The National Post, 13/05/00
Creationists correct?: Darwinians wrongly mix science with morality, politics
Michael Ruse
National Post
In 1980 the young governor of
Uncritically, Governor White signed into law a bill promoted
by an evangelical Christian state representative, a bill debated by the
legislature for less than half an hour. This "balanced treatment"
bill required that children be taught not only the theory of evolution, but
also the Bible -- taken absolutely literally. Countering the claim that we are
all descended by Charles Darwin's glacially slow process of development from
very simple organisms, children were also to be told, in their biology classes,
that Adam and Eve were real people, and that Noah's Flood once covered the
whole earth.
The
I still remember arguing in the
"Dr Ruse," Mr. Gish
said, "the trouble with you evolutionists is that you just don't play
fair. You want to stop us religious people from teaching our views in schools.
But you evolutionists are just as religious in your way. Christianity tells us
where we came from, where we're going, and what we should do on the way. I defy
you to show any difference with evolution. It tells you where you came from,
where you are going, and what you should do on the way. You evolutionists have
your God, and his name is Charles Darwin."
At the time I rather pooh-poohed what Mr. Gish said, but I found myself thinking about his words on
the flight back home. And I have been thinking about them ever since. Indeed,
they have guided much of my research for the past twenty years. Heretical
though it may be to say this -- and many of my scientist friends would be only
too happy to chain me to the stake and to light the faggots piled around -- I
now think the Creationists like Mr. Gish are
absolutely right in their complaint.
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere
science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion -- a
full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an
ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one
complaint -- and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make
it -- the literalists are absolutely right.
Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is
true of evolution still today.
One of the earliest evolutionists was the eighteenth-century
physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. He was no atheist, believing
rather in God as "Unmoved Mover": a being who decides right at the
beginning on the future course of nature, lays down unbreakable laws, and never
acts again.
Rightly, Erasmus Darwin saw this "deism" as
challenging Christian theism, which takes God as ready always to intervene
miraculously in His creation. For Erasmus Darwin, evolution was simply
confirmation of his commitment to a law-bound process of creation set down by a
non-interventionist God. It was part and parcel of his alternative religion.
To this vision,
In his progressivism -- especially in his belief that we
humans ourselves can and do improve our overall well-being -- Erasmus clearly
stood in yet another way against Christianity, which stresses that salvation
can come only through God. For the Christian, our greatest gains "count
for naught."
Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular
ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity. It stressed laws against
miracles and, by analogy, it promoted progress against providence.
And so things continued. In 1859, Charles Darwin, the father
of modern evolutionary thought, published his great work On the Origin of
Species. With this book,
But almost at once
When Jesus died he left no functioning religion. This was
the work of his supporters, especially
But like Paul also, for all that Huxley venerated Charles
Darwin, he could see in the master's writings only a glimpse of what he himself
needed for his own purposes. And in working to his own ends, Huxley was led to
the same consequences as Paul: a functioning system, but not that of the man in
whose name he worked and preached.
Origin appeared at just that time in Victorian Britain when
it was necessary to transform the country from a rural-based, near-feudal
society and to fit it for an urbanized, industrialized future. There was need
for reform everywhere: in the civil service, merit had to count, not
connection. In medicine, doctors had to stop killing patients and start curing
them. In education, learning had to be for today and not to glorify the past.
Huxley and his fellow reformers were in the thick of all this -- Huxley himself
was a college dean, served as a member of the new London School Board and on
numerous royal commissions looking into the state of things.
Correctly, Huxley saw Christianity -- the established
Anglican Church particularly -- as allied with the forces of reaction and
power. He fought it vigorously, most famously when he debated Samuel
Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. (Supposedly, on being asked whether he was descended
from monkeys on his grandfather's side or his grandmother's side, Huxley
replied he had rather be descended from an ape than from a bishop of the Church
of England.)
As a social reformer therefore, Huxley, known in the papers
as "Pope Huxley", was determined to find a substitute for
Christianity. Evolution, with its stress on unbroken law -- which could be used
to reflect messages of social progress -- was the perfect candidate. Life is on
an upwardly moving escalator. It has reached Victorian Britain. Who knows what
glories and triumphs might lie ahead? Thus the vision of
Indeed, recognizing that a good religion needs a moral
message as well as a history and promise of future reward, Huxley increasingly
turned from Darwin (who was not very good at providing these things) toward
another English evolutionist.
Herbert Spencer -- prolific writer and immensely popular
philosopher to the masses -- shared Huxley's vision of evolution as a kind of
metaphysics rather than a straight science. He was happy to insist that even
moral directives come from the evolutionary process itself.
"Social Darwinism" (more accurately, Social Spencerianism) took evolution to entail struggle and
success for the few, and so the moral message was understood as enthusiasm for
laissez-faire individualism. The state should stay out of the running of
society, and the best should be allowed to rise to the top. Failures deserve
their fates.
Of course, there were differences between Social Darwinians.
Socialists, Marxists and anarchists also justified their beliefs in the name of
The even greater point is that it continued to go on right
through the twentieth century. Evolutionary ideas were to undergo a great
transformation in the 1930s and 1940s, when a professional science of
evolutionary studies was developed -- a professional science which stood on its
own legs by its own merits, having no need for an alternative career as secular
ideology. But this secular ideology or religion hardly folded its tents and
crept away. One of the most popular books of the era was Religion without
Revelation, by evolutionist Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry. First
published in 1927, the book was revised (for a second time) and reissued in the
1950s.
"All thought and emotion," Huxley wrote, even the
highest, spring from natural mind, whose slow development can be traced in
life's evolution, so that life in general and man in particular are those parts
of the world substance in which the latent mental properties are revealed to
their fullest extent." As always, evolution was doing everything expected
of religion, and more.
Today, professional evolution thrives. But the old religion
survives and thrives right alongside it. Evolution now has its mystical
visionary, its
Faithful to the oldest tradition of evolutionary theorizing --
reading his morality and politics into his science and then reading it right
back out again -- Mr. Wilson warns us that we have evolved in symbiotic
relationship with the rest of living nature, and lest we cherish and preserve
biodiversity we will all perish. Drawing on the dispensationalism
of his Southern Baptist childhood, with the eloquence and moral fervour of
Billy Graham, Mr. Wilson begs us to repent, to stand up and acknowledge our
sins and to walk forward in the ways of evolution. We have but a short time,
else moral darkness will fall on us all.
The language of Stephen Jay Gould is hardly more tempered.
We learn that evolution "liberates the human spirit," that for sheer
excitement evolution "beats any myth of human origins by light
years," and that we should "praise this evolutionary nexus -- a
far more stately mansion for the human soul than
any pretty or parochial comfort ever conjured by our swollen neurology to
obscure the source of physical being."
Mr. Gould ultimately rejects traditional readings of
evolution for a more inspiring, liberating version: "We must assume that
consciousness would not have evolved on our planet if a cosmic catastrophe had
not claimed the dinosaurs as victims. In an entirely literal sense, we owe our
existence, as large and reasoning mammals, to our lucky stars." If this is
not to rival traditional Judaeo-Christian teaching -- with its central belief
that we humans are not just random happenstances, but a major reason why God
created heaven and earth -- I do not know what is.
What is the moral to be drawn from all of this? You might
think that the time has come to save evolution from the evolutionists.
Darwinism is a terrific theory that stimulates research in
every area of the life sciences. In the human realm, for instance, discoveries
in Africa trace our immediate past in ever greater detail, while at the same
time the Human Genome Project opens up fascinating evolutionary questions as we
learn of the molecular similarities between ourselves and organisms as
apparently different as fruit flies and earthworms. Surely this is enough.
There is no need to make a religion of evolution. On its own
merits, evolution as science is just that -- good, tough, forward-looking
science, which should be taught as a matter of course to all children,
regardless of creed.
But, let us be tolerant. If people want to make a religion
of evolution, that is their business. Who would deny the value of Mr. Wilson's
plea for biodiversity? Who would argue against Mr. Gould's hatred of racial and
sexual prejudice, which he has used evolution to attack?
The important point is that we should recognize when people
are going beyond the strict science, moving into moral and social claims,
thinking of their theory as an all-embracing world picture. All too often,
there is a slide from science to something more, and this slide goes
unmentioned -- unrealized even.
For pointing this out we should be grateful for the
opponents of evolution. The Creationists are wrong in their Creationism, but
they are right in at least one of their criticisms. Evolution, Darwinian
evolution, is wonderful science. Let us teach it to our children. And, in the
classroom, let us leave it at that. The moral messages, the underlying
ideology, may be worthy. But if we feel strongly, there are other times and
places to preach that gospel to the world.
Michael Ruse is professor of philosophy and zoology at the