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Is Darwinism Opposed to Religion?
ABDUL MAJID It is axiomatic that if we are in error about the origin of things, whether of the universe, or life, or religion, or salvation, we shall be in error about all that follows. (Philip E. Hughes, Christianity and the Problems of Origin, P. 37) Evolution means change or literally, “An unrolling”. In the biological sense, evolution specifically means genetic change or gradual development from simple to complex forms.(1) The idea of evolution was anticipated by many biologists and scientists before Darwin, like Lamarck, William Wells, Edward Blyth, Patrich Mathew, Robert Chambers, but Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Alfred R. Wallace (1823-1913) presented the idea in a systematic and comprehensive form. Both the scientists had stated the idea in a series of papers delivered before the Linnaean Society in 1858. The next year, 1859, Darwin finally presented the theory of evolution in his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; ( shortly The Origin of Species.) The main points of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection are: - All living species produce more offspring than can survive.
- Individual of a species are not all alike genetically and some of them are more fit to survive and reproduce in certain environments than others.
- The succeeding generations will contain relatively more progeny of the fittest ancestors than those less fit, and the average fitness, therefore increase. So the gist of Darwin’s theory is that due to overproduction of organisms, there is always a struggle for survival or existence i.e. a competition for food, water, space, light and mate. The organisms that are better adapted to the environment will survive and other will perish. So the fittest will be selected by Nature, called Natural Selection. During the long voyage of evolution, there emerged a staggering diversity of life, thousands of new species, and eventually the human race (2).
Let us now analyze why Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selction is called dangerous idea “(as called by an America Philosopher Daniel Dennett) and why it is threatening to religious believers? What is about evolution that places in question even the very existence of God? These can be summarized in three propositions (as described by John Haught). - The variations that lead to differentiation of species are purely random, thus suggesting that the workings of nature are “accidental” and irrational. Today the source of these variations has been identified as genetic mutations, and most biologists still follow Darwin in attributing to “Chance”.
- The fact that individuals have to struggle for survival, and that most of them suffer and lose out in this contest, points to the basic cruelty of the universe, particularly toward the weak.
- The mindless process of natural selection by which only the better organisms survive points to a universe that is essentially blind and indifferent to life and humanity.
These three inseparable ingredients – randomness, struggle (for existence) and blind natural selection all seem to suggest that the universe is impersonal, utterly unrelated to any Creator. (3) From the middle of the last century up to now prominent thinkers have welcome Darwinian ideas as the final victory of skepticism over religion. T.H.Huxly, known as Darwin’s bulldog, thought evolution as antithetical to traditional theism. Ernst Haeckel, Karl Max, Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud all found Darwin’s thought congenial to their atheism. Numerous scientists in our own time closely associate Darwinism with unbelief. Richard Dawkins, a British biologist, in his book “The Blind Watchmaker” argues that chance and natural selection, aided by immensely long periods of time, are enough to account for all the diverse species of life, including us. Why would we need to invoke the idea of God if chance and natural selection alone can account for all the creativity in the story of life? Before Darwin, we concede, it may have been difficult to find definitive reasons for atheism. The order or patterning in nature, seemed to beg for a supernatural explanation, and so the design argument for God’s existence may have made some sense in those days. But no longer. Evolutionary theory, brought up to date by the discoveries of molecular biology, has demolished the divine designer that most people believed in before the middle of the last century. Evolution for once and for all purged any remaining intellectual respectability for the idea of God. (4) William Paley in his book “Natural Theology” has compared nature to a watch. He said that if you chanced upon a watch lying alone on the ground and then examined its intricate structure you could not help concluding that it had been made by an intelligent designer. It could not be the product of mere chance. And yet, the natural world exhibits much more complex order than any watch., Thus, Paley concluded, there has to be an intelligent designer responsible for nature’s fine arrangement. This designer, of course, could be none other than the Creator God of Biblical religion (and of Islam). (5) But Dawkins debates that the divine designer is no longer needed. Paley’s argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best of biological scholarship of his days, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong, the analogy between watch and living organism is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of Physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. ------- Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered and which we know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no vision, foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watch maker in nature, it is the “blind watch maker”. (6) Although David Hume, Bertrand Russell and other Philosophers had already severely battered the design argument for God’s existence. Dawkins thinks that only Darwin’s theory of Natural selection provided a fully convincing refutation of Natural theology. He says “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”.(7) Dawkins is not alone in this conviction but most evolutionary biologists of today are of the same opinion. Daniel Dennett, in his book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” consisting of about 586 pages, argues in different ways that the Natural Selection is the only plausible explanation of the diversity of life, He says “Through selection of minute adaptive changes in organisms over a period of several billion years, the totally blind process can bring about all the diversity of life on our planet, including (human) beings endowed with sight and consciousness. Even the human mind is an eventual and perhaps inevitable outcome of an utterly mindless sequence of physical occurrences. The point is, there is no need for an “intelligent designer” to supervise the process.” This, according to Dennett is the most “dangerous” implication of Darwin’s idea, especially in its contemporary neo-Darwinian form (8) (Neo-Darwinism is essentially Darwin’s original theory of selection, clarified and brought up to date by our most recent knowledge about genes and the molecular constituents of life, of which Darwin himself knew nothing). Similarly other biologists like Mayer (Harvard Zoologist), Gravin De Beer and Ayala are of the opinion that neo – Darwinian science is the ultimate explanation of life, leaving no room for divine guidance or design, and it (Natural Selection) excluded God as accounting for the obvious designer of organisms. (9) Due to this association of evolution with unbelief, the idea of evolution (especially Darwinism) has been called as the “delusion of Satan (10)”; the main cause which promoted apostasy, atheism, secular humanism, libertinism and ethical relativism by different religious scholars and creationists. (11) Here, in the form of evolution, we are observing the scientific materialism which maintains that there is nothing but the matter and that matter is the essence and ultimate explanation of every thing. We are observing in evolution, the evolutionism, which is a subtle bonding of Darwinian idea with hidden premises of secularism, naturalism and the belief system we have been calling scientific materialism” (12) John Herlihy rightly observes, “The Darwinian theory of evolution has branched into two distinct entities. On one hand, we have the process of evolution as a genuine empirical process with objective documentation and meaningful findings, amounting to certain evidences of a micro-evolutionary kind. On the other hand, we have evolutionism as a distinctive doctrine resulting from an excess of zeal, not in establishing the facts, but in interpreting their philosophical implications.” He further says that “science is science and philosophy is philosophy. Each represents on half of the unfinished story of physics and metaphysics that could find its true expression in a narrative of truth based upon a process of mutual trust. The biological, molecular and quantum physics verities would be fascinating in their own right without the encumbrance of all the questionable assumptions and without the mega-structure of a deceptive secular philosophy that makes no sense with its avowed purposelessness and poverty of meaning.” (13) Another proponent of evolutionism says; “We believe in evolution not because it is science, not because it is revelation, not because it is rational, not because one iota of evidence has ever been presented in its favour, but because we feel it must be true. (13) Dr. John Haught rightly laments such viewpoints, “Many scientists---- and this point is ignored---- indulge in a conflation of their own. They too fuse science with belief. In the case of many scientists and philosophers today, to be more specific, the conflation consists of commingling evolutionary theory with materialism, a belief which is indeed antithetical to religion. Scientists of the stature of Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, just to name a few offer the theory of evolution to us snugly wrapped up in the alternative faith of scientific materialism” (15) Although evolution is descriptive interpretation of the origin and history of life on earth; it does not in itself necessitate casting in either materialistic or religious terms. However, in the highly charged and polarized intellectual milieu of the second half of nineteenth century, those who were already inclined towards atheism thought that they have found in the form of Darwin’s theory, the coupe de grace for religion. Thus, Friedrich Engel wrote to his comrade Karl Marx in 1859: Incidentally Darwin, whom I am just reading, is absolutely splendid. One bastion of theology was still unbleached. Now it has fallen. Marx replied a month later: “ I have read Darwin’s book during the last four weeks. Although set out in the clumsy English style, this is the book that will provide the natural history basis for our work”. (16) After quoting this, Dr. Ahmed Afzaal, in his thought provoking essay on “Quran and Human Evolution” writes, “Darwinism was enthusiastically adopted and developed on purely materialistic lines by the intellectuals of Atheistic disposition, in the hope that it demolishes the foundations of all religious belief. The origin and evolution of man was now being viewed as resulting from pure chance, making obsolete all spiritual and moral concerns. This provided the perfect excuse to the philosophy of moral relativism and absolute liberalism”. (16) As a result of such philosophies, man came to be viewed as nothing but a bipedal terrestrial mammal, a featherless biped, a tool making naked ape, a gene machine programmed to ensure the preservation of its selfish genes. (17) Consciousness was explained away in terms of electro-chemical and mechanical process in the brain, and the uniquely human phenomenon of religious experience was discarded as a mental aberration or a result of wishful thinking. (18) Due to such extreme philosophical viewpoints, a strong reaction resulted both in Christian and Muslim world against evolutionary theory. In Christian world, especially in United States of America, Scientific Creationists emerged which believe in biblical literalism and try to merge biblical accounts of creation with modern science. They are of the opinion that there are discrepancies and gaps in evolutionary theory (in which they are right). Creation Science (based on Bible) should be given equal time with evolution sciences in schools. (19) Many scientists like Dawkins, Dennett, etc. used evolutionary theory to support materialism and atheism. Similarly philosophers like Huxley and Spencer combined evolution and agnosticism into a comprehensive system of belief. Herbert Spencer said that God was the “Unknowable”, and an incomprehensible Absolute about which we can say nothing beyond the mere affirmation of its existence. Spencer drew elaborate comparison between social structures and the forms of living organisms and saw societies as undergoing a progressive evolution in which egoism will be replaced by altruism through a mechanism analogous to the inheritance of acquired characters. (20) Ernst Haeckle, a German Zoologist asserted evolutionary monism, according to which the entire organic and inorganic nature, including life, is derived from the chemical properties of Carbon. He was of the opinion that natural selection and mechanical causality provide the solution to “The Riddle of the universe; as his best known book was titled, and matter and force are the only ultimate reality. His confidence in the all-embracing explanatory power of the new biology is expressed in the following passage: “The cell consists of matter called protoplasm, composed chiefly of carbon with an admixture of hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. These component parts properly united produced the soul and body of animated world, and suitably nursed became man. With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in”. (21) The process of natural selection, interpreted as the survival of the fittest, provided a mean for explaining social process. The America political economist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), for example, saw society as the outcome of a social struggle in which each man, in pursuing his own good, can succeed only at the expense of others. The fittest in this social struggle are the ruthless, the imaginative, the industrious, and the frugal. They climb to the top, and it is right that they should do so. (22) I may conclude my paper mentioning briefly the role of evolution in Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought. He maintained that if evolution is taken seriously as a norm, our traditional values will have to be turned completely upside down. In the fierce struggle for survival the useful qualities are not the Christian Virtues but self-assertion and the will to power. If good is that which survives, strength is the ultimate virtue. “What is good? All that heightens in man the feeling of power, the desire for power, power itself. What is bad? All that comes from weakness”. Humility, love, and pity are a morality fit for slaves. A hero’s morality consists in courage, vitality and ruthless egoism. If need be, in the struggle for supremacy, heroic individuals must emancipate themselves from every moral scruple: they are above every law and through their autonomous wills must realize their own unique and creative individuality. Nietzsche looked forward to the coming Superman, discontinuous with the past, who would be master of the futre. He proposed a program of eugenics in which inferior strains will be eliminated so that there can come into being the race of heroes who will embody the will to power. Here evolution was used to justify ethical norms diametrically opposed to those of the Christian (and Islamic) tradition. (23) REFERENCES 1. Donald D. Ritchie& Carola Biology (California: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company-1984) P. 505 2. Ibid P.509, Encyclopedia Americana (USA: Grolier Incorporated, 1986), Vol-10, P. 736 3. John F. Haugt, Science & Religion from conflict to conversation (New York: Panlist Press, 1995), P. 48 4. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986), P. 6 5. John. F. Haught, P.50 6. Richard Dawkins, P.5 7. Ibid, P. 6 8. John F. Haught, God After Dawin: A theology of Evolution (Colorado: Westview Press, 2000) PP. 11-17 9. Ibid; PP. 17-18 10. Ahmad Afzal, Quran and Human Evolution in the Quranic Horizons 1:3, July-Sept 1996, P. 36 11. Ibid. P. 65 12. John Haught, Science and Religion, P.55 13. John Herlihy, Modern Man at the Crossroads (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 1999) P.96. 14. Ibid. 15. John Haught, Science and Religion, PP. 54 – 55 16. Dr. Ahmed Afzal, P.38 17. Arthur Peacock, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) P. 149 18. Dr. Ahmad Afzal, P. 38 19. Eileen Barker, Scientific Creationism in the Twentieth Century in John Durant (ed.) Darwinism and Divinity (New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1985) PP. 190 – 202 (for details of Scientific Creationism. 20. Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Same Historical and Contemporary Issues (USA: Harper San Francisco, 1997) PP. 70-71 21. Ibid , 71 22. Quoted in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, McMillan, 1967) volume 2, P. 304 23. Ian G. Barbour, P. 72
Assistant Professor of Zoology, Govt. Post Graduate College, Mansehra, NWFP, Pakistan. Back to Top Back to Table of Contents
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