The following represents a short addendum to my new book, False Messiah,1 because it might seem to some readers that my brief peroration on its last page required a little more elaboration to make my own position on the religious implications of opposition to Darwinism more explicit.
Permit me to start by citing a gag Woody Allen made in one of his films, where in the midst of many other bons mots he remarks on the fact that people are generally more concerned about a sore elbow than the fact that our planet is perpetually careering round and round an otherwise lifeless universe at more than 40,000 miles per hour. It’s superficially a good joke but after my initial guffaw it began to dawn on me that it did not actually reflect any profound truth about the human mind. On the contrary, we (collectively) do care — very deeply — about the anomaly of our life-friendly Planet Earth being surrounded by a sterile infinity of chaos. What, any sentient person is impelled to ask is, what is our ultimate fate against the backdrop of that literally immeasurable mortuary kingdom hemming us in on all sides?
The Enlightenment Hope for a Theory of Everything
Historically the answer to that question had been sought in religion but after the Enlightenment centuries, the solution increasingly began to be sought by the application of the scientific method. This is why Darwin’s theory, despite its glaring demerits, gradually won over so many hearts and minds. Even Darwin’s ally Thomas Huxley, who harbored extreme doubts about the viability of “natural selection,” was willing to pull his punches with Darwin because the latter’s theory accorded with the secularist zeitgeist which Huxley wished to promote. Strangely, the truth appeared to play second fiddle for Huxley.
Natural selection was self-evidently not (and never could be) empirically demonstrable, but for some persons an inner calculus seems to have moved them to conclude that it would be worth overcoming any sense of cognitive dissonance if they could only just claim (or at least pretend) that they had found The Answer in science. For however dismal a creed Darwinism is, it at least provides a decent scientific fig leaf and a (claimed) totalizing explanation to cover up the huge area of ignorance which people today seem less able to deal with than their more philosophical ancestors.2 Darwinism fitted in well with the century of (would-be) omniscience.
The New Critical Context
In our own day the mental temper I have outlined above is perhaps more specially relevant to the period from 1942 (the advent of the New Synthesis) to 1975 (the year just before the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene in 1976). It was the misfiring of Dawkins’s attempt to weaponize Darwinism for the cause of militant atheism, combined with a host of scientific discoveries in the last half century which are uncooperative with the Dawkins thesis3, that have now forced a hard rethink on evolution. This new critical context clearly makes it more difficult for those wishing to use Darwinism as a sort of cognitive crutch to shore up their materialist mind-set. In my book, I summed up the new thinking which must necessarily follow on from the recently perceived inadequacy of the whole Darwinian paradigm. As I wrote,
There is surely considerable irony in the fact that Darwinism, when subjected to an unblinking rationalist critique, reveals itself to be so completely unconvincing as to propel a (historical) secularist like myself in the direction of theistically oriented meditations on life’s ultimate realities.4
Let me try to explain those words by contextualizing them against the background of other 21st-century writers whose views come close to my own. The sentiment cited immediately above resembles but (for reasons which I will go into later) is not entirely identical with thoughts expressed some 15 years ago in a provocatively titled book by Richard Barns, a short account of which should, together with a few further examples, provide a useful prelude to clarifying my own position more precisely.
“The Dawkins Proof for the Existence of God”5
Barns’s fundamental thesis in the above titled study was that Dawkins (unbeknownst to himself) argued in a way inconsistent with atheism but in a way perfectly consonant with Christian theism. Dawkins, in Barns’s opinion, thought and acted as if there were somewhere, somehow, normative standards that people ought to follow (in philosophical parlance an ought, not just an is). In other words, we are not merely just matter-in-motion, for the belief that only matter existed could not account for the existence of anything immaterial, such as memory, altruism, or conscience. “Even Richard Dawkins lives as if God exists,” Barns declared, adding combatively.
Every time you hear Dawkins talking about good and evil as if these words meant something, it should strike you loud and clear as if he had announced to the world, “I am contradicting myself.”6
Theory-of-Everything Thinking
Although Dawkins knows full well that evolution can have no goal in view, just like Darwin before him (who notoriously appealed to the parallel of intelligent human breeders to explain mindless natural selection!), Dawkins resorts to similar images (such as the transparent rhetorical trick involved in the phrase “climbing Mount Improbable”) in the attempt to solicit assent for his views. For Barns, however, such a baroque explanation implied an “own goal” scored by Dawkins against himself. In truth what Dawkins was describing was but a periphrastic formulation of theistic evolution. After all, is it possible to “randomly” climb a hill (even in easy stages) without the volition and determination to resist gravity, albeit gravity on a minor scale?
As indicated above, Barns has not by any means been the only one to call out Dawkins in recent times. In literary heavyweight Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech (2016),7 Wolfe focused on the everlasting crux of the origin of human speech. It is a mystery which has puzzled humanity at least since the time of Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century and, as Wolfe points out with some humorous relish,8 the roots of language ability remain as unknown now as they did when Herder wrote his Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the Origin of Language) in 1772. Neither Herder nor later Darwin, as Wolfe points out, could find one shred of evidence that human speech had evolved from animals. This was particularly galling to Darwin since his whole life was essentially a quest for the secrets of creation or, as Wolfe phrases it in more mordant tones,
Darwin had fallen, without realizing it, into the trap of cosmogonism, the compulsion to find the ever-elusive Theory of Everything, an idea or narrative that reveals everything in the world to be part of a single and suddenly clear pattern… Like every other cosmogony, Darwin’s was a serious and sincere story meant to satisfy man’s endless curiosity about where he came from and how he came to be so different from the animals around him. But it was still a story. It was not evidence. In short, it was sincere, but sheer, literature.
pp. 20, 27
In point of fact the morphological link between ape and (wo)man is much less straightforward than it might at first appear, as is shown in the different language competences of apes and humans. The explanation Darwin later advanced in The Descent of Man was entirely ad hoc, as for instance when he muses on where we humans might have got our superior IQ/articulacy from:
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.9
This of course is an entirely Lamarckian argument which in later life Darwin appears to have pressed into service out of desperation and a sense of faute de mieux.10
Bringing the story up to date, Wolfe points out that the premier linguist of the 20th century, Noam Chomsky, who for decades thought that he had cracked the language problem by his postulation of a language “organ” situated in the brain, finally had to throw in the towel and admit defeat. And as Wolfe satirically points out, if Chomsky, who had never accepted the development of language by successive evolutionary adaptations, was now recanting his “organ” theory, then this inevitably had large theistic implications:
Chomsky made it clear he was elevating linguistics to the altitude of Plato’s transcendent eternal universals… He was relocating the field [of enquiry] to Olympus.
p. 89
This meant in plain English that Wolfe/Chomsky were all but conceding that language might have been “God-given” which, in Richard Lewontin’s notorious old phrase, could most logically be construed as the heresy of “allowing a divine foot in the door.”
Alas Poor Darwin. I (Thought) I Knew Him Well
The fact that the technocrat Barns and the late Tom Wolfe make common cause is a significant straw in the wind indicating that the Darwinian grip on educated minds is beginning to lose much of its force. The example of Wolfe in particular also shows that there is slowly arising a wedge between practitioners of conventional biological science and the intelligentsia in the wider sense. The attempt by atheist proselytizers to disempower independent thought is clearly resulting in many notable pushbacks. Earlier in the present century we witnessed another example of this trend in the case of the late Antony Flew, erstwhile Chairman of the British Rationalist Association, seceding from his earlier, materialist viewpoint. Whilst not espousing any one particular religious creed, he nevertheless came to accept on philosophical grounds that the universe was created.11 This was unarguably one of the biggest volte-faces observed since the time of Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid to late 1860s. A delicious irony of Flew’s “conversion” was that the erstwhile CEO of the British Rationalist Association latterly described his intellectual move as a “pilgrimage of reason.”
My own position comes somewhat closer to that of Flew than it does to that of Barns because Barns takes the disproof of Darwinism as proof positive of an exclusively Judeo-Christian revelation.12 Whilst being sympathetic to that interpretation, my own inclinations are (with Wolfe’s strictures against cosmogonism in mind) more ecumenical and tend more to the position once held by celebrated poet John Keats who chose to find his own religious path without undue deference to traditional dogmas and formularies.
Keats is famous for his somewhat gnomic phrase “negative capability,” which he defined as “The ability to be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching out after fact & reason.”13 As Keats scholar Robert Ryan pointed out, Keats “generally cultivated a kind of intellectual humility that prevented him from claiming certainty in areas where no certainty was really possible”14 (which of course included the religious sphere, where he followed an idiosyncratic form of via negativa). Keats objected that the views of his fellow poets Coleridge and Wordsworth could all too easily descend into unwarranted certitude and even sermonizing.
While the established religious route may no longer be the predominant way of apprehending the mysteries of life and its origins, the erstwhile standpoint of Keats is certainly gaining resonance in our doubt-ridden 21st century. I for one welcome its openness to questioning and wonder.
Notes
- Neil Thomas, False Messiah: Darwinism as the God that Failed (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2025).
- For dyed-in-the wool atheists, needless to say, Darwinism served as a kind of profane crucifix to ward off any incursions of Christianity!
- I have outlined this often startling and disorienting scientific evidence in False Messiah, pp. 67-76, 169-80.
- False Messiah, p. 180.
- Richard Barns, The Dawkins Proof for the Existence of God (London: Amazon, 2010).
- Barns, The Dawkins Proof, p. 13.
- Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016).
- The 21st century’s premier linguist, Noam Chomsky, never backed the idea of language being an evolutionary “adaptation” and latterly even forsook his own theory of there being a language “organ” in the brain. In later years Chomsky retreated to a position of stoic bafflement in the face of the inexplicable. See Wolfe, pp. 3-6.
- The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 110.
- On Darwin’s curious reversion to the once pilloried Lamarckism see my False Messiah, pp. 39-43.
- See Antony Flew, There Is a God (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
- “Christianity in not constructed by a series of deductions from a central principle; rather is it the product of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ and the written revelation of the Bible” (The Dawkins Proof, p. 111).
- Robert R. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), p. 65. The word “negative” as used by Keats was used in a somewhat idiolectal way, meaning opposition to the philosophical principles of 19th-century positivism of the Comtean variety.
- Ryan, Keats, p. 65.