Charles Moore (in the Telegraph today) reviews Darwin and God by Nick Spencer. This is the key quote that interested me:
The purpose of this short book by Nick Spencer, published by SPCK, is to rescue Darwin from the war between the atheists and creationists. He points out that Darwin did not want to enlist in the battle. This was partly temperamental. Darwin was an educated, retiring country gentleman with poor digestion – he did not have the stomach for the fight. But it was also because Darwin objected to false certainty. He found that he could not wholly divorce religious and scientific questions, but doubted his capacities in religious thought, and confessed himself "muddled".
There were areas of confidence. "Will you honestly tell me," he wrote to the geologist Charles Lyell, "whether you believe that the shape of my nose (eheu [Latin for "alas": his nose was blobby]) was 'ordained and guided by an intelligent cause'?" And, if not Darwin's nose, why any minor detail? On the other hand, Darwin was writing about the physical world, and so was reluctant to debate the metaphysical. When his first paper on evolution was presented to the Linnaean Society in 1858, he could not come because his infant son had died two days earlier. "Thank God he will never suffer more in this world," Darwin wrote. Was there a God to thank? Was there another world beyond suffering? Darwin was not sure.
Spencer traces clearly how Darwin began a Christian, then gradually lost his faith, became a sort of theist and ended an agnostic. Darwin's Christianity was of the Paleyite kind – a vision of natural order and goodness of the sort readily available to Cambridge men with enough money, time and power of observation to appreciate their good fortune in the temperate climate and stable polity of England: "In a spring noon, or a summer evening," wrote Paley, "on whichever side I turn my eyes, millions of happy beings crowd into my view." Darwin noted that there were fewer happy beings in the Tierra del Fuego.
Darwin's Christianity was never, in short, very Christian. It had little to do with the ideas of the Incarnation or the atonement. It did not spend much time contemplating the Cross or the empty tomb. Grace, sacraments, prayer were not considered important. What faith he held was weak, and he was honest enough to see its weakness and discard it, with regret. Christians should not pretend that Darwin was plain wrong, or can be ignored. His theories did expose a great deal of nonsense. Nor is it enough for them to say, in a superior tone, "Oh well, the problem is only for people who believe literally in the Genesis account." What should Christians think about design, or the lack of it, and about the suffering of all animal and human creation? Christians had a "narrative" which Darwin, perhaps without meaning harm, countered with another narrative. What is the Christian narrative now?
But Nick Spencer should be thanked for showing that the man born 200 years ago next week was not the sworn enemy of the man born 2,000 years ago.
And Charles Moore should be thanked for highlighting that in all the public discourse at the moment we fundamentally have a clash of narratives.
...complex biological systems cannot evolve step-by-step as taught by new-Darwinianism, because until they have become functioning systems they serve no purpose and natural selection cannot operate upon them. In asking how a irreducible complex system could arise, we're not asking how rapid-rabbits might evolve from also-rans but how a cabbage might grow legs.
