New Theos research has shown that only 21% of Britons know that 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Does this matter?
On one level, no, of course not. When the global economy teeters on the brink of collapse, thousands fear losing their houses and millions their jobs, people may be excused for having other things on the their mind.
But on another level it does matter. Darwin is a major national treasure, on the same level as his near contemporary William Wilberforce. He had extraordinary powers of observation, patience, association and speculation, by means of which he authored a theory that radically altered how humans understand themselves.
Unfortunately, because some of his modern disciples treat him as if he were a kind of scientific Wilberforce, a great liberator who worked ceaselessly to rescue ordinary people from the intellectual oppression of superstition and ignorance, Darwin has become a needlessly controversial figure. The messiah for some, he has become the great Satan for others, architect of a theory that led to atheism, materialism and genocide.
This is emphatically not why he matters. Darwin was a man of his time and thus believed some races, like his own, were inherently superior to others. But he was viscerally opposed to slavery and had no time for the ruthless, cut-throat capitalism that some, notably Herbert Spencer, drew from his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Rather, Darwin matters because the issues about which he wrote matter. In spite of what some modern Darwinians claim, questions of design, order, and purpose within creation remain live. The problem of suffering, which was at the heart of his own loss of faith, will never vanish. The question relating to the extent to which, being evolved, humans can fully trust their own cognitive capacities, is still much-debated, with the highly-respected American analytical philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, making it a pillar in his argument against naturalism.
Even those things he did not much write about, such as the basis of his own faith, remain interesting. Darwin declared himself “orthodox” in his late twenties, although the few existing letters from the time suggest that his faith then was rather lukewarm, and somewhat like a hypothesis that had been satisfactorily established or an argument that had been won. His religious journey begs the question what should be the basis of religious faith (or, for that matter, religious doubt)? Experience? Reason? Scripture? The natural world?
Supremely, of course, Darwin cast fresh and, at the time, astonishing new light on the question of what it is to be human. Mid-Victorians were scandalised by the idea that they, in all their propriety and formality, might be related to the apes and monkeys they were beginning to visit in their zoos and museums.
We are less troubled by this but rather more troubled by how closely and to what ends we are linked to other species. Whereas once evolution was the battleground, now it is evolutionary psychology, with all its linked disciplines.
Thus, Darwin matters, not because he is an angel or a demon, but because he was a fantastically gifted natural scientist, an unfailingly gracious and respectful writer, and because he opened up vistas that remain relevant and fascinating to us today.
Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.
