In his study of the spectrum of semantic nuances inhering in the term agnosticism, Robin Le Poidevin records that historically the most radical form of agnosticism was that advanced by the first-century BC thinker Pyrrho whose sayings were preserved in the writings of another ancient author, Sextus Empiricus. Through the Pyrrhonistic record as preserved by Sextus we learn — to put the matter briefly — that Pyrrho denied that there was any way at all of getting to the truth behind any of the larger questions posed by our existential situation.
The Hidden God
However, over against that form of absolute skepticism, Le Poidevin points out that for other persons the term agnosticism has had a positive point of contact with negative theology (historically termed the via negativa) — the idea that God is inconceivable in simple anthropomorphic terms and lies beyond the range of attributes available in any human lexicon.1 Such an idea, notes Le Poidevin, was (and is) entirely “compatible with a religious way of life and outlook.”2 For instance, he cites Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century who avowed that God was greater than could be conceived of or described in merely human terminology. That conception was also reflected in the views of Thomas Aquinas (1224-76) and in the thinking of the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). Meanwhile the 14th-century religious thinker Meister Eckhart promoted the uncompromising conviction that God was “wortelos” (literally = “words-less,” indiscussable).
Note that medieval German wortelos is not synonymous with the term wortlos (which simply means “wordless,” ineffable). The wider term “wortelos” encapsulates a plural noun which implies that it is not possible to state anything meaningful about God in that plurality of joined-up words and sentences which we term “rational human discourse” or “philosophy.” Not for nothing is Eckhart classified as a mystic writer in histories of German literature since it was mystical intimations and wordless epiphanies rather than philosophical debate which in his view provided the only route towards the deepest existential truths of our existence.
Perhaps the nearest we get to Eckhart’s position in the modern era was embodied in the view latterly espoused by Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) who, after prolonged anguishing about his own faith,3 came to view formal theological debate as little but empty word play — valueless “logomachia.”4 Similarly, in the previous century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had emphasized the strictly finite nature of human understand by underlining the difference between the “phenomenal” world of empirical experience (to which we have ready access) and the “noumenal” dimension of the world about which we, as strictly finite beings, can say nothing.5 To borrow the striking phrase later coined by linguist Noam Chomsky, we humans at certain critical times simply have to resign ourselves to “cognitive closure.” As Deepak Chopra said in his illuminating debate with Leonard Mlodinov, neither philosophic nor scientific discourse can exhaust reality because reality has deeper levels of causation that cannot be demonstrated empirically (as for instance quantum physics has demonstrated in the last hundred years). It is therefore necessary for us to be able to open our minds to diverse dimensions of reality which go beyond the old Enlightenment paradigm of a predictable clockwork universe.6
Deism
Given such philosophical reservations, there will doubtless always be a large question mark over the nature and attributes of God, one modern viewpoint (conscious of what C. S. Lewis termed the problem of pain) being that the entity we refer to as God may harbor potentialities for both good and evil.7 That is of course a highly debatable viewpoint which I wish to bracket off from the present discussion; but what can be said with some certainty is that loss of faith in a directly interventionist God has led many to “an unsatisfied longing for some kind of experience of the love and presence of God” and even once reportedly elicited a cry of dereliction on the part of St. Teresa of Calcutta.8 In the light of the numberless evils which go unchecked in this world, the idea of an intervening God may therefore to some sound somewhat Pollyannaish. Hence many now incline more to the idea of a non-interventionist God to which we give the label of Deist. This view became especially prevalent in Europe after the great Lisbon Earthquake (and its accompanying tsunami) in 1755 in the course of which so many entirely innocent lives were peremptorily snuffed out.
Deism is perhaps the most intellectually unexceptionable doctrine since it takes into account the logical fact that all things must ultimately have a creator and yet it is not obliged to justify the needless carnage with which we today are all too familiar across the globe. My hunch then is that many are tempted to fall back on the deist position because it coheres with the time-honored logic of ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes of nothing — with of course the single exception of Plato’s postulation of an Unmoved Mover). Such at any rate was the reigning philosophy of men of science when Charles Darwin was growing to maturity.
Darwin
It is well enough known that Charles Darwin from early youth had stood in the shadow of his more brilliant and accomplished grandfather, Erasmus, and that this factor was destined to to lead to some conflicts in the mind of the younger Darwin. For instance, he felt great pressure to fulfil his grandfather’s intellectual program of finding an explanation for how life might have evolved autonomously and without divine supervision. His famous solution to this problem was to postulate the mechanism of natural selection, but he came over time to harbor doubts about his own theory, and not only because Sir Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace (rightly) warned him that no such dynamic, species-building process as “natural selection” did or could exist in nature — only the more passive process of natural preservation (which is obviously incapable of creating anything at all).
The above consideration, which of course entirely invalidates the very notion of autonomous “selection” (a fact known about but preponderantly ignored since 1860 on what I can only assume are grounds of ideological obfuscation) may have played a part in Charles’s later doubts — which even led him back to accepting a form of the once excoriated Lamarckism as a much needed “supplement” to a theory he was beginning to suspect might be untenable.
Yet another factor will almost certainly have played a part in his later thinking. This concerned his frank admission that he could say nothing about the absolute creation of life9 (without which his theory of natural selection could not of course have even begun its claimed operations). We know that Erasmus Darwin — by dint of some opaque logic which it is hard to follow10 — aspired to erase any notion of a cosmic middleman/creator in favor of a purely impersonal, autonomous process ab initio. I use the term opaque quite deliberately because of the truly fatal question which Deepak Chopra asked of Leonard Mlodinov in their book-form dialogue, namely,
How did design appear in an accidental universe? … You can’t start from a meaningless cosmos and get to the rich meaning of human life.”11
To his credit, the grandson who described himself in a letter written in 1879 as a Theist (Darwin’s own capitalization) did not share his grandfather’s unquestioning atheistic prepossessions — much less Erasmus’s penchant for aggressive proselytization. A clear sign of the temperamental difference between grandfather and grandson was recently highlighted by the late Deborah Lavin in her account of the notable meeting at Down House six months before Darwin’s death between Karl Marx’s son-in-law, Dr. Edward Aveling, atheist member of parliament Charles Bradlaugh, and Darwin himself. Darwin politely declined to endorse their atheist cause but shortly after Darwin’s death Aveling by word of mouth and even pamphlet spread the rumor that Darwin had supported Aveling’s cause. Many were outraged that Aveling had dared to misrepresent Darwin’s point of view so brazenly and the protesters included Darwin’s own son, Francis, who stated, “My Father’s replies (to Aveling and Bradlaugh) implied his preference for the unaggressive attitude of an agnostic”12 As Lavin pointed out, “the affair evidences Aveling’s obsessive desire to recruit Darwin to the cause of militant atheism.”13
From Edward Aveling to the New Atheists
We know that Darwin was offended by the cruelty he witnessed in his life in both animal and human worlds and maybe at times he might have been tempted to sympathize with the phrase “pitiless indifference” coined by the uncrowned king of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, to describe the world we live in. Yet I doubt very strongly that he would have assented to what Dawkins attempts to put forward as a logical entailment of the words I have cited above, namely, that the world is just what you might expect if no god had had a hand in shaping it.
To be sure, if our planet resembled that chaotic pinball machine that is the external universe, Dawkins’s argument would have greater force. But as cosmologists have belatedly recognized in the last half century, the sheer exceptionalism of our planet with its minutely and optimally calibrated design features distinguishes us very sharply from the chaos of our distant cosmic surroundings. Our “Goldilocks zone” (to use the current cliché) certainly exceeds the scientific and engineering capacity of any cadre of scientists, however brilliant they might happen to be. In fact, our planet points to a dimension of creativity of which (as Anselm and Aquinas realized a thousand years ago) we can have no conception.
Hence to suggest that our planet could have come about from some mysterious and purely notional “quantum vacuum” (as is asserted by leading American cosmologist Lawrence Krauss)14 coupled with the serendipity of “natural selection” (a culpably misleading term as explained above, pointing not to creativity but to a mere preservation of the status quo) seem to me irredeemably absurd. As Louise Mabille recently pointed out in an admirably plain-speaking phrase, to chalk everything up to chance (as Dawkins does in biology, Daniel Dennett did in philosophy, and Lawrence Krauss does in cosmology) is tantamount to denying the necessity of causality at all:
Dawkins has almost pulled off the impressive metaphysical feat of doing away with the notion of cause altogether.15
So why do people believe in weird things?
History is littered with the intellectual “corpses” of what Basil Willey once termed “doctrines felt as facts,” the fallacious nature of many of these idées reçues probably being already familiar to many readers. They include such now discredited notions as that of ectoplasm and phlogiston or the once seriously defended notion that the moon possessed lunar inhabitants and an advanced civilization to boot. Nor are these strange beliefs mere historical curiosities, as the present author recently discovered to his cost.16 Darwin himself to his credit was not credulous about science and was no boisterous proselytizer even for his own cause. He had the grace to advance his own ideas about natural selection only as a placeholder theory until, he wrote expressly, “a better theory might emerge.” The five heavily amended revisions of his Origin of Species appearing in the decade that followed first publication in 1859 are in themselves eloquent testimony to some unbidden apprehension on his part that, as mathematician Marcus du Sautoy recently put it, “just because the scientific community accepts a story as the best fit, this doesn’t mean it is true.”17 At a later stage of his life he felt duty-bound to acknowledge that he was not completely convinced of his own theory and that behind natural selection, he obscurely suspected, might lie some teleology hidden from humankind.
New Atheist Obscurantism
In conspicuous contrast to Darwin is the recent crop of thinkers dubbed the “new atheists” who seem not to be afflicted by the most minimal portion of self-doubt even though the positions they strive to defend à l’outrance may strike others as irrational and even risible. I go into more detail about this subject in my forthcoming volume False Messiah: Darwinism as the God that Failed (to be published by Discovery Institute Press in October 2025).
Seen against a wider, historical canvas, the subject of evolution had been viewed as intimately linked to politics and religion since the 18th century. Those who believed in transmutation of species tended to be on the side of the religious doubters, and on the left politically. It was commonly supposed that if you believed in an autonomous, self-fashioning, and self-sustaining Nature, there would arise a corresponding impulse to define yourself as the independent product of natural processes rather than as the designed creation of a supernatural originator. In this respect the new atheists are the intellectual legatees of Erasmus Darwin.
Figures as various as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Monod have claimed that belief in the divine was a response to human feelings of insecurity and contingency. That revolutionary declaration of independence from the divine which we term atheism must then surely count as a response to the countervailing human desire for untrammelled personal freedom. That aspiration had its political correlative in the desire to rise up against the forces of overbearing overlordship (secular or divine) and forge one’s own destiny. As Steve Taylor observed, “every metaphysical framework satisfies a psychological need for certainty and orientation.”18 Clearly religion performs such a function but so does materialist philosophy, which also is a metaphysical postulation, not an empirical fact. Indeed, scientist and politician Francis Bacon (1561-1626) — who incidentally played a minor role in colonizing Virginia — conceived of the desire to understand and tame nature as an expression of the colonizing instinct.
This is why the discovery of the quantum world is so disturbing to some, for it upsets our aspirations to be able ultimately to understand and so control/colonize our world. As geneticist J. B. S. Haldane famously put it , “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”19 It is especially disturbing to the new atheists who are more at ease in a time warp of Enlightenment thinking where all was viewed as being potentially intelligible, given the requisite amount of time and research. Better by far to live comfortably in the conceptual world inhabited mentally by Erasmus Darwin than face the radical disorientations threatened by the world of quantum mechanics and Werner Heisenberg’s aptly named Uncertainty Principle. Predictable Newtonianism is consoling to some because it gives us the illusion we have a handle on the world, and hence a modicum of control over it; but in this it nourishes a false hope, since, as Christian Bandea puts it, science is manifestly unable to “peer across the existential brink, into the realm of pure creation.”20 Whether we like it or not, Erasmus Darwin’s simple and predictable world is no more, and we now find ourselves subject to a profoundly mysterious cosmos. Even in Charles’s chosen field of biology, microbiological research is revealing a subtly coded web of biological imperatives that remains beyond human fathoming.
Under the illusion of being the “brights” (their term) — that is, the enlightened ones — the new atheists appear instead to have become the doctrinaire victims of a peculiarly modern form of obscurantism, doggedly clinging to an obsolete worldview while ignoring the implications of much cutting-edge science. Their outlook has little in common with that of Charles Darwin, whose later years were marked by what Peter Vorzimmer termed “frustrated confusion.”21 In that respect, it might be added, Charles Darwin should be posthumously welcomed as a prefiguration of postmodern man in that his unresolved tensions anticipated the decidedly non-omniscient spirit of our present age.
Notes
- See on this topic Anthony Kenny, The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (London: Continuum, 2004) and Michael Rae, The Hiddenness of God (Oxford: OUP, 2021).
- Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford : OUP, 2010), Preface, p. xiii.
- Whilst some of Stephen’s co-religionists were able to cleave to the evidence revealed by Scripture itself, Stephen himself had lost faith in the literal witness of Genesis under the pressure of the German Higher Criticism.
- See on this point Le Poidevin, pp. 19-22.
- This distinction is usefully summed up in the German mnemonic, Sein und Schein.
- Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinov, Is God an Illusion? The Great Debate Between Science and Spirituality (London: Rider, 2011).
- See Stephen Law, “The Evil God Challenge” in Philosophers on God: Talking About Existence (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 103-18.
- See Michael Rae, The Hiddenness of God, Preface, p xii and p. 8.
- Although he once speculated tin a letter that life might have originated from unspecified chemical reactions in a small, warm pond.
- In his Temple of Nature and in other writings Erasmus postulated the initial presence of a tiny filament or “ens” which went on to develop and diversify life (bringing to mind Richard Dawkin’s ideas of “replicators” making their miraculous [because unaccounted-for] appearance and so developing family lines). Such thinking of course inverts the tried-and-tested logic of ex nihilo nihil fit and asks us to believe instead that ex nihilo omnia fiunt. The most obvious cavil is of course, Where did these alleged tiny filaments come from in the first place?
- Chopra and Mlodinov, Is God an Illusion? p. 125.
- See The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887, volume 1, p. 318 and Deborah Lavin, Edward Aveling, Son-in Law of Karl Marx. A Victorian Enigma (Milton Keynes: Lightning Force, 2021), pp. 348-9.
- Lavin, Edward Aveling, p. 349.
- Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, (New York: Simon Schuster, 2012). Notably, Rupert Shortt, declining to be “blinded by science,” notes that the term “quantum vacuum” is merely a learned periphrasis to denote an early stage of a universe already existent, albeit in some inchoate form. See his Outgrowing Dawkins: God for Grown-ups (London: SPCK, 2019), p. 37.
- “The God Delusion and Probability,” pp, 160-73 in Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath, ed, Coming to Faith though Dawkins (Grand Rapids; Kregel, 2023), citation 172.
- I refer to the fact that I had always assumed (did not everybody?) that there was a close correlation between hours spent in the gym working out and weight loss. That was until I read Herman Pontzer’s Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism (London: Penguin, 2021). To cut a long story short, Pontzer’s study of the hunter/gatherer Hadze people (who are active on their feet for 5 hours a day) are no more likely to lose weight than a sedentary Wall Street executive sitting behind a computer console every day. The Hadze people are of course remarkably fit, but by no means as skeletal as “common sense” and previous physiological “science” might previously have predicted.
- Marcus du Sautoy, What We Cannot Know from Consciousness to the Cosmos: The Cutting Edge of Science Explained (London: HarperCollins, 2017), p. 6.
- Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World (London: Watkins, 2018) p. 19.
- J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), p. 286.
- Christian Bandea, God of the Details (London: Amazon, 2021), p. 40.
- Peter Vorzimmer. Darwin: The Years of Controversy (London: University of London Press, 1972), p. 254. Such doubts are expressed in 1860 in Darwin’s letter to C. G. B. Daubeny, August 1, 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 2887A, University of Cambridge.