During the Darwin-mania of 2009, Theos conducted research into the level and nature of anti-evolutionary beliefs in Britain. It unearthed two critical facts. Firstly, many more people rejected evolution than ever darkened a church door. This was quite clearly not a question of Darwin vs. Genesis. Second, (one of) the reason(s) for their rejection was not what evolution allegedly said about God, but what it said about ‘Man’. People, with a greater or less degree of articulacy, could not accept that humans are “nothing but” primates/ genes/ survival machines.
Roger Scruton falls into that camp, although firmly at the articulate end of the spectrum. The Soul of the World is based on his 2011 Stanton lectures at Cambridge University. It is typically – which in Scruton’s case means astonishingly – erudite, and although it makes few concessions to the casual reader, it repays the effort it demands.
Scruton’s keystone is that Darwinism, and behind it scientism, has invaded the humanities, seeking to redescribe and ‘explain’ everything we recognise as human in ‘objective’, material terms. This, he argues, is a vain (and destructive) goal, which “cannot take note of the internal order of our states of mind” and therefore of our everyday experience of living as and with free, intentional, moral persons.
This approach invites a kind of “ontological dualism”: because humans can’t just be one thing (matter), we must therefore be two (matter and spirit), which somehow mysteriously interact. Scruton rejects this, preferring instead what he calls “cognitive dualism”. According to this, “the world can be understood in two incommensurable ways, the way of science, and the way of interpersonal understanding”. It is not that human beings comprise anything other than the same stuff that makes the rest of the world. It is that the form that stuff takes permits two different kinds of engagement, the scientific and the personal. “The person is not a special kind of object but an object to which we can respond in a special kind of way.” Thus, smiling, looking, kissing, and blushing – to take four examples he discusses – are all understood very differently depending on whether we think of them in the first or third person.
As with persons, so with what they make. Music is an “emergent” feature of sound, art of pigments, and architecture of building materials in the same way the person is of Homo sapiens. To encounter Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise, or Santa Maria della Pace in Rome (all examples he cites) without understanding their personal content is to fail to understand them. Worse, it is to desecrate them.
Acknowledging and thinking within this personal dimension is to move from the realm of “causes” into that of “reasons” and “meanings”. It is to treat the question ‘why?’ as meaningful. And it is to lead towards (thoughts of) God – although, crucially, God as ‘You’ rather than God as ‘It’, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob rather than the God of the Philosophers.
Scruton is too sharp (and too honest) to imagine that this somehow means that God necessarily ‘exists’. Indeed, the book is in one respect an extended discussion of whether the concepts of person, freedom, beauty, and God form anything more than “a shared hallucination”. Its objective, however, is not so much to answer those questions as to insist that they are meaningful. Atheists, Scruton rightly says, will reject the question of why altogether. But to do so is merely to “turn aside from the argument”, and confine oneself to a world of causes rather than reasons, human beings rather than persons, sounds rather than music. And however cogent that may seem when you are in the laboratory, it is not world in which we live and move and have our being.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
The Soul of the World is published by Princeton University Press
Image by Viewminder from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.
