[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm almost ashamed to admit this. It was only after I had retired and I had the mental repose to think about things objectively.
But it somehow came to me.
It was a sort of waking dream, that this dumbness in business, it's rubbish, isn't it?
And it was as direct as that.
ID the Future a podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Despite some serious early criticisms and a raft of internal weaknesses, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has triumphed as the dominant theory of origins for over 150 years.
But is this success justified on scientific grounds? And how is modern science undermining Darwin's theory and the worldview on which it is based on?
Well, welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott, and today I welcome again Professor Emeritus and author Neil Thomas. About his new book, False Darwinism as the God that Failed. Over two episodes of the podcast, we're looking at some of the problems with the theory itself and how it managed to triumph for so long, and of course, how it's being eclipsed now by recent scientific discoveries.
Thomas is a reader emeritus in the University of Durham, England, and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied classical studies in European languages at the Universities of Oxford, Munich, and Cardiff before taking up a post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. He has published over 40 articles in a number of referee journals, including and is author of a number of books, including the 2021 Discovery Institute Press title Taking Leave of Darwin, A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design.
Welcome back, Neil.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Hello there.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: So would you say that this book, False Messiah, is a sequel to Taking Leave of Darwin?
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Yes, I think it's a sequel, but I would like to think it's a more informed sequel because I have not ceased researching into Darwiniana since my last book was published in 2021.
I've been fortunate to be able to publish a whole raft of articles with David Klinghofer on evolution news and views, and that's helped me to clarify and consolidate and has given me the opportunity to expand on what was in article form and expand it all book form. Yeah.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Awesome. Well, in the first half of our conversation, we touched on your journey from longtime Darwinist and agnostic to someone ready to bid farewell to Darwinism, a story that you tell. In Taking Leave of Darwin, we also discussed some of the internal flaws in Darwin's theory, as well as some of the historical influences that helped shape his ideas.
Now, today, in Part two. I'd like to focus on what you explore in the second half of your book. Some of the external reasons that Darwin's theory triumphed. A look at also a few of the key dissenters of his theory in the Victorian era and the arguments that they've made and the bulwark against Darwinism that they represent. And of course, we'll also review how modern scientific advances are challenging Darwinism and the framework that it comes from.
So first of all, I know that you tell this story in taking leave of Darwin, but just very briefly, how long were you a Darwinist?
And what did it really take to be willing to walk away?
[00:03:58] Speaker A: This is one of the strangest stories you will ever hear from anybody.
I.
Darwinist. I was a passive Darwinist. I would say I was not an activist Darwinist.
I accepted what I'd been taught.
And it was only.
I'm almost ashamed to admit this, it was only after I had retired I had the mental repose to think about things objectively.
But it somehow came to me, it was a sort of waking dream that this Darwinism business, it's rubbish, isn't it?
Direct as that.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: And I put it down to the fact that I suppose that like many of us with busy professional and personal lives, that I'd been so preoccupied with the day to dayness of existence and getting by and making money and seeing family okay. And so on, that I really didn't have adequate bandwidth, I think is the word that they use these days to consider the really important existential issues of our life. And it suddenly came to me. I mean, you can, you can use the word epiphany. It sounds a bit pretentious and maybe a bit religious. I don't think it's. I think it was more like a kind of scientific flash of inspiration. You know, do. Am I really believing this on logical and scientific grounds or is it because I've been indoctrinated into. Into just believing it was the case?
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Very interesting.
Yeah, yeah. This Darwin business, it's. It's rubbish.
Yeah, no, I like that. Well, let's look at some of the external factors for the triumph of Darwin's theory.
Um, in your book, you point out that Darwin had a pencil sketch of his thoughts on evolution by 1842 and an informal private essay by 1844. So why, pray tell, did he wait until 1859 before publishing on the Origin of Species? I mean, I consider myself someone who is afraid to commit to things and has trouble, you know, with that. But was it that or was Was there something else and how did that delay actually play into the success?
[00:06:30] Speaker A: There are all sorts of theories about this.
I mean, one of them, I, I, I don't want to go into this, this is too well known really to go into much, but some people say that, that he, it was out of regard for his God fearing wife Emma, that he wanted to pull his punches and not, not, not was by nature a little bit of a prevaricator. You know, he put off till tomorrow what he should be doing today and so on. And then of course, it was only when Wallace came out with very similar ideas that this galvanized him in 1858 to getting down to writing the book itself.
So yeah, I think that was it.
And I suppose he got lucky in a way because if he had published in say, 1845, I don't think the reception of the book would have been as favorable.
I mean, I might come to this later, I think this might come later in our discussion, but the process of secularization in Europe was gathering pace from the 1840s, 50s up into 1860.
So he was on the cusp of a new mental paradigm of people who were discarding old ways of faith and opening themselves up to potentially new ideas.
So in a way it was to, to, to use a peculiar word, providential, as he waited until 1859 to publish.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: And you mentioned Wallace sort of, you know, forcing his hand there. And we'll mention, we'll mention Wallace a little later. You talk about confirmation bias on the part of many intellectuals who embraced the theory soon after it came out, noting that they turned a blind eye to the scientific inadequacies revealed by these early reviewers and accepted the theory as the all but inevitable extension of a long nourished intellectual project.
You also remind readers that Darwin didn't cause the Victorian crisis of faith, but rather served to confirm the skepticism of those who had already formed antitheistic attitudes on other grounds. Can you just explain that a bit more?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, this is where it's necessary to know something about European history, I think, and understand why it happened in the way it did.
One of the most catastrophic events in European history was the great lisbon earthquake of 1755, combined with tsunami, which consumed a lot of the hinterland of Lisbon.
This was taken up by intellectuals like Heinrich von Kleist, the German author who had a short story about it.
And it's obvious from the way that Kleist writes that he is glossing at events as blaming God for allowing such a thing to happen.
Now, the take Home lesson of the Lisbon earthquake was yes, there might be a God, but he's not an interventionist God, otherwise he would have saved us from all this carnage.
So people then diluted their image of God to, to a deistic equivalent.
Trouble is with a deistic equivalent is not a lot of practical use to people in their day to day lives. You can't appeal or even pray to such a God because he's deaf to your entreaties.
And so people began to think, well, hang on, why do we need a God at all if that is the case?
And so what I think happened was that when Charles Darwin came along and bypassed the necessity for invoking any kind of divine figure, at least in the evolution of the species, the people were prepared to listen to him more favorably than they would have before.
I'm not saying that all people after 1755 were in that position. What I'm talking about is the intellectual elite who tend to dominate the conversation, the national conversation at any rate.
And I believe that was the reason for that. Darwin was given such an easy pass, for heaven's sake.
I mean, if you and I had come out with what he'd come out with, I would have booted out of the room. But anyway, that's all history now.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, very interesting context. And then about six months, I think it was after the book Origin of Species on the Origin of Species came out.
So Samuel Wilberforce and Huxley, they had a debate at the time when Oxford was moving from, you know, sort of a clerical institution toward more of that secularization that you refer to.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Well, what did Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, an educated, highly analytical man, point out as a core flaw of Darwin's theory?
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Well, he was very much in league or friendly with Britain's greatest Paleolithic expert, Richard Owen at the time.
And he himself, the bishop had an Oxford first class honors degree in maths. So he was by no means anti science. He was by no means scientific illiterate, but he was in touch with anybody who mattered in the top echelons of the scientific world.
And Richard Owen was not keen on Darwin's theory for logical reasons.
And in fact Wilberforce wrote a 40, 40 page review of the, of the Origin of Species which was not very kind to it.
So I think on purely logical grounds, the sort of things that I respect and where I'm coming from, there was that aspect.
One has to say though, that ex officio he was an important bishop.
And I think that he felt that the liberalizing forces in the Church of England at the time were becoming a little bit excessive.
Around about 1860, more or less at the same time as the Oxford debate, there was a book came out called rather anodyne sounding book called Essays in Reviews. It was written by a number of liberalizing churchmen.
They were the predecessors of the demythologization movement associated with the theologian Rudolf Bulkman in the later 19th, 20th century.
And it was, to use one word, they were keen on an allegorical interpretation of the Bible rather than a literal one.
And this had gone back to the German writer Lessing and the German theologian Hermann reimarus in the 18th century. Anyway, enough is enough, he thought, and I think that those two strands of his thinking, one, that Darwin didn't stack up logically and B that he was encouraging a kind of half belief in his parishioners, that he was diluting down the Christian message for his parishioners. I think those were the two cardinals points that he was. That he was really hopping on about.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And I read parts of Bishop Wilberforce's review, you know, based on what he said at that debate, that lengthy review. I've read parts of it on ID the Future. I found it quite interesting and most interesting was it was not a theological critique.
It was not done on theological grounds. It was done on. On scientific, rational, philosophical grounds.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Perhaps he'd been coached by Richard Owen, but that doesn't mean to say that he hadn't internalized things intelligently on his own account. But he did have influential friends.
Learning friends. Sorry. Yeah.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, your book delves into two key dissenters of Darwin's theory who were contemporaries of the naturalist. One of them is Alfred Russel Wallace, credited as the co discoverer of natural selection. Wallace had such a shift in view that it made Darwin fear he had murdered your own and my child. He said, why did Wallace ultimately reject the idea that natural selection could explain the human mind's unique faculties? And what did he conclude instead?
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, to put it in possibly a slightly facetious way, I think Wallace's internal sense of logic got the better of him in the end.
He realized that what he felt was true in his younger years was on reflection, not as watertight as he had once opposed.
And this came gradually really from 1865 onwards.
He began to associate with people who were against Darwin, not Darwin, as displeasure.
And even in 1889 when he wrote a book explicitly called Darwinism, he used his very last chapter to say, well, Darwinism might apply to animals, but I can't see that it applies to human beings because we are far too complex.
Then there must be some other higher power which has made its entrance into our fates. Well, of course that is as good as saying that he is falling back into a Christian way of thinking. Although I've got to say that he did not announce himself in an exact denominational way as a Christian. But I think he did think of himself as maybe in some obscure sense a theist.
I. And the other thing I think about Wallace is that he was, I think, a man of great intellectual honesty.
In older age he seemed a very benign, kindly old man. I've read an interview with him with somebody, I can't remember who now, but sort of person that you'd love to be your uncle or your grandfather, you know, he was. And.
And he didn't have any sense of false pride about him.
I mean, with Darwin you got the impression I am Charles Darwin, I am Erasmus Darwin's nephew, therefore grandson, rather.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Therefore I must, you know, I must show the flag for the family and so on.
With Wallis, he came from relatively lowly stock.
He didn't have this sense of amour propre that Darwin had and he could afford to speak the truth, which must have been very liberating for him.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
Didn't have so much to lose, perhaps didn't feel that pressure of.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: But is the point.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: I was saving the family name?
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Interesting. And when we say he's the co discoverer, were they both just thinking along the same lines? How much did they collaborate? What was the nature of it?
[00:20:12] Speaker A: They didn't collaborate.
What happened was that the so called turn eight letter which Wallace sent to Darwin from the tropics outlined the very similar ideas they had.
And then there was a meeting in London, I think it was in 1858 or 9, just 58, I think, just before, where both theories were read out in front of a scientific audience in order to give them equal time.
But they didn't collaborate. It was a coincidence and one of the strangest coincidences in history, I suppose.
But Wallace did later divert. In fact, Wallace had an amazing life.
He didn't die till 1913 and he wrote all sorts of books on cosmology.
He had a be in his bonnet about compulsory immunization of children. He was wrong about that, by the way.
He thought the higher ups were trying to impose on the working class that they must immunize their children against this, that and the other. He was wrong about that. But he did enter the fray on a much wider sense than Darwin did. Darwin devoted the latter part of his life to the study of barnacles because it was safe. Nobody size your own barnacles.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: But Walmart put his head above the parapet and he has to be admired for that, I think.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: Indeed, yeah. Now you also highlight the work of English romantic poet William Wordsworth as providing a philosophical barrier to the full acceptance of Darwinism. How did Wordsworth's poetry do this? And how did this spiritually charged view stand in opposition to Darwin's grim vision, the struggle for existence?
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Yeah, good question.
A recent survey was done, I think it was done in Britain, suggesting that many Britons feel closer to God when they're in nature than when they're in church.
What Wordsworth was doing, although he wouldn't have defined it as that, he was in fact poeticizing the rather arid prose of William Paley, the archbishop who wrote Natural Philosophy in around about the 1800 and making it real for people.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: He.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: The way he evokes nature. I first encountered him when I was only 16 years old, but I knew instinctively that here was a man of huge spiritual distinction.
I think Brits have responded to that at various levels and in various ways.
But you ask about how different that was to Darwin's red and soothing claw claw conception of nature.
Wordsworth was not ignorant or immune to that.
He understood that some people suffered a lot.
And on his lakeland walks he would meet various people who were tramps or dispossessed tramps in the British sense of the word, not the American sense of the word.
Vagrants and the old peddler, for instance, and he would ask them to confide in him their stories.
So this was an example of what I would call practical Christianity.
He understood that there was suffering in the world and he did what what he could, which was perhaps very little, but what he could to try and alleviate it.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: In fact, one of his co poets, Shelley, referred to Wordsworth as a rare word, hierophant, which means a priest.
So that's how he was regarded at the time, as having the sort of an aura of scientific about him.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And did he. Was he writing before Darwin published?
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Yes, he was born in 1770 and he died in 1850.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: I mean it is. I'm not saying that he didn't know anything about evolution, but he certainly wouldn't have known anything about Charles Darwin.
That was 10 years after his death.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: Right.
And I don't know if you were able to pull a line or two from some Wordsworth poetry just to encapsulate this, you know, opposition to a reductionist view of life. I have a few lines on my end if you. If you don't. But.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Well, I, I. There is one there. There's. There is. There are a few lines which I quoted for. For in. In the book, in fact, which I've. Which I've noted down here from a poem called Tinton Abbey.
Now, I doubt very much that even you will have been to Tinton Abbey in the Wye Valley on the English Welsh border.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: I have not.
[00:25:53] Speaker A: No, no, no. It is the most sublime place.
The old abbey rises up like a Gothic ruin. There's a river nearby.
There are hills and greenery all around.
So it's. It's a pretty. It's a pretty picturesque spot.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: I can certainly imagine it, though, because I have visited abbeys in Scotland. You know, my homeland, had a chance to go back there, and they sort of gave me the keys to all these. These properties in a way, because I. I do a Scottish podcast. And so we got to take in Melrose Abbey and. Oh, yeah, Firmland Abbey and just some of these beautiful old runes.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that it gives.
You know, you mentioned.
I think Wordsworth would not have even understood the word reductionist that you.
Because it would never have occurred to him to see humankind in a reductionist perspective.
That's not the sort of person he was.
I think the person he was, he went on a tour to Tinton Abbey and then he returned after five years.
And these are sort of reminiscences and tranquility. And I'll read out.
It's about 10 lines, if you don't mind.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: No problem.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: And he was on a hill overlooking Tintin Abbey, and he looked down and he experienced, quote, that blessed mood in which the burthen, that's burden of the mystery in which the heart and the weary weight of all this intelligible world is lightened.
That sense and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended. We are laid asleep in body and become a living soul, while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deeper power of joy, we see into the life of things.
I love that light. See into the life of things.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Wow. I like that. Yeah.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: Pretty powerful stuff, I think.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I would have touched on some Wordsworth poetry in college. You know, I did. I did study that, but it has been a while since I've visited his. His verse, but he does Talk about, you know, emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought and roles through all things.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Yes, indeed.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: The life of things, as it were.
Beautiful stuff.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Well, we've reviewed several objections to Darwin's theory at the conceptual level. Your book helps us do that, as well as the cultural and historical levels. You also point out in the book that there are many objections that rest on evolutionary theory's lack of evidential foundation and explanatory force. And although that's not the focus of your book, you do summarize some of those scientific objections. In biology, for example, the problem of origins has shifted largely to the mystery of the origin of biological information, something the modern synthesis of Darwin's theory struggles to explain. The more we learn about what is needed to bring about functional change at the molecular level, the more inadequate Darwinism appears.
Can you just touch on the contours of that challenge for us? We're now seeing so much evidence that's pushing back on this framework that Darwin built his theory on.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Yes, I can certainly say that the complexity of things, which was unknown to Darwin or Ernst Haeckel at the time, they had a simplistic idea of early organisms as just simple blobs and so on. I mean, that's gone out of the window now. I mean, we have a much more sophisticated idea of things.
And I think this, and this is something I touch on, that this brings up the whole idea of the quantum realm of things, the realm of the.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Very small.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Which adds a further layer of complication to any attempt to get a purchase on what life is about.
Because if you enter a Lilliputian world where the laws don't hold any longer, where there is only a probabilistic possibility of this not being the case. Probabilism is the watchword of.
Of quantum mechanics ever since the time of Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s.
Then you can see that it is rather futile to try and figure out what is. What cannot be figured out by any conventional laws.
I mean, one of the things that struck me is that the very year that Werner Heisenberg came out with his theories about the uncertainty principle, he called it, there was a British scientist called Sir Arthur Eddington who said.
It might sound a bit cryptic, but I understand exactly what he meant. He said that 1927 was the year when it became possible for a thinking person to espouse religion.
I think by this he meant that given that human capacity can never crack the arcana of secrets of the quantum world, we have to cede priority to somebody who can, somebody with greater insight, greater possibilities of understanding.
And he didn't sort of lay it on thick, but I think the inference was. Or rather the implication or was it he was thinking of some divine presence.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah, it's definitely something that's, that's come about in the, the 20th century is just this, hang on, we can't really explain this. And, and they were diving deeper and they were finding more about the molecular machines inside cells. You know, we, we crack the code of DNA, as it were, so we're seeing the small things, but at the same time we're admitting that we, we don't fully understand that realm.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: I mean, in my first book I remember writing and I felt a bit silly about writing it, but I was going to write it anyway. I said, the complexity of this world is such that I don't, do not understand how anybody could have constructed it, even God.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: Speaking of intellectual humility.
Yeah, well, and then there's, then there's the problem of the first life. Right. Abiogenesis.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Oh yeah, that's can of worms, isn't it? Yes, yeah.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And Darwin, he wasn't much concerned with that small problem, was he?
[00:34:04] Speaker A: I think he probably was, but he pretended not to be. I think he knew that he would be on a very sticky wicket if he tried to even venture. He did actually say in a letter that he thought that in some warm little pond that there might be some sort of chemical reaction and so on, but it didn't go any further than that and he had no way of proving it.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: And we know, we know much more now. We also know that it's still not been a nut that has been cracked, you know, solving this origin of life problem.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: Well, even, even at the time in the 1880s, there was a German scientist by the name of Ludwig Bushner who said by letter or by some means to Darwin, well, you're telling us about how life evolved in this godless way and yet you have got nothing to say about the very origin of life itself.
Well, why do you not then just say, well, the whole thing is the result of a divine inspiration because you can't just subdivide it arbitrarily like the way you've done so.
There were so many people at the time who came out of the woodwork to attack Darwin, but they seem to have receded back into the woodwork in the 20th and 21st centuries in large measure.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Fascinating. Well, you nailed the irony that modern science has led to an unexpected revival of the fortunes of Paley's once derided natural theology, the pendulum has swung back towards the argument for design and nature. So what does this mean then for the future of Darwin's theory in your estimation?
[00:35:59] Speaker A: To be candid with you, I don't think it means as much as one might expect because the experience of my long life is to be rather pessimistic that people are going to listen to rational logic.
They're more likely to stick with safe E day resus that have been rubber stamped by generations of people that they look up to as gurus or scientists or whatever.
Many people, I mean the cosmologist Fred Heil, very eminent man in his day, said that Darwin's weaknesses were such as to leave Paley in the tournament, as he put it, in contention still. But he didn't do anything about it. He didn't sort of say, right, well I think we're going on the wrong route. So if Hoyle said that and yet didn't act on it, why would you expect that there's going to be some Voltefuss suddenly like before 2035 say? I hope there is, but I do not have an implicit faith that will.
[00:37:29] Speaker B: Happen which makes your book important and timely for those who are willing to respond to that disquiet in their soul, in their mind as they see all this happening. Audience. You can learn more about Neil's book and order a copy for yourself or a friend at Discovery Press and of course available on online retailers such as Amazon as well. Well Neil, again thank you for your time for unpacking some of what's in your book.
You do go into way more detail and it's very well written and you cover your bases and I want to thank you for your contribution to to the debate.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: One footnote is that the public publication date is the 21st of this month so people will have to pre order and it will be sent to them as soon as it is humanly possible.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely worth mentioning. We'll be putting this out towards the end of October, so just know that it will be coming to you soon if it's not readily available, but the publication date is nigh upon us.
So again thank you Neil for your time. This is ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott, thanks again for joining us.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
