvard University:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a materialist explanation of the world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by adherence to materialist causes to create an apparatus of investigation that produces materialist explanations. Moreover, that materialism is absolute.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the 20th century’s most influential philosopher, said that ‘even if all possible scientific knowledge could be obtained, the biggest questions of life would remain largely untouched.’ By ‘the biggest questions of life’ he meant those ‘three in the morning’ questions which perplex us, intrigue us and mystify us from infancy onwards. Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? Where do I come from? Where am I going? These are questions that never go away, that our very nature and our sanity drive us to explore. They are the questions that have engaged the human minds from the dawn of time, and which have inspired the noblest poets, prophets, philosophers, mystics, and visionaries. Science, as Wittgenstein understood it, cannot even approach these questions, but contemporary materialist scientists have dealt with them all by declaring them non questions. You came from nowhere, and you are going nowhere. You are a cosmic accident, a piece of the universe’s flotsam, differing only in degree from a monkey, a horse, or an amoeba. Your life has no purpose whatsoever, beyond those purposes you construct for yourself to keep you from going insane. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the Double Helix, puts it like this:
You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
How can such a reductionist view of the human being possibly inspire us or console us? How can such a view give us a basis on which to build a society of genuine mutual concern, justice and freedom? How, against the background of such a philosophy, can we challenge those like Professor Peter Singer, who holds that human beings have no more right to exist than animals? How do we challenge those tyrants who, like Stalin, believe that individuals can be legitimately sacrificed for the supposed good of the wider group? How do we challenge racists like Hitler who believe that natural selection has rendered one race superior to the rest? Such racism has been given intellectual sanction by Darwinism; Darwin himself – although opposed to slavery – believed in the superiority of the white race, and his cousin Francis Galton, founded the science of eugenics – ‘good breeding’ – by which, he said, we would be able to ‘introduce prophets and high priests of civilisation into the world as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins.’ How do we challenge journalist Christina Lamb, who, in a recent edition of the Sunday Times, defended her commitment to private education in this telling sentence. ‘I have been driven to distraction by the refusal to acknowledge, 150 years on from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, that life is all about survival of the fittest’?
‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’, is what Richard Dawkins called natural selection, and dangerous it has been, principally in the way that it has been hijacked by those who are committed to fostering a purely materialist conception of reality. But it has proved dangerous for us, too, because we have been seduced by this materialism, making it the dominant philosophy in our movement. Not so extreme as some of the scientists I have quoted, but it is still present. It has shown itself in the current Darwin fest we seem to be celebrating, but it’s also seen to be present in our scholarship and in our worship. We have, almost without a whimper of protest, given up on those ‘three o’clock in the morning’ questions I mentioned earlier, which are rarely addressed in our churches or in our publications. Our scholars are all historians. Where are the scripture scholars, the philosophers, the creative thinkers? Where are the contemporary Unitarian explorations of life after death, of God, of purpose, of prayer? Since we have tacitly given up on these things there’s nothing left for us to talk about except gay rights, ecology, abortion, feminism, global warming and the like. We have tried to fashion a religion out of materialism and turned ourselves into a political protest movement, with the occasional concessionary and nostalgic nod in the direction of a sterile 18th century deism. But the real materialists despise us as fellow-travellers with the fundamentalists, or ignore us as an irrelevance.
I like to think that the real reason we are honouring Charles Darwin, and why we should be honouring Abraham Lincoln, is that they were courageous thinkers, who dared to put forward ideas that they knew would be challenging and unsettling. It is time for us to emulate that courage, to dare some thoughts of our own, ‘to venture boldly and explore’ as we sing in one of our hymns, instead of wondering aimlessly down the corridors of 19th century thought, afraid to challenge the dehumanising ideas of contemporary materialism with which we seem to have compromised ourselves; afraid that we will be considered less than rational, less than scientific, by those who, truth be told, don’t really care what we think.
‘Sapere aude’ – dare to think’, said the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. When we start to dare once more, we may just find that others want to join us.
Bill Darlison
22nd February, 2009