Darwinism and the Creator

AT THE START OF the paragraph we have just quoted, Darwin had spoken (as he always did in all editions of The Origin of Species) of his system as being in accordance with ‘the laws impressed on matter by the Creator’. We can argue about just what Darwin meant at the various stages of his life by ‘the Creator’; but it would be hard to have a mind-set which could make any reference, however metaphorical, to a creatorial mind which did not take some tendency towards the better as being inherent in creation. Darwin may have become an agnostic theologically speaking, as he tells us quite explicitly in his Autobiography, even while admitting ‘the extreme difficulty or even impossibility’ he has ‘of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man and his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.’ And even granted Darwin’s steady drift towards personal agnosticism, in his core theorising there are significant traces of (dare we say?) design thinking.

It is not just that nature mimics human livestock breeders, which is what Darwin argues in his less exuberant moments. In a striking, but not a-typical passage from the Natural Selection chapter in The Origin of Species, Darwin says: ‘Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being…’ (The Origin of Species, p 133)  Natural selection scutinising, rejecting, preserving, adding, silently working at the improvement of each (!) organic being, and doing it all daily and hourly. Strewth! Falls of sparrows notwithstanding, the Gospels never imply so much; nor is Thomas Aquinas’s all-sustaining First Cause quite so busy and officious here on earth. Metaphor, all metaphor, we will be told, no doubt correctly. But metaphors reveal and metaphors are powerful; and this one is all of a part of Darwin’s attempt to hold on to natural selection as a progressive, beneficent force, an attempt which all but forces him to envisage it anthropomorphically, as a displaced intelligent designer, doing the Creator’s work for Him, through the laws He has impressed on it. (Although it would take us too far afield here, it is worth noting briefly that the God envisaged in the best traditional theology is not an interfering being at all, so not the one Darwin is replacing with natural selection, but rather one whose rain falls on the just and the unjust alike; not a being among beings, but the source of all that is who has withdrawn from creation precisely in order to allow things to develop and emerge according to the order of creation.)

In the closing passage of The Origin of Species Darwin says this: ‘Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’ Yes, we may think, but this is some distance from the earlier dispassionate nod in the direction of more cases of the want of absolute perfection. And life breathed in? How? By whom? And stylistically the endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful will certainly outweigh in the reader’s mind the war, the famine, the death which led to this inspiring result, and displace them from the forefront of his consciousness, as much as in any traditional theodicy.

But what of the writer’s mind? We know that in fact even as early as 1856 Darwin lamented the ‘clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature.’ In 1865 he reflected on the certainty of the extinction of all life: ‘to think of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into a red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi with a vengeance.’ And in 1881 he told Wallace that even with everything to make him happy and contented, ‘life has become very wearisome to me’, partly surely because of his growing agnosticism. (See John C.Greene, Debating Darwin; Adventures of a Scholar, Regina Books, Claremont, 1999, pp 53-4.) For all Darwin’s pointing up of aspects of sympathy among us and other creatures, and his talk of grandeur in his vision notwithstanding, one can easily become depressed, as Darwin seemed to be himself, with the fundamentally cruel and bleak aspects of his re-imagining of nature.