[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Why has Darwin's theory of evolution succeeded so dramatically?
The official story, of course, is that it provides a sweeping and complete explanation of the development of life on Earth, with the claim that it's rock solid because it's grounded in an abundance of evidence.
But when we take a closer look at that official story, we see that it actually resembles more of a myth, a legendary origin story that has been championed and propped up successfully for over 160 years.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott.
Today I want to treat you to a reading from False Messiah, a book by Neil Thomas recently published by Discovery Institute Press.
In two separate previous episodes, I interviewed Neil Thomas about the book and I encourage you to go back to these episodes if you haven't enjoyed them yet.
But I also wanted to share part of the book with you directly as a reading because I think it gives us some really valuable insight around the mythology of Darwinism as well as the mythical figure of Charles Darwin himself. The evidence for intelligent design in nature is mounting by the year, and collectively, that evidence provides a formidable challenge to neo Darwinian claims. But another way to understand why Darwinism is inadequate is to look more closely at its frailties.
Well, enter Neil Thomas, a recently retired professor of English and a longtime supporter of Darwinism who only recently felt he had the freedom to take a fresh critical look at the theory's rise to dominance.
Thomas first signaled his break with orthodox thinking in his previous book Taking Leave of Darwin, where he challenged key aspects of the theory. False Messiah is his follow up, where he digs deeper into the cultural and intellectual forces that propelled Darwinism's success.
We learn that mid 19th century Europe was already becoming a fertile seedbed for scientific materialism, and Darwin's idea arrived at just the right moment to take advantage of that. Here was all the skeptical agnostic elites needed to make sense of everything. A seemingly sweeping and unifying scientific explanation that finally ushered God out of the picture and offered a comprehensive explanation of life. It was a way to explain the obvious design without a designer, a non teleological account of life.
But in False Messiah, Thomas makes a case that the rise of Darwin's theory owes as much, if not more to cultural timing, philosophical appeal and persuasive storytelling as it does to scientific demonstration. Let's not forget Darwin intended this to be a mere abstract of his theory. And while he wrote it, he kept promising friends and colleagues that a larger volume chock full of evidence supporting his theory would would follow, but that promised volume never came.
So to help us understand why Darwinism has persisted for so long, it's helpful to take a closer look at the forces that moved it forward and upheld it, lest we be tempted to think that it has succeeded purely on the strength of its scientific arguments.
Now, before I read from the book, I'd like to highlight a few endorsements the book has received. Peter Jeavons, Senior research fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, an Emeritus professor at the University of Oxford, had this to in this fascinating and wide ranging book, Neil Thomas draws on his expertise in European intellectual history and linguistics to examine both the content and context of Darwin's writings. He draws in detail on the words of Darwin's contemporaries such as Charles Lyell and Asa Gray, to examine how Darwin's ideas were received in the 19th century.
He also considers the literary context in the world of William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Algernon Charles Swinburne. There is a particularly interesting section on Alfred Russel Wallace, the co discoverer of Darwin's evolutionary theory who later changed his mind on some of the key aspects. Thomas also looks carefully at some of the details of Darwin's text and the difficulties of translating the concept of natural selection into other languages and sets out what these reveal about Darwin's lack of conceptual clarity. I found the discussion of Darwin's religious confusion and struggles and the claim set out here that Darwin's presentation of natural selection comes close to that of a goddess figure to be thought provoking and insightful. The book provides a stimulating challenge to the lazy assumption that Darwin's work provided a simple and satisfying scientific explanation for all aspects of the biological world. Anyone who holds onto that view after studying the issues discussed here really is clinging to a false messiah.
Lehigh University professor of Biological Sciences Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box and Darwin Devolves, says this about the how in the world could a theory as transparently lame as Darwin's win over most late 19th century academics?
Neil Thomas brilliant new book False Darwinism as the God that Failed shows that many intellectuals then were already hoping to explain away the obvious designedness of life in order to subsume biology into a totalizing human centered Enlightenment vision. Darwin merely offered them what they were hoping for. Ironically, as Thomas notes, it is the very progress of modern science, especially the discoveries of non mechanistic quantum reality and in the information suffused molecular layers of life, that has ultimately quashed their efforts, whether or not they yet realize it. Now onto the book itself. I'M going to read Thomas Prologue first, which will give you some overview of the scope of his book.
Then I'll read a portion of chapter one and that chapter is called Darwinism and its Discontents.
Prologue In a previous volume, taking leave of Darwin, I tell why I went from a member in good standing of the Darwinian establishment to a person surprised to discover that modern evolutionary theory rests on a foundation considerably less stable and reassuring than rock. Specifically, on closer examination of the theory, I was confronted with the bewildering spectacle of some indisputably clever people making unsupported claims in favor of a hypothesis originally advanced upon a surprisingly rickety thrust foundation. I found that when Charles Darwin, together with later biologists as well as cosmologists, would reference purely notional processes such as natural selection, self assembly or a cosmic imperative, these terms amounted to little more than a sidestepping of a host of imponderables. Hence the disquiet I felt at discovering that all their scientific sounding livery were but the regalia of so many empty referents carried along by magical thinking, and I mean empty reference in its formal linguistic sense, words without demonstrable content within or ascertainable relation to the real world. Moreover, I found that Darwin and his successors had involuntarily, by the sheer incredibility of their claims, furnished presumptive evidence for the role of a special dispensation behind the origin and evolution of life on earth, a dispensation far beyond the parameters of a purely naturalistic analysis. The present volume continues my intellectual journey, for it soon became clear to me that there were many further avenues still needing to be explored. In simplified terms, the present work takes relatively short sections of chapter two and three of Taking Leave of Darwin and expands them into an entire book. In that previous work I briefly surveyed the early and later voices of dissent from Darwin and and weighed the back and forth between Darwin and his defenders on the one side and his more thoughtful critics on the other. But this is a rich vein and I barely scratched the surface here. Pick in hand, we will delve deeper. I should make clear from the outset that my cheeky title False Messiah is not meant to describe Darwin as he ever styled himself. He actively resisted being co opted as the figurehead of a secularist religion. In part, this may have been the respectable Victorian gentleman steering clear of anything redolent of French radicalism, but the effort also seems to have stemmed from a genuine personal ambivalence concerning matters metaphysical. Certainly much of his professional work was devoted to substantiating the anti theistic convictions of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. But Charles was much more prone to vacillate over the broader implications of his theory, brow knit, than to proclaim fist in palm some particular materialistic religion. Moreover, there is compelling evidence analyzed in this book that in later years he developed doubts about his formula for creation without a creator. In mining his personal correspondence and autobiography, one finds that in older age he became almost as much a natural theologian as a natural scientist. However, none of that has prevented a body of Darwin's followers from co opting him as a sort of latter day messiah for a materialist program of cultural and civilizational transformation. I will argue that employing Darwin in this way is false twice over.
First, it is not what Darwin made himself out to be. Second, and as accumulating evidence has made plain, his theory, with or without the modern synthesis, and with or without the various third way epicycles tacked onto it in recent decades to save the appearances, cannot bear the weight of its role as gospel for a brave new age of atheistical enlightenment. However one chooses to characterize the aging gentleman of Down House, his doubts about the materialistic project have been amply vindicated by advances in biology in the last seven decades. One of the topics explored in the present book, which brings us to the present volume's subtitle, Students of the Cold War may recognize it as the title of a 1949 collection of essays by six prominent writers of the day on their conversion to and eventual disillusionment with communism. My borrowing of the phrase and thereby connecting Marxism to Darwinism is not incidental. Although the Communist Manifesto was published a decade before Darwin's theory of evolution went public, Marx said he saw in Darwin's on the Origin of Species the book which in the field of natural history provides the basis for our views. Or as he put it a year later, Darwin's work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. Despite all shortcomings, it is here that for the first time teleology and natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow, but its rational meaning is empirically explained. In similar terms, Marx's collaborator Frank Friedrich Engels enthused that Darwinism had helped to eliminate teleology from biology, much as Marx, we might say, had eliminated it from social science. Today we could invert this formulation to assert with only slight exaggeration that Marx has been eliminated from social science, at least Marxism, as a coherent, all encompassing political program. Darwinism, I want to argue, is approaching A similar condition of obsolescence.
There are relatively few dyed in the wool Darwinists remaining true enough in the academy. One is still asked to genuflect before that mistiest of all dogmas evolution. But among actual scientists doing serious work in biology, things have moved on from Darwin and even neo Darwinism. As with many of our present day social scientists, what remains in the biological sciences is a dogmatic commitment to materialism, regardless of how desperate that commitment may have become. Much of what follows has benefited from my background and expertise in European intellectual history as well as in languages and linguistics.
In the present volume I cast a wide net to view Darwinism against the backdrop of European cultural assumptions, with special reference to religious and theological thinking, particularly among the Darwinists.
Within that context I also focus on many linguistic ambiguities and and modes of literary presentation favored by Darwin, which point towards largely unexplored subtextual implications. The volume is structured as Chapter 1 describes the contemporary Darwin debate by attempting a warts and all sketch of the various issues at stake. In particular, I discuss how, more than 160 years on, there is no settled acceptance of modern Darwinian theory even among mainstream biologists, a reality rarely discussed in the popular press, but one easily enough uncovered. To that end, the opening chapter briefly surveys the more important issues which presently divide evolution experts. Chapter two discusses Darwin's frequent lack of conceptual clarity, a lack which becomes evident when we look at some of his imprecise and at times even misleading terminology.
It was this lack of clarity which drew him into the contradiction of claiming on the one hand that that natural selection was a mindless process, and on the other hand that it was a crypto teleological process analogous to that employed by animal breeders bent on procuring the best livestock. After unmasking some ways in which Darwin's conflicted mindset could have stemmed from ways of thinking familiar to the Victorians but no longer intelligible to our present generation. I go on to document how even some modern biological researchers have been constrained by their evidence to concede that Darwin's notion of natural selection does not line up with the results of modern empirical research in the area.
Chapter three considers the implications of Darwin's autodidactic education by installments, including his own awareness of the difficulties arising from a theory which had its origins in a stitching together of opinions he took from others, rather than its emerging empirically from minutely observed fieldwork as the Darwin mythology has it. As well as tracing modern influences on Darwin, I also consider the work of ancient atheist Philosophers to whom Darwin owed a debt he was little aware of. Here too I consider the implications of Darwin's giving a new lease on life to the philosophy of atheistic atomism, cold shouldered for almost 2,000 years. In Chapter 4 Culture Wars, I begin a three pronged analysis of the changing religious landscape of of Victorian Britain. First I come at it from the perspective of writers of the period, many of whom are prescient in their ability to anticipate trends in the developing or sometimes deteriorating spirituality of their wider society. Then I come to the university world of Oxford, a bellwether for intellectual developments throughout the 19th century and location of the famous debate on Darwinism in 1860 between Darwin's bulldog Tom Thomas Huxley and Oxford's Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.
Here I address Oxford's changing culture through the 19th century as our ancient seats of learning reluctantly adapted themselves to secularizing trends in post enlightenment Europe.
Thereafter I come to the grassroots, mainly the working class movement, simply styled secularism, which showed itself in remarkable advance of Oxford and in its attitude to the German higher criticism of the Bible. I argue that the upshot of Darwin's delaying publication of on the Origin of species by almost two decades he had already produced a pencil sketch by 1842, led to its benefiting from the rising tide of secularism which peaked in Britain in the period circa 1850-1890. The debatable logic of the Origen book made sense within that secularizing context by dint of what is now commonly termed confirmation bias. Later in the chapter I turn to the deuteragonist of the Darwin story, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose many scientific achievements were in their totality considerably more impressive than those of Darwin. I assess the reasons that eventually impelled him to forsake crucial aspects of his co authored theory of natural selection. Wallace has often been sidelined by science. Historians have described the evolutionary story in almost exclusively Darwinian terms, a tendency I resist. In this volume, Chapter 5 discusses doubts harbored by both Darwin and some of his modern legatees concerning the sufficiency of natural selection. I also chart the ways that Darwin's friends and colleagues helped him promote his ideas. And yet, taking their cue from Darwin's own insecurities and hesitancies, felt no obligation to regard his ideas as as sacrosanct. So much so that they offered sharply varying takes on the origin. In fact, many unresolved tensions in Darwin's own mind caused him to present his origin somewhat diffidently as a theory worthy of consideration only until a better one might have advanced. Chapter six is devoted to what was in effect a rival philosophy of nature, developed in the poetry of William Wordsworth. I look at how the poet's considerable influence across all social classes and as well as across the Atlantic Ocean stood as a philosophical barrier to people's full acceptance of Darwinism. The seventh and final chapter considers how the recent disciplines of quantum mechanics and microbiology are difficult to square with those Newtonian notions of scientific predictability that Darwin appealed to for intellectual support. This bears on the plausibility of Darwinian notions since recent discoveries acting as a corrective to Enlightenment presuppositions and presumptions have undermined faith in the capacity of materialist science alone to predict outcomes and deliver truth. This in turn has undermined the Darwinian project itself.
Now I'm going to read to you a small selection of chapter one of False Messiah. That chapter is titled Darwinism and its Discontents. The section I'm going to start with here is called Natural Selection. The Other Half of the Deal One might suppose that whereas the chance variation side of Darwin's joint mechanism of evolution was a tough sell, at least the ingenious other half of the mechanism, natural selection, posed a relatively easy marketing challenge.
But natural selection faced its own public relations difficulty. Empirical evidence for it accomplishing anything of note was in short supply. Here too, Darwin had recourse to a sleight of hand, using the metaphor of an architect to describe the work of natural selection. However, as Johnson has pointed out, the architect metaphor worked at cross purposes with Darwin's intentions, since an architect is manifestly an intelligent agent, in contradistinction to the witless and impersonal processes of natural selection. To make matters worse, the image had been employed for centuries in such locutions as cosmic architecture to refer to the very deity Darwin wished to exclude. Clearly, the takeaway message from his writing, however deftly and euphemistically camouflaged, does involve the conception of the chance, origin and evolution of life on this planet.
On that reading, God had been shown the door having been rendered superfluous to evolutionary proceedings said to unfold autonomously. Yet Curtis Johnson also observes that in Notes not for Public Consumption, Darwin would ask himself, do these views make me an atheist? Whereupon he exclaimed, no. In later notes, he describes himself variously in theistic, deistic, or agnostic terms. Such terms, Johnson notes, preserve the possibility of a creator who designed a world in the beginning that would operate in definite and predictable ways. At a later point in his life, Darwin may have been seriously tempted to return to the Christian fold at least with one foot, as will be observed below. Perhaps even more tempting would have been a decision to return to the status quo anti that is to the common deistic prepossessions of the scientific community. In the first half of the 19th century such a reversion might have been the easier for Darwin, since in the case of man of science, their convictions rested not on simple faith, but on two centuries of philosophical thought. Those new patterns of thought had brought such enormous changes to people's understandings of external nature as to make Darwin's twin mechanisms of chance and natural selection problematical, if not indefensible. It is to that fundamental change in the educated European mindset that we now turn Changing Ideas of Nature in the two centuries which separated William Shakespeare from Charles Darwin, there had occurred a revolution in Europe's understanding of nature. A change such as to make improbable the very notion of natural selection. It is well known that in the early decades of the 17th century Shakespeare could quite unproblematically portray an act of nature capable of issuing portents of future misfortune as warnings to humanity. On the stage of the Globe Theatre, it will be recalled, nature was able to put forth such meteorological warning signs as thunderstorms and sundry other horrid sights seen by the watch.
But such stage evocations are interpreted by today's audiences as merely a dramatic device known technically as the Pathetic Fallacy. For hard on Shakespeare's heels chronologically came a finger wagging brigade of mid to late 17th century Natural philosophers exhorting the Bard's intellectual heirs to view nature as an entirely passive phenomenon. No will or agency should henceforth be attributed to natural phenomena, these early scientists insisted. And this understanding became an informing axiom of post enlightenment science. As Stanford history professor Jessica Riskin has pointed out in the Restless Clock, a history of the centuries old argument over what Makes Us Tick. A residue of the older thinking could still be traced in Lamarckian conceptions that posited an imminent force driving plants and animals to form themselves in and to complexify their structures over time to produce many different plant and animal types. Harking back to ideas originally proposed by Denis Diderot and like minded philosophes in mid 18th century France, Lamarck proposed that living beings might be able to alter their own internal physiology and by an act of will develop such new organs as might be requisite to their purposes in life. His most infamous illustration of this claimed ability is was the much cited and derided example of the giraffe species possessing the ability to elongate its neck over the course of many generations to be able to reach leaves at the top of trees. Consistent with the tenets of this idea of a power inhering in nature itself, Lamarck was to look askance at the famous watch on the heath analogy formulated by William Paley, wherein Paley compared the functional arrangement of parts in a watch to to the same in a living organism and argued that just as the one is necessarily designed, so is the other. Lamarck demurred, positing that the essential motor of the living being was unlike with a watch integral to it rather than something coming from an outside source. More than this, Lamarck was suggesting inhering in living things is some natural force affording a species the capacity to evolve given the right circumstances.
Lamarck's was then a decidedly bottom up conception, and as Riskin observes, Lamarck's was a dangerous idea since it posited self evolving entities. Lamarck appeared to have replaced an external God with a mysterious and unspecifiable inner force. A common contemporary take is that in rejecting Lamarckism, science rejected what amounted to an attempt to smuggle back into biology an antiquated animism.
Risk Riskin offers a decidedly different perspective. On her view, Lamarckism represented its era's most naturalist, non theological account of species change. This means, explains Riskin, that the biologists and philosophers who dismissed Lamarck's theories were unwittingly reinforcing a view most of them had no desire to support. They were placing themselves in the strangely anomalous position of of distancing themselves from naturalism and in so doing becoming heirs to the very tradition with which they meant to do battle. The argument from design with roots among the ancients and revived and further developed in the physio theology of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century, championed by such thinkers as John Ray, William Durham, Christian Wolf, Bernard Nuventit, and latterly William Paley.
As Riskin put it, a material world lacking agency assumed, indeed required a supernatural God. The 17th century banishment of agency, perception, consciousness and will from nature gave a monopoly on all these attributes to a supreme external power.
The paradigm simply could not function without an accompanying theology. It was an unambiguously top down conception which depended absolutely on the superintending agency of a designer creator. This then is the grand irony. Darwin and his heirs had hitched their wagons to a tradition that from its inception denied agency to inanimate nature precisely in order to ascribe it to a designer God. The framework to which Darwin expressed His official allegiance was then ab initio, and by the express wish of its originators, extremely design friendly by restricting mysterious agencies to the jurisdiction of the Christian God. The shapers of modern Science after circa 1650 left the atheistically inclined with a dilemma. The new mechanistic science was adamant that one could not procure a lens instrument without an instrument maker or an eye without a divine optician. Hence Darwin's famous shudder when he asked himself rather disconsolately, how anything of such supreme intricacy as the eye could have been fashioned by natural selection. In short, Darwin found himself in a bind. He sought a mechanism for evolution without recourse to either of two resources available to evolutionary thinkers of the preceding two centuries. If we can allow ourselves a bit of picturesque language in summarizing the situation, Darwin sought to bar nature's father from evolution's work. But in seeking a power that was up to the creative task, he could not, as his grandfather or Lamarck had done, go running back to Mother Nature.
Now that should give you a taste of the deep dive that Neil Thomas takes into Darwinism and Darwin himself in order to better understand why the theory has succeeded for so long. And as I said, the more we understand about the forces already in play that propelled Darwinism to predominance, the better we can show that today's scientific evidence for intelligent design in nature provides a much more adequate explanation for life in the universe. I encourage you to pick up a copy of False Messiah, read it and add it to your collection. You can also share it. You'll find it in the usual places, Amazon, BN.com, which is the website of Barnes and Noble booksellers and the like. You can order it from a local bookseller or you can hop on to the website of Discovery Institute Press, that's at Discovery Press to get it there. That's Discovery Press.
And be sure to catch my two part interview with Neil Thomas about False Messiah. Those are available as two separate episodes of ID the Future. Well, for the podcast, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining me.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and Intelligent Design.
This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
