[00:00:05] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Hello, I'm Jonathan Witt, your host for this episode of Id the Future, I'm happy to have back on the show, Neil Thomas. He is the author of an excellent new book from Discovery Institute Press, taking leave of Darwin. A longtime agnostic discovers the case for design.
Neil Thomas is a british academic. He's retired. He had a successful career. He's coming from a liberal arts background, and some people might see that as a weakness for a book about Darwinism, but I see it as a strength because we've had plenty of scientists writing about Darwinism and the weaknesses and challenges of darwinian theory. But Neil brings a perspective, some skills, intellectual skills sharpened by his studies. We talked about those more in the previous episode, so we won't go into that too much there. But if you're looking for a fresh take on evolutionary theory and the design debate, taking leave of Darwin is certainly that. He does a fantastic job of weaving together scientific threads, scientific evidence that he grappled with cultural influences on Darwin, on the darwinist of the 20th century. It's just a very rich smorgasbord, if you will, cultural, philosophical, intellectual journey. He, as I mentioned in the previous podcast, he's not the sort of intellectual that's supposed to exist. He's a settled darwinist, settled secularist there in England. And then he comes along and he has a crisis of faith in Darwinism, if you will. And maybe it wasn't a terrible crisis because maybe you weren't especially fond of Darwinism. I think the way you put it is you just kind of took it on, on faith from the culture. Well, it's the conventional wisdom that Darwinism is. Right. Okay, great. I'm in literary studies and cultural studies. I'll take that and move on. But then when you finally studied it, you found that it was kind of like the emperor and his new clothes. You're like, okay, now that I'm actually, I've come to the parade and I'm looking at them. There's no clothes here. Your book highlights. And let's go ahead and just jump right in. And I want to start a little more on the cultural side, and then we'll get into some of the science in this episode. Your book does a masterful job of drawing linkages and noting possible influences that scientific specialists would tend to miss. Let's highlight just one of those threads here. Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and heroic atheism. I really loved your discussion of that in the book. You quote them and note how their language echoes some of the heroic poetry of the ancient world and also that of the early middle ages. And the connection here is Darwinism, as Richard Dawkins would later put it, made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. So we see that moving into the late 18 hundreds, early 20th century. And so you have figures like Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche and some others that rather than bemoaning, oh, Darwinism, he cast God down and now we've lost God, they said, let's embrace atheism and confront the darkness, empty universe with a heroism. And you draw an interesting parallel to heroic poetry, and in particular the old english poem the battle of Malden. Tell us a bit more about that linkage.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Yes, indeed, I believe that there does exist a deep seated, maybe atavistic instinct to affirm an almost exclusively heroic or fatalistic attitude to life, which some might even describe as being nihilism.
Now, this is not so apparent in the kind of older literature, english literature most have studied at some point, say, chaucer or shakespeare, but is very much present in the much older stages of european culture, such as the homeric epics of the Iliodore Odyssey, where the idea is glorified of death being welcomed before dishonour. Most memorably, it is also present in the old icelandic sagas and in the germanic lay of Hildebrand or the lay of Nibelung, so beloved of Wagner, and which I wrote about in my previous incarnation as a german professor. Now, the specific poem that you refer to was a very old poem written in 991 ad called the battle of Malden, which tells of a famous or infamous victory, if you like, over the Anglo Saxons by norman warriors.
And the rallying cry of the English is that they should ignore their failing powers in battle and keep on fighting to the end, the implication being that death is infinitely preferable to surrender to the Norsemen. Now, what's the relevance of this to modern philosophers? Well, it's this. It's the same kind of macho, fatalistic ethic which I detected in the writings of the philosopher Bertrand Russell and in those of Richard Dawkins, who acknowledges his philosophical debt to Russell. Both Russell and Dawkins transfer the ancient warrior ethos to the larger existential realm, which, of course, is their primary concerns. And the subtext to drill down a bit deeper is, as I see it, this I'm thinking of Dawkins's implicit accusations that people of faith are cowards or wimps hiding from harsh existential realities, whereas he and other doctrinaire rationalists are as courageous as our anglo saxon forebears were facing the ultimate void via the unstoppable viking force. That, in a nutshell, is what I saw. Nothing is new under the sun. And I think that the Dawkins and Russell were invoking, channeling, maybe some of this ancient way of thinking.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Yeah. As you talk about that, I think of Tom Shippy and his book on Tolkien, the author of the century. He talks about how Tolkien, whereas he didn't share the kind of ultimately nihilistic view of a dark reality with the northern, pre christian forebears, he admired that norse or northern courage where there was no kind of hope after death.
And he said, there's actually is a virtue there, but if it gets disconnected from truth, then it can become twisted and become a vanity.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Yes. A virtue of a rather bleak sort.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Oblique sort. But there's a courage that could be turned to something useful.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: And that's kind of, kind of what should be says Tolkien kind of explores with one of the groups in the lord of the Rings. Well, I better. I better nip that in the bud since I'm a Tolkien fan. And we could end up going well down that path if we're not careful.
Your book highlights two serious problems with Darwin's idea of natural selection, helping random variation build all of life's diversity. What is the first?
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Well, mentioning natural selection is a cornucopia of difficulties. There are all sorts of problems with the term, with the bare lexical item, which we call natural selection. The first one, I would say, is a semantic one because that which Darwin referred to as natural selection had already had currency in the english language before Darwin's day, in the language of animal breeders, to designate the wholly unpredictable variations which lay outside the control of the breeders themselves to alter. So natural selection in its proper meaning meant something like nature's serendipity, what is outside our control. But when Darwin commandeered the term, he stood the original meaning of the term on its head to imply that nature was not arbitrary and unpredictable, but also creative. In the evolution of the organic world. A very considerable form of semantic creep, if not distortion, had crept in when he used the term.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah, you nicely talk about how he talks out of two sides of his mouth, that half the time when he talks about it, it's purposeless. But then he uses all this purposive language when talking about natural selection.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Well, there are all sorts of problems.
There is, as it happens, no empirical evidence of a crossover of one species to another, even though, down against the evidence suggesting that could be. I mean, there is no such thing as that kind of continuous metamorphosis of species which is necessary to his theory. This constant hybridization was something which Darwin wanted to be the case, but wasn't the case. And he had the grace to admit that in the origin of species, when he said that all nature should be an uproar, according to my ideas, this form mutating into that form and so on, in a number of intermediaries which nature does not show up.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Yeah, the evidence wasn't there in his time, and somebody said, well, it happens too slowly or we'll get it eventually. But then, as Michael B. He's pointing out in his recent couple of books, the edge of evolution and Darwin devolves. Now, we've got these long running experiments with microbes and millions and billions of colonies, and they hit walls. They can micro evolve, but they hit walls. We see some interesting devolutionary processes, but the picture is much more like what most people assume before Darwin is that, yeah, nature can adjust within limits, species can adjust within limits, but not beyond that.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Micro mutation rather than macro. Yes.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Right. So you do a nice job of summarizing that problem I found particularly delicious, though, your discussion of his, as I said, talking out of both sides of his mouth, trying to have his cake and eat it, too, in terms of purposeful, purposeless. Is it one or the other? Well, what are you talking about here? Darwin?
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Yes. I mean, he seems to me a very endearing individual. In many ways. He inspired a lot of love, there's no doubt about that. You know, the sepia tinted photos show a rather harsh victorian patriarch, but I'm sure he was nothing like that. Otherwise, he couldn't have inspired so much friendship. But he did have this rather slippery way of arguing about things. I mean, prime cases is fossils. You know, he complained that the fossil evidence was inadequate to substantiate his theories. Well, the truth of the matter is that the fossils, neither then nor in the century and a half since, have been able to substantiate his theories. In fact, the so called cambrian explosion of species, which happened some 540 million years ago, shows us that species in most cases, came for fully formed, which speaks for special creation, not slow evolution. If it speaks for anything.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Yes. Species and whole phyla, whole body plans just suddenly.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Which is, you know, a very high level of the taxonomic category, and boom, all of a sudden you've got, you know, according to Darwin's theory, you should get these minor changes as the tree of life, and those get larger and larger and larger and eventually they'll branch out until you start getting separate families. And then up from there, subphyla and eventually phyla, cambrian explosion, boom. You've got like more than two dozen phyla just suddenly there. Huge problem. Of course, Darwin's doubt. The book goes into that in extensive detail. Your book, I think, again, does a fantastic job of summarizing that problem.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: I mean, I wonder if Darwin, by some kind of historical counterfactual, had been able to live into the 1970s to witness the occasion of Gould and Eldridge announcing their theory of punctuated equilibrium. He would have said, this is quite impossible by my standards. Such things are divine saltations. This cannot happen in nature.
And I think that he would have regarded those two or two Americans as closet creationists on that account because he could not conceive of anything evolving so, so quickly apart from some of some sort of supernatural occurrence.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: And I take that to his credit. I could put that to his credit, but he was being realistic about what random processes do, how quickly they could do it. I mean, you can throw a scrabble board those tiles down and you might get it or the word and you're not going to get a whole sentence. And to get these huge leaps quickly, you need something preposterously unlikely and you need them strung together. And. And so he insisted on a type of gradualism and thought he'd found the way, but the fossil record just did not support it. And it's, as we've discovered, more and more and dug more and more, it's continued to confirm this very different picture from what he hoped to find.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: And of course it brought up all sorts of problems for his more honest american legatees, Gould and Eldridge, who felt that, well, we've got to reckon with the lack of fossil evidence somehow this is our expedient for doing so by bringing up punctuated equilibrium. But of course, that in itself, as you hint, brings up problems of its own because how could punctuated equilibrium account for the gradual evolution of body parts and so on and so forth?
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it may have been Philip Johnson, the author of Darwin on trial, who pointed out that he noticed that you tend to have. The paleontologist would be open to this idea of punctuated equilibrium because they were acutely aware of the fossil record problem for Darwinism. But the evolutionary biologist, the geneticists, would tend to have nothing, no interest in this idea of punctuated equilibrium because they understood that the mathematical probability problems with evolving things at a genetic level that rapidly were just absurd. So they would reject that side of it. What neither side was willing to do is to put both sides of the evidence together and say, hmm, maybe Darwinism is simply wrong because it's not lining up on either side.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Yes, I think a lot of subject specialists are sort of not exactly at each other's throats, but they have very different views. For instance, philosophers, I mean, people like myself, who are trained to look very carefully at the evidence, the verbal texture, et cetera, have great difficulty swallowing all that Darwin put forward. So there are kind of sort of internecine rivalries, even between sort of scientific and philosophical specialties on this subject.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating to see those fault lines and find them. Yeah, I want to read a passage from chapter six of your new book, taking leave of Darwin, and then have you elaborate. So, yeah, you're right. If the reigning materialist paradigm had even a tolerably convincing weight of evidence behind it, I would be the first to accept it. In fact, I would embrace it wholeheartedly and with a sense of relief, even closure, since it would provide an excellent fit with a prior educational formation which has habitually foregrounded rational, evidence based criteria. However, it is those very rationalist principles which bid me reject the darwinian narrative and its original neo darwinian and extended manifestations. I find it the grandest historical irony that the most fervent defenders of Darwinism claim to be advancing the ideals of the european enlightenment. My view is that they are, in reality, dishonoring the foundational principles of that admirable project by perpetuating a hypothesis without empirical foundation or even the slightest approximation to verisimilitude. As philosopher Richard Spilsbury once noted, the basic objection to neo Darwinism is not that it is speculative, but that it confers miraculous powers on inappropriate agents. In essence, is an attempt to supernaturalize nature, to endow unthinking processes with more than human powers. So that's the end of the code. And you go so far even to suggest that it's a kind of throwback to ancient pagan thinking. Can you elaborate on that notion?
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Yes, I'd like to do it in two parts. You mentioned the enlightenment and the sort of periodization of philosophical thinking and so on.
If anything, the philosophers of the European Enlightenment prided themselves on being able to free themselves from medieval superstition. That's what they recorded. Now, that superstition, they felt, was faith bound rather than evidence bound.
The Enlightenment philosopher saw themselves as precursors of modern science, which works on the basis of empirical evidence, backed up by strict testing and expand, as we all know now, the point is that none of that applies to Darwinism, certainly not unequivocally, which has no empirical evidence for its claims. And therefore, I cannot in all good conscience accept the boast that it could be in any sense lineal successor intellectually of enlightenment thinking at all.
So that would be my cavil and caveat about the Enlightenment as to the point that you bring up about the throwbacks to the ancient world.
Well, if you look at the controversies that Darwin has given rise to in our age with philosophers such as Mary Midgeley and Antony Flow and others, such philosophers have objected that crypto animistic talk about selfish genes and are somehow arbitrary for somehow miraculously creative natural selection. Those things remind me the way in which ancient peoples would also have an animistic take on nature. They would personify natural forces, such as, for instance, the aeolus, the God of the winds, and, well, I think this is well known, Mars, the God of war, Venus, the goddess of love, etcetera, etcetera. So in a strange way, there's a kind of link between that kind of extremely ancient thinking on what purports to be the very newfangled and progressive ideas of Darwinism itself. And in a wider sense, I suppose one would claim that there was a study done about 40 years ago now by an american called Dov Osbort, very discerning study, claiming such creativity for natural selection.
Bishop Wilberforce thought that Darwin was making natural selection into a, quote, impersonal deity, that he was, despite himself, being guided by theistic ideas of progressionism, without being aware of this religious bias. And I see all sorts of throwbacks and biases in the way that people like Richard Dawkins, and I wouldn't be the first to say to accuse Richard Dawkins of partial animism, by the way, and that they don't see these links, or perhaps they don't wish to acknowledge them, because to say that natural selection can work autonomously, that chance can somehow produce a thought out, finished product, it seems a little bit baffling to me. One would need a supportive agency of some sort to come towards rescue before one could make such a courageous claim, it seems to me.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: Yeah, the linkage back to the pagan thinking, and not just to the atomists, but to these pagan personifications of different aspects of nature. I found that a fascinating linkage. You work that out, develop that concept very nicely in the book. It's kind of a final to kind of wrap up our two part discussion. Well, let's kind of pull back, go kind of big picture worldview. You're a longstanding member of the British Rationalist Association, a long time agnostic. You explain, I think, in the introduction, but in the book you say that your hard look at the evidence has shaken your agnosticism. Talk to me a bit about that aspect of your journey.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yes, okay. I think what I came to see in the course of research in Darwinism, which I've never done before in a long life, was to see that it was a theory that was developed against all available empirical evidence rather than on the basis of it. Embarrassingly, for proponents of Darwinism, modern science suggests the initiating activity of some unknown but superior force other than natural selection, working behind the scenes. So that, to put it in a sort of tabloid nutshell, modern science proves God rather than Darwin. And if you're asking me on a personal level, of course, I've had thoughts about this for my own self, and I cannot really get beyond the idea, which is put by more able philosopher than I would ever be. That is Anthony flew, who, at the end of the day, even though he said that he had undergone a scientific conversion, it wasn't a conversion to a full on form of christian faith, as many people would understand. It was more a more muted deist version. And of course, the deist suggested that God lit the blue touch paper for the earth, but had been little seen after that.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: And maybe an older. You know, the kind of modern deism is very rigorous. You know, it might say that there was a divine being that launched the big Bang and then it hasn't been involved, whereas an older deism would have been maybe not quite so rigorous, might have not had a problem with a God being involved at the origin of the first life, you know, maybe the first animals. But it's not a God that's kind of intimately involved in people's daily lives, that sort of thing.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Well, whichever way you choose to interpret it, I mean, as far as my everyday life is concerned, I mean, I've tried, not always successfully, there's no doubt about that, to live it on the basis of what we in England called humanist principles, which to some extent is living on christian capital, I will admit. But to be a Christian with a small see as what I've tried to be. And so, in a way, I have not had to alter my stance on life in any very seismic way. But what I do feel is that I have a sense of vicarious resentment that people of faith have been somehow short changed by what I now regard as a darwinian canard.
For instance, the Church of England, the anglican church, made a retrospective apology to Darwin in 2008 for getting him wrong. You know, the sort of thing they might have said.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: I think that apology is rather grotesque, since Darwin is a conjecture without scientific backup of any kind and very possibly a misdirection of humanity for more than 160 years.
Because according to the strict rules of logic, if not special revelation, which I have my doubts about. But according to the rules of logic, the church has far more logics to its position of an initiator, a first cause of God, if you like. And for it to sort of wantonly throw away, or rather to cede the advantage to Darwinism seems to be an unfortunate way of perhaps suggesting the idea that people might give up on their spiritual birthright, which has been the religion and the ethical compass which has accompanied them throughout their lives. I do feel some reservations about that, but my own sense, I think my sort of moral ethical core has remained constant throughout.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: William, that's fascinating. Yeah. And your mention of the Church of England's apology, it makes me think of a short story by John Updike, pigeon Feathers, which I don't know if you're familiar with.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: But why not?
[00:25:35] Speaker B: I'm not familiar with the story.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. If you can find it and read it, it's fascinating. And it's this boy that kind of ends up with parents and a church leader who are basically trying to accommodate kind of darwinian materialism that somehow fitted in to their religiosity. And it's kind of grotesque. And he kind of wakes up to this. There's this kind of hypocrisy or this game they're playing. Anyway, it ends up.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: I've made a note of that. Yeah, pigeon feathers.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: And pigeon feathers come into it at the end. It's, it's, it's a beautiful, beautiful short story. Very, very interesting. But, but I've very much enjoyed this conversation, Neil. We could probably, you know, pull out other chapters and go on for hours. But we want folks to buy the book. It's taking leave of Darwin and the subtitle. A long time agnostic discovers the case for design. And you can find it at online booksellers anywhere at Amazon. If you do get a chance to read it and enjoy it, encourage our listeners to leave a review there at Amazon. Thank you, Neil, for joining me from there in England. Over for id the future, this has been Jonathan Witt. Thanks for listening.
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