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God Bless You Charles Darwin: Reconciling Creation with Evolution

Introduction

Today we celebrate Darwin Day, Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. Darwin continues to be controversial. Why? Why don’t we  just accept evolution and move on?

We know the answer. What keeps stirring the pot is the continuing arguments about evolution and religion. What has developed is a conflict between two groups of people who between them have convinced many people that religion is opposed to modern science. In recent years religious opposition to evolution has been growing in the UK. This provokes atheists into accusing all religious believers of being anti-science.

My aim this evening is to defend the position that religious faith has nothing to fear from evolution and whether it’s true or not can safely be left to scientists. This is the view held by most religious believers. It may surprise you to hear me say this, because the mass media give a completely different impression, but ordinary believers think is very different from the extreme positions we keep hearing about. In my work with the Modern Churchpeople’s Union I have had countless discussions with clergy who say they couldn’t possibly tell their congregations what they really think, because the congregation would be so upset; and also congregations who say they couldn’t possibly tell their vicar what they really think because the vicar would be so upset.

I’m not a scientist, and with apologies to anyone who may be disappointed, what I’m going to say is mainly theology rather than science.

What do we know?

To avoid unnecessary complications I shall describe four main positions. I’ve already mentioned two. One says the Bible provides the facts and science is mere human theory. The other says science provides the facts and the Bible is mere belief. The third is the dualist compromise: science is right about the scientific facts and religion is right about the religious facts, so we need to keep the two separate in their own independent spheres.

These three positions share a view about facts which philosophers call positivism. The idea is that a fact is a truth which has been completely proved so we’ll never need to question it any more. It’s secure, in the bank. As such, facts are completely different from opinions, beliefs and theories. The fourth position is that neither science nor religion can provide complete or certain facts. This is the position I shall defend. For 200 years scientists thought Newtonian physics was absolutely true fact. Then Einstein came along. What had seemed certain was only partially true. So according to this fourth position, when scientific leaders disagree with religious leaders about something, we don’t settle it by general theories about science and religion; instead we allow that either may be mistaken and we judge each issue on its merits.

Religion and science before Darwin

The position I’m defending was normal up to Darwin’s time. Traditional religions, all over the world, have a place for what we now call science: observing what goes on around us, making generalizations and using them to predict the future. They put science within a wider context. Just as science tries to explain the positions of stars by wider theories about the Big Bang and dark matter, so also religion tries to explain the achievements of science by wider theories about why anything exists at all, the purpose of our lives, and how we ought to live.

Genesis 1

A good example is the first chapter of Genesis, the text in which God created the world in six days. Biblical scholars explore what the authors intended to convey. It was written by Jews, about 2,500 years ago, after they had been exiled from their home in Jerusalem to the city of Babylon, the capital of a large empire. While there they learned about the Babylonian theory of the origin of the world.

It went like this. The strongest god is Marduk. After defeating other gods in battle Marduk did something to please them. He provided the gods with servants to do their housework for them. He did this by creating the world and putting humans in it. The purpose of your life is to burn sacrifices and maintain temples for the gods.

The Jews took over that story and changed it. What they took over uncritically was the practical scientific details: the succession of days and what God created in which day. Just as most of us today just accept what scientists tell us about science, the Jews just accepted what the learned Babylonians of their day were teaching about the scientific details. What the Jews changed was what kind of God created the world and why. They said there is only one god, who has complete power and knowledge and has created the world in order to bless the creation. The purpose of your lives is to live in peace and harmony with other people, with the world around us and with God.

Thus they made a theological change while leaving the science largely unchanged. This shows that they were not really concerned with the scientific details. What they were positively saying was that the world has been made to be good for us, so that we may flourish. The beginning of Genesis is the earliest known text which positively affirms the two principles essential to all science: that the world is ordered, and that the human mind is capable of understanding its order.

Christian interpretations

Christians knew from the start that there were errors in the Bible. Early and medieval Christians interpreted their scriptures as allegory: beneath the literal meaning they believed there was a spiritual meaning. In the fourth century the historian Eusebius remarked that if Christians were to take the Bible literally – well, they would have to believe in fairy stories!

An exception was the Reformation debates of the sixteenth century. Protestants and Catholics alike claimed to accept the plain teaching of the Bible literally and accused each other of distorting it. But even then, despite all the rhetoric, all the main traditions found ways to accommodate the science of their day. Calvin, for example, taught that God had dictated the Bible to human authors, but had used language which the people of ancient times would understand.

Natural theology

As modern science began to progress, many people put huge amounts of voluntary effort into it. Why? Today we value science mainly for new technologies; but then, their main motivation was natural theology. Natural theologians believe that we can learn about God by observing the world around us. By Darwin’s time there had been two centuries of natural theologians, especially Church of England clergy, doing scientific research in order to reveal the glory of God’s creation. Darwin himself in his youth expected to become a clergyman, and while he was preparing to sail away on the Beagle to visit South America his uncle commented that scientific research was eminently suitable for a clergyman.

Evolution in the 19th century

Today people often treat religion and science as completely separate; in the first half of the nineteenth century the two were different but related. For example, if I want medicine for my tummy ache I go to the doctor, but if I want bread I go to the baker. My love of freshly baked bread may be related to my tummy ache, but I still know the difference between a baker and a doctor. So also nineteenth century natural theologians saw science and religion as different but related, much as the ancient Babylonians and Jews had done before them.

In the early nineteenth century, before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, geologists found lots of fossils in rocks. It seemed that countless different species of animals had in the past appeared, flourished, and then become extinct. Did God create them all separately and then kill them off? Which of them were in Noah’s ark? Or did God put the fossils in the rocks specially to deceive us?

Later generations looked back on these questions and said “These are religious questions, not scientific questions”. That’s an anachronism, imposing our categories on a generation which didn’t have them. Then, the overwhelming majority of scientists were natural theologians trying to explain the scientific data in ways which made sense both scientifically and theologically.

Evolution was being discussed. One problem with it was the lack of fossils linking one era with the next. The main alternative was catastrophism, according to which the world got into its present state not through gradual evolution but through a series of sudden changes when some species became extinct and other species appeared. Many catastrophists believed that these catastrophes had been caused by divine intervention. Usually they argued that the most recent catastrophe had been Noah’s flood.

The catastrophists paved the way to fundamentalism, by reinterpreting Genesis to fit their geological theories. However they were not fundamentalists: they were promoting a scientific theory which in their day had not been refuted.

So here’s another distinction we need to make, between theories which are not scientific and theories which are scientific but are wrong. For a theory to be scientific, it must be open to some kind of assessment based on observations. Popper argued that a theory is scientific if it is open to falsification. Some theories are scientific and have been falsified. To say that the earth is flat is a scientific theory which can be tested, has been tested, and has been disproved.

The same is true for catastrophism. In the early nineteenth century it was a scientific theory which had not been refuted. It was being promoted for scientific reasons. By the end of the nineteenth century anybody who still believed in it was flying in the face of the scientific evidence.

After Origins

Darwin’s Origin of Species changed the situation. Thereafter the evidence for evolution was more convincing. Most church leaders, being natural theologians, were quite happy to accept it in principle, despite questions which I’ll mention later. In 1884 Frederick Temple, the Bishop of Exeter, delivered the Bampton Lectures on the relationship of science and religion. He took for granted that the theory of evolution was true, and public opinion, including the national newspapers, found this perfectly acceptable. Twelve years later he became Archbishop of Canterbury. Such a senior post usually attracted a lot of public debate. If there had been a large body of public opinion opposed to evolution, there would have been a campaign against his appointment. In fact there were no objections at all from people who didn’t believe in evolution. As far as I know the only Church of England bishop who at the time opposed evolution was, I’m sorry to say, Bishop Ryle of Liverpool.

But the minority voices were there. The catastrophists seemed to have lost the scientific argument. Some of their successors reacted against all science. Increasingly they resorted to divine revelation: if you want to know the facts, find out what God has revealed. It’s more reliable than mere human theory. In this way the opposition to evolution gradually evolved: from a scientific theory into a rejection of mainstream science.

This provoked a forceful reaction by Thomas Huxley and his supporters. At a time when most scientists were Christians, and a great many were Church of England clergy, they may have felt out of the loop. They conducted an energetic campaign. On the one hand they argued that religion should be kept out of science because it’s completely separate: science should, as they put it, be ‘value-free’. On the other hand they argued that religious belief was positively opposed to scientific research.

It is their campaigning which misdescribed the evolution debate as though it had been a debate between science on the one hand and religion on the other. They presented Darwin’s opponents as religious believers opposed to science, and his supporters as scientists some of whom happened to have religious beliefs. In the 1850s and 1860s this could not have been the case for the reasons I have given.

One of the greatest achievements of their campaign was to mythologize the debate held in Oxford in 1860. Despite the myth the debate could not have been between church leaders on one side and scientists on the other. In 1860 too many leading scientists were themselves clergymen. The debate was about the scientific case for evolution, though also with an eye to the metaphysical implications. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the main opponent of Darwin’s theory, was a scientist himself and from the evidence we have most of the scientists present seem to have agreed with him.

At the time this debate attracted very little attention. The press barely reported it. It was only twenty years later that Huxley and his supporters used the occasion as an example of their imagined conflict between religion and science. The problem was, they had to remember what had happened. What they remembered was Huxley’s devastating reply to Wilberforce. Nobody could remember the exact words, but judging from the various accounts something like this happened. Wilberforce asked whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that Huxley was descended from a monkey. Huxley turned to the friend sitting next to him, slapped him on the knee, and with a nice ironic touch, exclaimed, ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands’. When called to reply, he declared that he would rather be descended from an unintelligent monkey than from a man of able intellectual and rhetorical skills who uses them to discredit seekers after truth. Superb reply to a pompous debating point, but not exactly cutting edge science.

The idea of a conflict between science and religion began towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was very much a minority view, but the two sides fed on their hostility to each other.

Some dates.

Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859.

In 1870 the First Vatican Council was held, and exalted the infallibility of the Pope to the status of dogma. Initially this declaration was not directed against evolution; but later it was.

In 1871 the first volume of Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology was published. Hodge was the first of the Old Princeton theologians, who laid the theoretical foundations for what is now called Christian fundamentalism. He wrote:

The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches… The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.

Here the infallibility of the Bible closely parallels the infallibility of the Pope. Both appeal to revelation from God which transcends mere human theory.

In 1874 John Tyndall gave the influential presidential address to the British Association. Science, he argued, would provide a complete materialistic explanation of the physical world, including everything from the smallest atoms up to the mental activities of humans. He incorporated Darwin into his theory, and argued that religion had so far stifled science.

In 1875 John William Draper’s book was published under the telling title History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science; and in 1876, Andrew Dickson White’s book The Warfare of Science with Theology. These books rewrote the history of Christianity in order to present it as opposed to science.

Extensions of evolution

So then, if religious belief itself wasn’t in principle opposed to evolution, why was there so much opposition to it? Primarily because then as now it could be adapted to explain not just the origin of species but also pretty well everything.

Reductionism

One set of issues comes from positivism. If knowledge comes from what scientists observe and measure, then all facts are about the physical, observable world. Materialists said everything that exists is either physical matter or is based on physical matter. Reductionists said when we get a complete account of the world, it will be possible to reduce everything to nothing but atoms and laws of nature. Determinists said that because everything is atoms obeying laws of nature, nothing is free or random: everything that happens is caused by other physical processes.

These ideas, increasingly popular in the nineteenth century, produced two questions. If there is no God we need some explanation of how the world came to be full of so many different living things. Christians can choose whether or not to believe in evolution but for atheists evolution is the only satisfactory explanation.

And if the human mind is nothing but a determined product of atoms pushing each other in the human body, this means that all our thoughts and beliefs, our ideas of value and purpose, our moral judgements of right and wrong, you sitting there wondering what you are going to do for Valentine’s Day, are all nothing but by-products of chemical processes in our brains.

In the twentieth century other explanations were developed, but in the nineteenth century many people believed scientists would prove that all our values and judgements are determined by cause and effect, and evolution seemed to show how. If you believe it would be immoral to stick a knife into the throat of the person sitting next to you, forget the idea that it really is immoral: the reason why you consider it immoral is that somehow this belief of yours has evolved as a way of improving your chances of having more sex and babies.

These ideas were most popular in the 1880s and 1890s, the time when Huxley and his allies were most effective in their campaign against religion.

Today, you know how some computer nerds get excited about the prospect that they are going to construct robots which can do everything humans do, and do it better. Robots will have emotions, they will make their own decisions, they will run the world better than we can, eventually they will make human beings redundant, they will enslave us or get rid of us altogether. We’re going to create these things! Isn’t that wonderful! And if you’re not a nerd you ask yourself, “Am I really looking forward to this?”

So also in the nineteenth century the theory of evolution helped those who wanted to show how human beings are really just deterministic, programmed machines. Some people who believed there is more to being human than that, were in the circumstances motivated to deny evolution.

Racism

An alternative extension of evolutionary theory is that, far from disproving value and progress, it shows us what progress is.  Herbert Spencer coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’. Over time evolution produces more complex beings. Europeans have evolved  further than other races, so wiping out Africans and Australians and populating the land with white Europeans is speeding up progress. Destiny. The Empire is making the world a better place. Racism was also at its most popular in the 1880s and 1890s.

Eugenics

Closely allied to racism is eugenics. In his Descent of Man, published in 1870, Darwin allowed himself to be influenced by Spencer and argued that just as we get the best horses by choosing the best ones to breed from, we ought to do the same with humans. By the time Hitler applied the idea, most scientists had discredited it; but in the later nineteenth century this seemed to be where science was leading. Condoms were promoted among the poorer classes so that they would have fewer children by comparison with the better classes. Again, those who didn’t approve of racism or eugenics were tempted to doubt the theory of evolution. At the time, these were good reasons.

Summary

To summarize. Religious opposition to evolution represents a continuous tradition going back to the early nineteenth century catastrophists. However it is a changing tradition. Before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species it would be anachronistic to describe it as a religious tradition, or even as religious arguments. New scientific data raised questions which were scientific, moral and metaphysical. The educated classes were interested in them all and looked for answers which made sense both scientifically and theologically. After 1859, catastrophists were losing the scientific arguments so they concentrated instead on presenting the Bible as an alternative source of scientific facts. Their successors today look for scientific evidence against evolution, while being committed to their own view of the Bible is a source of scientific facts. Like many sectarians, they often claim that they are the only true Christians and anyone who disagrees with them isn’t a true Christian at all even if they think they are.

Ranged against them are the anti-religious campaigners who take them at their word and treat them as the only true Christians, but reach the opposite conclusion that all religious belief is anti-scientific, anti-rational and based on unjustifiable dogmas.

These two groups are in many ways mirror images of each other. They are both committed to that late nineteenth century positivism which makes a sharp distinction between facts, known with absolute certainty, and on the other hand opinions, beliefs and faith. Their disagreement is about the source of facts: is it the Bible or science?

They are also both equally committed to a late nineteenth century view of religion. Religion, according to these two groups, is not an integral part of society’s self-understanding, as it had previously been: instead it is a self-contained cultural phenomenon standing over against mainstream society, rejecting society’s beliefs and offering alternatives based on direct revelation from God, to be believed without question however incredible or irrational they may seem. Again, the difference between the two groups is that one believes that religion so conceived is right, while the other thinks it is wrong.

Finally, these two groups are equally committed to discounting all the religious believers who accept evolution and all the scientists who believe in God. Nearly all the social surveys I am aware of indicate that most people in both Britain and the world have some kind of religious belief, and are also content to leave scientific questions like evolution to scientists. Ironically the country with the largest proportion of anti-evolutionists is also the country which invests most heavily in the products of modern science, namely the USA.

Outside these two groups I believe we can speak of a traditional majority who are religious believers and value science. My argument has been that they are right. We need to reaffirm the value of science not just in order to produce new technologies, but so that we may appreciate and explore the richness of the world around us, how we ought to relate to it, what is the point of all this life, and who if anyone gave us that point. It was for these reasons that for a few centuries large numbers of religious believers, including many Church of England clergy, invested so heavily in developing modern science, and there could be no better place than a liberal, progressive Church of England church to celebrate and reaffirm their achievement.