Remarks on science and Christianity - two

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There is a sense - and this is what I want to show in this article - that the two sides are talking past each other. The issue is one specific scientist - Charles Darwin: a hero to one side because of his achievements, condemned by the others because of the moral tendency of his ideas. Each side is busy ignoring the real, living point of the other. Very few Christians appear willing to even admit the validity of Darwin’s scientific work; and even as open-minded and civilized a scientist as the late Stephen Jay Gould downright falsifies his hero’s views - or perhaps does not want to see them. After all, they are the very doctrines of racial superiority that he himself has spent much of his life fighting. Time and again, in his brilliant essays, Jay Gould repeats as a mantra a single remark of his hero: “If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin” - our, because while Newton had gained his position in the ruling order by politicking and conniving, Darwin had been born to it. Newton was the posthumous son of a small farmer; Darwin was one of the owners of England, the class of squires, born rich and never missing an opportunity of getting richer. The poor belonged to his class in very much the same way as slaves belonged to southern American landholders; they were “our” charge.

Well, for a start this statement only refers to “our” poor, that is, to fellow members of what we shall soon see that Darwin regarded as a superior and privileged race. So it may well be that what troubled him might be not poverty as such, but that racially superior Anglo-Saxons were living no better than contemptible Irishmen. But apart from that, Darwin was not quiet on social matters in other areas; and nearly every other statements he makes on history, sociology, or culture, clearly contradicts Professor Jay Gould’s humanitarian interpretation.

In effect, Darwin’s real views have been neglected or covered up ever since they became unpopular. (Does that remind us of anyone?) In Commonweal magazine, Peter Quinn found it all too easy to nail Charles Darwin’s philosophical hide to the wall:

In 1912, in his presidential address to the First International Congress of Eugenics, a landmark gathering in London of racial biologists from Germany, the United States, and other parts of the world, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, trumpeted the spread of eugenics and evolution. As described by Nicholas Wright Gillham in his A Life of Francis Galton, Major Darwin foresaw the day when “eugenics would become not only a grail, a substitute for religion, as Galton had hoped, but a ‘paramount duty’ whose tenets would presumably become enforceable.” The major repeated his father’s admonition that, though the crudest workings of natural selection must be mitigated by “the spirit of civilization,” society must encourage breeding among the best stock and prevent it among the worst “without further delay.”
Leonard Darwin’s recognition of his father’s role in the formation and promotion of eugenics was more than filial piety… Adrian Desmond and James Moore in their 1991 biography, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, make clear that natural selection was intended as more than a theory of life’s origins. “‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image,” they write. “But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start - Darwinism was invented to explain human society.”
… By the time Darwin published the second edition of The Descent of Man in 1874, he had added Francis Galton’s eugenic theories and Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” social philosophy to the mix, calling Hereditary Genius, Galton’s treatise on the biological nature of intelligence and moral character, “remarkable” and Spencer “our greatest philosopher.”

We shall soon see reason why Darwin, of all people, should not have taken refuge in the notion of hereditary intelligence and of the importance of intelligence. Meanwhile, let us get back to Peter Quinn’s J’accuse:

“There is not the least inherent improbability, as it seems to me,” Darwin writes in support of Galton’s theory, “in virtuous tendencies being more or less inherited.”

In which case, any moderately intelligent person would answer, they would be to that extent not virtuous at all, since there is no virtue in following an obliged - inherited - path. Iron is not praised for sticking to the magnet, nor man for dying after threescore and ten years of life. Virtue is only virtue - in the sense Darwin meant, that is moral goodness - if it is understood and followed by an act of will.

In locating an example of Galton’s iron law of hereditary determinism, Darwin shows no sign of succumbing to egalitarianism: “I have heard of authentic cases in which a desire to steal and a tendency to lie appear to run in families; and as stealing is a rare crime in the wealthy classes we can hardly account by accidental coincidence for the tendency occurring in two or three members of the same family.”

This, of course, is a frequent nightmare of the nineteenth-century English and European aristocracies - the criminal aristocrat, and his recurrence in certain families of rank whose behaviour tended to shock everyone else. It did not seem to occur to Darwin that being brought up and educated by a criminal father, who had probably picked a likely mind for a wife or else beaten her into submission, might lead a son into criminality. Not that I deny the possibility of hereditary factors such as tendencies to violence or rashness: but Darwin’s complete failure to even consider education in his lucubrations on criminal families show that feature of bland dullness, the very reverse of sparkle or intelligence, that many people found in him. And beyond the prejudice and the arrogance, it is this very feature of dullness, of stupidity, which the merciless Quinn, not content with his already clear evidence, keeps bringing out:

Darwin’s work is filled with references to the work of those involved in creating a radical new “scientific” justification for labeling races, classes, and individuals as “inferior.” He writes of having seen “the ear of a microcephalous idiot” thanks to “the kindness of Dr. L. Down.” John Langdon Haydon Down was the medical expert who gave his name to “Down syndrome,” a form of mental retardation that he described in an 1866 paper titled “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots” as a reversion that left its victims with the physical and mental characteristics of a lesser race - that is, Mongolians.

By “Mongolians”, of course, Dr.Down meant the race of Confucius and Hayao Miyazaki - whose mental and moral inferiority and proximity to Down’s Syndrome victims is not very easy to discern to the rest of us.

The energetic skull measuring done by French anthropologist Paul Broca, which made him a leader in establishing definitive links among brain size, race, and intelligence, is cited approvingly by Darwin in several places. The celebrated German anatomist Karl Vogt, whose work Darwin also relies on, concluded that the Negro’s intellectual abilities could rise no higher than those of “the child, the female and the senile white.” In writing about “idiots” who “resemble the lower types of mankind,” Darwin offers this appraisal: “They are often filthy in their habits, and have no sense of decency; and several cases have been published of their bodies being remarkably hairy ... the simple brain of a microcephalous idiot, in so far as it resembles that of an ape, may in this sense be said to offer a case of reversion.”<

While celebrating the evolutionary process that produced English gentlemen like himself (the self-congratulatory note that rankled Nietzsche), Darwin writes in The Descent of Man that “a most important obstacle in civilized countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class” is the tendency of society’s “very poor and reckless,” who are “often degraded by vice,” to increase faster than “the provident and generally virtuous members.”
To illustrate, Darwin quotes at length from “On the Failure of ‘Natural Selection’ in the Case of Man,” an article in Fraser’s Magazine of September 1868 by cotton manufacturer turned laissez-faire economist and essayist, W. R. Greg: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits [transcriber’s note: notice the atrocious grammatical mistake of this self-regarding Briton, evidently incapable of paying his own language sufficient respect!]: the frugal, fore-seeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts, and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect [emphasis added], would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence’ [Malthus’s phrase], it would be the inferior and less favored race that had prevailed.”

How is this problem in the theory solved? With ridiculous ease:

Fortunately, the high mortality among the “intemperate” and “extremely profligate” prevents such catastrophes. In the case of the Irish, the potato famine of the 1840s did the job, killing more than a million and sending 2 million abroad. As an English gentleman farmer, Darwin had firsthand experience of the potato blight. (“Poor people, wherever I have been,” he wrote a friend, “seem to be in great alarm”; but the impact on England was far less severe than on Ireland, and his family continued to live, he reported, “as rich as Jews.”)
But when it came to describing the effects of famine, Darwin - perhaps with the political sensitivities of the Irish question in mind - prefers to look far from the United Kingdom. “With savages the difficulty of obtaining subsistence occasionally limits their number in a much more direct manner than with civilized people, for all tribes periodically suffer from severe famine,” he wrote. “Many accounts have been published of their protruding stomachs and emaciated limbs after and during famine. They are also compelled to wander much, and, as I was assured in Australia, their infants perish in large numbers.”

Whether, in fact, Aborigines and other races represented distinct species is a central concern of The Descent of Man, and though he meanders at times through thickets of mind-numbing detail, Darwin offers a clear chronicle of how one group-Anglo-Saxons-outdistanced all others in its evolutionary progress and what that means for the future. The races, Darwin observes, differ significantly in small ways such as hair texture and significant ways such as skull capacity “and even in the convolutions of the brain.” Likewise, their powers of mind are “very distinct, chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.”

Of course, the truest test of whether races are separate species is if they can breed together, and here, at least at first glance, the evidence seemed ambiguous. Professor Broca, “a cautious and philosophical observer,” Darwin writes, reported much evidence “that some races were fertile together, but evidence of an opposite nature in regard to other races.” In the end, the evidence suggests to Darwin that the differences among the races were “graduated” rather than absolute and that “the term ‘sub-species’ might here be used with propriety,” though “from long habit the term ‘race’ will always be employed.”
All races, as it turns out, descend from the same ancestor but some are more descended than others. “I do not think that the Rev. Mr. Zincke takes an exaggerated view,” Darwin declares, “when he says: ‘All other series of events-as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome - only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to ... the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the west.”

Considering that most of the great art and culture even of the West, let alone the world at large, was at the time being produced away from “the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the west”, to dismiss Plato, Jesus and Thomas Aquinas in the past, and Beethoven, Goethe, Verdi, Balzac, Wagner, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or even Napoleon and Bismarck in the present, as mere subsidiaries of “the great stream” shows not so much arrogance as sad, provincial ignorance. This is the Fog in the Channel, Continent cut off mentality in full and sorry display, with an unselfconscious purity such as we today only ever imagine from the mockery of Dickens and of foreigners reporting on that particular breed of Victorian fool. It also shows the great biologist, so careful of classification and description in his properly scientific work, talking the most nebulous, ill-defined nonsense, and taking popular ideas for granted with not the slightest notion that they could even begin to be questioned. It shows him, in short, being fantastically, thumpingly stupid. Quinn still hasn’t had enough:

…Darwin envisions a far grimmer future for races or sub-species less fit than the Anglo-Saxon. “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world,” he predicts. “At the same time the anthropological apes ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state ... even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Darwin is cavalier about the extermination of lesser breeds. He estimates that minimal force will be required, for “when civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.” Even here, in Darwin’s view, only civilized races could “resist with impunity the greatest diversities of climate and other changes,” a truth nowhere better displayed than in Britain’s imperial reach. In contrast, the “wilder races” showed the same lack of adaptability as their “nearest allies, the anthropoid apes, which have never survived long, when removed from their native country.”

I disagree with Quinn’s reading here. Darwin is not being “cavalier” so much as having a failure of imagination. In fact, I would say, his imagination is refusing to work, because what it would have to imagine is something that Darwin’s commonplace Englishness subconsciously rebels against. Here stupidity, we might say, becomes the accomplice of a certain underlying standard of decency. It would have been easy enough for Darwin to envisage what his ideological successors envisaged and worked towards - the extermination of whole social groups for the improvement of the race. He did not; and the very fact that it was so easy that practically everyone else except him managed it, shows that he did not do it because, at some level, he did not want to. Any time that his imagination comes near the extermination of whole races, he escapes from any suggestion of human responsibility into naturalistic verbiage that does not even explain what he expected to happen to the doomed groups, in fact which, in one case, positively contradicts what he had just been saying. For if lesser races, like the great apes, cannot live away from their original homes as he claims, then this proves that they CAN live in their homes - that is, that their survival in certain and definite areas is fairly assured. Only a stupid man could make such an argument without noticing the hole in it, and only positively idolatrous readers could fail to notice it.

The words stupid, dull, fool, have recurred again and again in this discussion of Darwin’s sociological views: not, I hope, spoken in anger, but as the inevitable, one might say clinical, description of things that objectively call for such words. One thing we can say for sure: that this great scientist was in many ways very stupid. The evidence lies before our eyes. And that ought not to surprise us. The noblest praise of Darwin ever written comes not from his champions, bent against all the evidence on making him a plaster saint, but from G.K. Chesterton; and if the word “stupidity” is not found in it, the word “dullness” comes as its very climax:

Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose. When a man splits a grain of sand and the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. It is hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous power and triumph. If they had brought the heavens down like a house of cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle; their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. Whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, there was a good ground for attacking them; but so long as they were wholly humble, they were wholly victorious. There were possible answers to Huxley; there was no answer possible to Darwin. He was convincing because of his unconsciousness; one might almost say because of his dullness.

Yet Darwin was a genius. We can, indeed we must, generalize from this. Genius is not intelligence cubed; there is no scale of increasingly keen wit at one end of which we find the common or garden fool and at the other Beethoven, Rembrandt or Galileo. The phenomenon of the stupid genius, though infrequent, is by no means impossible: they exist. Niels Bohr, the equal of Fermi and Einstein in the great generation of early twentieth century physicists, looked, sounded, and acted like a classic moron, with a low and sloping forehead, buck teeth and a stupid grin; and he was so slow of understanding that his own students sometimes had to explain things to him in class. The painter Rousseau le Douanier was the butt of the whole Parisian artistic world. In the same time and culture, the musician Bruckner was the joke of all Vienna, looking and sounding like the crassest of country yokels. Voltaire reported that his father, who met the great playwright Corneille, used to say that Corneille was the silliest and most boring person he had ever spoken with, and that all he could talk about was the prices he was paid for his plays. And you should read Dr.Johnson’s hilarious account of his own friend, Oliver Goldsmith, “poor Noll/ Who writ like an angel, and talked like poor Poll”.

Much more frequent are geniuses who are stupid in specific areas. Beethoven never learned to write or speak decent German, though he spent his life among educated people, and his letters to his last days are full of his native Rhenish dialect. C.S.Lewis thought that Tito was the King of Greece. I am the personal - and frequently infuriated - friend of a writer of genius in her mid-thirties, whose work I am confident will become immortal, and whose ideas on society and modern history I have called to her face both liberticidal and hopelessly confused. And charity will not allow more than a mention of the nonsense that both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson spoke about religion and philosophy - the braying of provincial asses simply convinced that they had understood and comprehended the stars. And yet, if Franklin and Jefferson were not great men and geniuses, then neither expression has much meaning.

This is important in that it destroys one of the obsessions of Social Darwinists themselves, the importance they ascribe to IQ and inborn - inherited - gifts. Genius is and remains mysterious, but the one thing that is clear is that it has nothing to do with the top whatever per cent of measured IQs in the population. Just as some geniuses are remarkably stupid, so a large amount of high-IQ individuals have remarkably little to offer society. (In order to avoid suggestions of sour grapes, I had better mention that I myself have a Mensa-certified IQ of 156 - what they call genius level.)

The issue with genius, and specifically with the productive genius that really enriches society and advances knowledge, is by what channels men otherwise as ordinary as Darwin, as meanly ambitious as Newton, as damaged as Beethoven, were capable of star-shaking achievement. And the first thing that matters is that their very flaws and peculiarities may be among the causes. It should be enough to damn Darwin’s socio-political views, to show that they are profoundly stupid, and I think we can agree that they are. They are not just intolerable as philosophy, religion, politics, humanity; they are bad biology. Darwin not only crassly extended to the social relationships within a single species - and that species, homo sapiens - the principles of competition for resources and space that he found in the interplay of different species, but did so with absolutely none of the precision and care he brought to his biological work. He seems unable to understand that the relationship between English and Irish in any context might be different than the purely competitive relationship between, say, different species of carnivorous fish in a single lake - such as, perhaps, will not allow a slower or less adaptable species to survive the presence of another; and that in spite of the fact that Irish men of all kinds were a part of the society he moved in, and that conversely the effect of English interference on Ireland had been a major matter of argument for centuries. Darwin simply “knew” that the Irish were dirty and improvident; the Irish lawyers and politicians, businessmen and academics, he could meet every day of the week, simply did not register on his mind, sharp though it was for every variation in animal characteristics. And this shows that he has never even begun to reflect on the principles of history and sociology. He had never so much as asked himself whether these disciplines had any different feature from the kind of biology he practiced. In fact, he did not think on these things at all.

But this, in turn, tells us that, while his ideas on history and sociology can be discarded as interesting only to his personal character, his biological studies cannot possibly be treated in the same way. They are serious work. They are to be treated seriously. It was in this area that Darwin spoke like an adult and a man of principle rather than like a dolt fed by stupid fads, never making a statement he could not substantiate, taking care that his observations should be of the highest quality. The Darwin who measured the beaks of finches in Galapagos and elsewhere and left us still valuable descriptions was not the man who dealt in airy generalizations about people he had never met or, if met, he had totally failed to know.

That is why I started from Newton - a man who makes Darwin, as a personality, seem an angel of light. Do we, because of Newton’s hateful personal qualities, even consider rejecting his scientific achievement? We would be mad to do so. They have been proven in the only way that matters, by their results and by what was constructed upon them, a million million times. Our whole civilization could not survive a minute without Newtonian mathematics, mechanics, optics. Einstein’s discoveries did not revoke them so much as enlarge upon them, and it has been said that Newtonian physics live on as a sub-case of Einsteinian.

That is not to say that Newton’s crazed theology had no influence on the direction and significance of his discoveries. They can clearly be perceived in the description of a self-contained universe living entirely through forces that have no origin outside it and that continue in their one direction by inertia till any other stimulus alters their direction and quality. This is Deism in its rawest form, denying both the need and the possibility for a Mediator and for any intervention by the Creator in His creation. Nor does it stop there, either. Emotionally, though not logically, this picture of forces in blind and constant motion tends to contradict one of the classical proofs of the existence of God, the proof from motion. I mean that, although a logician could easily show that something must have started those forces which inertia kept in being, nonetheless the imaginative impact of this picture makes the supernatural fade away from the real world as it can be imagined. For three centuries, atheists have snugly cradled themselves in the closed Newtonian universe, gleefully repeating - if they knew French - the answer which, according to a legend more persistent than history, the scientist Laplace was supposed to have returned to someone who asked why he had left no space for God in his system: Je n’En vois pas la ncessit. I cannot see any need for It. Even after Einstein, they still do it.

That in real life Laplace, though atheist enough, never said anything so cool, pregnant or powerful, is a great deal less important than the fact that the legend exists. Post-Newtonian ideas of mechanics and physics encourage it if it does not positively make it inevitable. The God of Newton is at best a God Who creates the universe and then leaves it to run itself as it pleases; a true Deist Deus otiosus with no need to do anything so vulgar as become incarnate, suffer, die, or rise again. And one has to say that some, though not all, aspects of Einstein’s special and general relativity, which finally cracked the egg of the Newtonian closed universe, are so easy to understand, once explained, that one has to wonder why on Earth a genius of Newton’s power, or any of the remarkable men who followed him, ever thought of them. I think that the minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were conditioned to look for truth in one direction and one direction only; it never occurred to them to look where Einstein did, not because it was too difficult, but because it was too unexpected.

By the same token, then, it is easy to see that Darwin’s stupid, provincial, faddish ideas, rooted ultimately in English self-regard and nothing better, tended to focus his investigative powers in one direction and one direction only. It is at this point that his better self - the industrious, careful, tireless, devoted collector and combiner of facts, the man of sharp eye and sharper though narrow intuition - comes astonishingly into his own. Without his biological work, Darwin would never have been anything except a ridiculous, Podsnappish country squire, the kind that supplied Continentals and Americans with laughs and enemies of Britain with arguments. Because he had this instinct to search out facts and arrange them, he became a national glory. He was peculiarly suited, not only by his talents but by his defects, not just to perceive - evolutionary schemes had been proposed before him - but to deliver crushing accounts of the evidence for evolution. And as he was peculiarly suited for this particular work, so his age was peculiarly suited to recognize its magisterial quality, give it not only scholarly but popular acclaim, and promptly build upon it.

This peculiar suitability is, in my view, what we call genius. It will be seen that it depends as much on contemporary social conditions and beliefs as it does on individual talent; genius is in effect a combination, like a key and a lock, of the right individual talent in the right culture and society. In nine times out of ten, Beethoven would have wasted his life on the edge of society and Schubert have been a sentimental schoolmaster; in early-nineteenth-century Vienna, they were in the position to become machines to make great music. That was because of the conjunction of an immense and musically educated public, and of the new possibilities placed in the hands of intelligent composers by the recent invention of musical analysis. Trained minds seized on the possibilities afforded by the new ways of reading - and hence of writing - music; and the presence of a vast public and of a large number of trained professionals insured that their intuitions would not die unnoticed. A dreadful human being such as Newton is not uncommon; what is uncommon is that he should happen at the exact time and place when his frightening secret energies could be pointed at the one thing among many he could do surpassingly well - lay the mathematical bases of modern physics and prove them beyond peradventure - and unleashed till, in a few years of fire, he had recast all the human understanding of the material universe. Genius does not guarantee that a man should be morally decent, except in the field of his greatness; we may be sure that Newton would have done anything to suit himself, except publish a false calculation. But it does guarantee that the work he does in his field of expertise will be directly relevant to every human being.

(It follows that any scheme whatsoever to artificially foster and create genius is certain not only to fail but actually to achieve its opposite - a world of conformity, idle minds, and failed ideas. That is because nobody can envisage in advance the right combination of suitable talents with suited cultural and social circumstances; to do so would be to be able to forecast cultural and social trends a lifetime away. The minds that will be bred by such programs will be trained to deal with society and culture as they were when the program was first envisaged, or indeed when its inventors were children or young men, and therefore inevitably out of synch with the world as it will be when they bear fruit. What can be done is cultivate competence. Raise a thousand skilful musicians, and one of them may grow to be Beethoven, or at least Toscanini; try and raise a thousand musical geniuses, and you are certain to produce a thousand loquacious but rather imperceptive newspaper music critics. So much for Darwin’s and social Darwinists’ obsession.)

It is in this light that we have to regard Darwin’s properly scientific theories. He has shed light on a specific feature of the natural world, paying attention to some things and not to others because he was, in a word, that kind of man. In my view, speaking as a non-scientist with a keen interest in science, Darwin’s properly scientific theories suffer from two grave flaws. Firstly, as I said, he seems incapable to tell the difference between the patterns of interaction of different species and the social patterns within one single species. Ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz (ethology as a discipline did not exist in Darwin’s time) have shown that individual species have patterns of behaviour among themselves which, especially in the higher animals, often seem to foreshadow or even parallel human morality. (Or the reverse - scientists have observed wars between bands of monkeys.) As a delighted C.S.Lewis wrote to Bede Griffiths after discovering Lorenz’s The ring of King Solomon, “the wolf is a very different creature from what we imagine” - May 28, 1952. Secondly, it seems to envisage a frequent or constant fluidity of change, and a mechanism of change in which a mutating species goes through a fairly slow, equal change. I do not think that is the way change takes place in real life, and, with his usual instinct, Chesterton identified a more credible alternative view he called “catastrophism”, that is, spasms of sudden change followed by long periods of comparative stability. This is in fact Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium”, that is, a state of balance (equilibrium) punctuated by occasional and sudden change. The notion of constant and slow mutation led, in the early days of Darwinism, to the futile search for the “missing link” between early hominids and man. These are, in my view, severe flaws, and ought to be enough to remind us not to treat Darwin as infallible or perfect; but even if I were wrong, the anti-Darwin party would be perfectly right in pointing out that he was nothing like the plaster saint proposed by their opponents, and that his ideas were directly involved in some of the ugliest developments in recent history.

But the issue is: do we condemn his biological theories on these grounds? And here, I am afraid, the anti-Darwin party not only misses the point, but finds itself guilty of all the things with which its opponents charge it. We may, indeed we must, condemn Darwin’s confused, dangerous and obscurantist social views; and we have a right to point out where they influence and perhaps tend to corrupt his properly biological work. But we have no right to condemn a finding of fact on moral grounds: that is itself immoral. Because our opponents are mostly ashamed - because of a silly modern superstition - to use the word “morals” and its derivatives, they cannot explain why the assault on Darwin makes them so furious: but it is the violation of one of the basic moral tenets - not even of science, but of all intellectual life - that really fires their anger. And that tenet simply is: always tell the truth. Behind the complexities and obscurities of scientific language, lies this simple, universal, overriding moral demand. It is the core, the nucleus, the soul, the goetterfunken that drives and moves and animates, anything that claims to be science, or indeed knowledge of any sort.

Our opponents, like us, are human and fallible. They see some of us trying to stop the teaching to children of theories whom they have good grounds to regard as true; and they regard this as a suppression of truth. Justifiably, this rouses their anger. But in the heat of their anger, they ignore, or worse, they cover up, the reasons why those teachings are suspect to us: that they are not morally neutral, but tend to come as a package deal with a whole lot of non-scientific personal notions of Darwin’s, from the silliness of his views of culture to the folly of his atheism to the downright wickedness of his sociology (to dignify it by such a name). They fail to see that Darwin was no plaster saint, not indeed a saint at all, and that his influence on society is a legitimate object of doubt. And in doing so, they themselves violate the principle of truth. Each side grows angrier at the other, and less willing to listen; till we get the nonsense spouted by ignorant hacks such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, who do not sound like they have ever met a Christian in their lives. Their equivalents on our side I will not mention for charity’s sake, but my readers would do well to examine themselves.

The worst thing is the perversion of the very notion of science. What is certain, in science, are not the facts, but the techniques. Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, in their different ways, have both shown that the content of scientific knowledge is ever-changing and that science consists in a method rather than in an accumulation of supposed - and supposedly unchallengeable - facts. A scientist ought to approach criticisms to his/her heroes with a certain humility, not make them grounds for excommunication and refusal to listen. That does not mean that manifest nonsense is to be embraced; but beware of a reaction which is itself nonsensical and unscientific.

But Christians in their turn should be the last to shut their ears to unpalatable facts. And while eugenics and its train of vile racist and abortionist attitudes (proposals for legalized abortion began as a part of the eugenics movement, though they survived its demise) are a more than legitimate target for moral criticism and condemnation. But moral condemnation cannot sensibly reach the fact that Galapagos finches have the most extraordinary adaptations to different tasks. The facts that Darwin established are to be regarded as established, whatever interpretation we place on them.

Evolution is attacked for describing a cold, cruel, unfeeling universe. Pardon me, is that even a Christian feeling at all? Christianity teaches us that this universe is a place of exile, that our true Home lies elsewhere; and we should be surprised that this place of exile does not share our fundamental morality? Christianity teaches us that Goodness Himself, once He entered this universe, was made so welcome as to suffer murder by torture on the Cross; and we should be surprised that science describes this universe as blind and pitiless? Where did it say that nature, as opposed to God, cares a fig about mankind? Not in the Psalms, not in Ecclesiastes - for instance. Nowhere in Scripture. God, indeed, does care for the fall of a sparrow; but God is above the world, and will come back to judge it. Nature without God is blind, stupid, pitiless, a field for ignorant armies to clash by night, for the fittest rather than the best to survive. Is it worth suppressing the least true fact, let alone one of the great works of science of all time, to allow the survival of a sentimental notion of Nature found neither in Scripture nor in any Father of the Church, and barely older than Wordsworth? Of course not. Of course, it is the positive evil will of the Devil, the universal corruptor, that drove Goodness Himself to die on the Cross; but then the Devil is the Ruler of this age, or of this world - until God’s death breaks his power. We are not, or should not be, allowed to think of this world as a positive force in itself, as essentially good; the best you can say for it is that, before the Fall, it was made by God - but it should not be confused with God. To do so leads to the nasty, foolish New Age sentimentality that cannot see the difference between killing a man and killing a shark.

And scientists: beware of category mistakes. The compassion of man, the pity felt even for the animals he kills to eat, the emotional connection to every object, is just as much a fact as Darwin’s finches. And the fact that you have a special, unprecedented, and triumphantly successful insight into the laws of matter - including the matter that makes up the human body - does not make your kind of knowledge superior to other kinds that mankind cultivated since its own beginnings.

To the contrary! The success of science itself is determined by philosophical and religious notions that predate it by ages. It is not for no reason that the second man to walk on the moon used one of the Psalms to comment on this triumph of scientific technique. Science depends upon the certainty that the world is created firmly and permanently - which is in the Psalms - and upon the statement of the laws of mathematics and logic, which go back even beyond ancient Greece. Science owes its being to philosophy, and the stream does not rise higher than its source. When a scientist offers a proposal that goes beyond the sphere of science itself - namely, knowledge of the physical world - he does so not as a scientist but as a philosopher, and his proposals are to be judged as good or bad philosophy according to the rules of that discipline.

There can be no doubt, for instance, that Darwin was as bad a philosopher as ever lived; and his glory as a scientist does nothing to detract from his condemnation as a thinker - in which the best part of him is found not in what he thought, but in the few things, such as deliberate extermination of human beings, which he shrank from thinking. And scientists must appreciate that to speak of Darwin in such a way as to underrate or hide these features of his personality and work is not a service to the truth. They might also advantageously reflect on whether a philosophy so bad, whatever its positive effect, may not effectively have blinded Darwin to better interpretations of his own facts. Darwin - and his successors.

There is an implicit claim that science possesses a peculiarly sound brand of truth - of “scientific” truth, or proof, or evidence, which makes the results of other disciplines pale and phantasmal by comparison. But that is nonsense. Basic mathematics such as we learn at school is, no doubt, compelling on every human being: no matter what happens, no matter how clever you are, two and two make four, and the sum of the squares of the two right-angle sides of a right-angle triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse, and the volume of a cube is worked out by multiplying the length of its side by itself twice (cubing it). But science begins exactly where these elementary and universal facts end. For instance, the absolutely flat surface that can be assumed in the classroom and for elementary daily calculations such as working out the size of a room, is a disastrous mistake in working out the surface of a planet. One must first know the exact shape of the planet, for geometry on a curved or irregular surface does not follow the rules of what we may call ordinary geometry. And the areas in which contemporary science moves are even more complicated; so complicated that some escape Popper’s criterium of falsifiability, because no tools exist that could measure and test the theories presented.

The problem with science as a self-evident, self-proving source of truth is that to most human beings, it is nothing of the kind. They have to take it on trust, because even the kind of mathematics they learned at school cannot help them - I should say, cannot help us - to understand the kind of proof that scientists offer to each other. If we had nothing more than scientific proof to accept science as a source of truth and knowledge, then we would be reduced to gaping from outside to the superior caste of the sages, debating with each other problems that the ruck of mankind is too dense and ignorant to understand.

But this would lead science itself to despair. Separated from the human race at large, it would find itself powerless to affect it, and would eventually die out from lack of elementary interest. And at any rate it is not, luckily, like that.

What reconnects science to ordinary mankind is not, as the simple would imagine, its triumphant application in technology. That simply subjects the rest of mankind, including the rich, the strong, and the wise, to scientists, as an alien and superior caste of sorcerers, plonking among us the wonders their unexplained magic produces. No: is the fact that most of the best and most important scientific theories can be summed up in clear, economical and fairly precise verbal accounts, which any ordinary human being can understand. Few humans in any age will ever be able to read Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica - if nothing else, because it requires a joining of two skills, Latin and physical mathematics, that are rarely housed in the same skull, and less than ever today. But say to any moderately intelligent person: “each action causes an equal and opposite reaction” and, in a very short while, they will understand what you are saying. They have seen it on billiard tables or football pitches. They may even, if they think that way, have felt it in human interaction, or in politics. Einstein is in modern language the very epitome of scientific obscurity: but say to any moderately intelligent person: “A body may be considered in motion or at rest according to its position to another body”, and they will have no problem understanding it. JRR Tolkien, hardly a scientist, gave a powerful suggestion of the idea when he had Pippin, falling asleep on the back of the great horse Shadowfax, and imagining that the horse was still and the land was rushing by them. Again, set any moderately intelligent person to read the evidence gathered by Darwin, and his arguments for his theories, and their hearts will break under the effort of understanding. But tell them: “A species tends to survive, over long periods of time, according to whether or not it is fit for its environment; and physical mutation can help adapt it to an environment” - even without shortening it into “survival of the fittest” - and they will understand. That something survives best in an environment to which it is suited is an elementary truth to which they are all used: take, for instance, the astonishing survival rate of lickspittles and incompetents in work environments where the boss is insecure or incompetent or both. Indeed, the average person is less likely to make the category mistake between “fit” and “morally deserving” on which Social Darwinism rests, than most savants; he or she often has a better understanding of what “fit” means - as in “if your face fits”.

This is John Henry Newman’s “illative sense”: the instinctive capacity of the average person to understand basic theories. It does not mean that the average person can necessarily tell a sound theory from an unsound one: any one of us can quote the widespread acceptance of exploded theories in certain periods. But it does mean that, when the professional savant, certified to know to an extreme degree one or more of the branches of knowledge with which the ordinary person is familiar, tells the ordinary person: “That is the way it is, and we have the evidence for it, and we agree on it”, the ordinary person will reply: “Oh, I see.” And from their intuitive, illative position, they really will see. Even the exploded theories of the past existed on those two levels: the philosophical, scientific or theological one of the savants that formed the theory, debated it, and extended it, and the illative one of the great masses who accepted it on their authority and in their own intuitive way. After all, no theory, even a wrong one, can exist unless it seems credible and understandable.

The very existence and continued existence of science depends, therefore, not on the supposed self-proving quality of scientific achievement, but on the confidence it gains from the illative sense of outsiders. And this alone ought to discourage the exclusivism of scientists, the pretence that they have access to a layer of truth that they alone can judge. They may understand it better than anyone else - but anyone can understand its central point. And given that we have had to go outside the field of science - to a theologian, yet! - for a concept that will explain the authority of science among the non-scientific majority, there is another warning: science has no monopoly either on explanation, or on correct and fruitful explanation. A scientist may spend his or her whole life without the least understanding of the part s/he plays in society, when a Victorian theologian had come up with the most useful explanation more than a hundred and fifty years ago. At the same time, in fact, as Darwin was working out his own theories.

Enormities such as Richard Dawkins’ position in the world - a position engineered, I regret to say, by the beautiful and beloved University where I spent some of my youth and met some of the best people I know - rest entirely on the presumption that scientific truth has special authority, to be accepted reverently and unquestioningly by the rest of the human race. The notion that the world needs a “Professor of the Public Understanding of Science” is an outrage against decency, quite literally a crime against humanity; for humanity will and must form its own “public understanding of science” in the face of any interest group claiming to speak for science. To claim to have a “public understanding of science” to teach is the same as to claim to have the right to cram one’s own understanding of science down the public’s throat. It is the ultimate result of the awful notion of science as a party rather than a discipline, which I have been outlining. Karl Popper turns in his grave, and the shade of Thomas Kuhn sniggers knowingly over his.

Indeed, not only does the public have a right to form its own understanding of science, but it is quite able to make its own contribution by doing so. Some of the best suggestions that I, as a historian, have received or come across, were made by laymen, even by total ignorami. And if we accept the existence of the illative sense, this should be obvious. And everyone accepts it: even Richard Dawkins, in spite of his claim to be allowed to cram his own “public understanding of science” down the public throat, uses no better than his own illative notion of other disciplines such as theology to assess and condemn them. Every person assumes, and assumes correctly, that they are able, under correction, to understand what another person is saying. Professor Dawkins is only different, in this, in being rather deficient on the “under correction” front.

What is more, the illative ability of the average person to understand theories means that the average person is perfectly qualified, if not to judge theories, at least to react to them; and, in reacting to them, may go into areas of understanding that the authors of the theory never thought of. In a negative sense, that is what both Karl Marx and the Social Darwinist movement did with Darwin’s theories. While he himself, as we have seen, was hardly guiltless, nobody can deny that most of the political and sociological running was made by others, and sometimes, as in the case of Marx, in directions in which Darwin never thought to go. And none of this would have had any meaning at all if the illative understanding of the world as the theatre of a universal struggle for survival had not seized large masses of the ordinary public. I hope nobody is stupid enough to imagine that most or even many Social Darwinists were scientists, or even familiar with Darwin’s writings. That would be as foolish as to imagine that most Marxists have read Marx.

Conversely, the resistance to Darwin’s theories that has been one of the most remarkable features of the intellectual landscape for the last two centuries has fed on both scientific and public doubts. There has rarely been one decade since the publication of The origin of species in which Darwin’s theories have not come under sustained scientific attack. But the Darwinist party prefers to ignore this and describe anti-Darwinism as the preserve of laymen, ignorami, and beetle-browed religious fanatics. This is a defence that, apart from its dishonesty, only has any value if it is assumed that only specialists can have anything of value to say about a scientific theory. In other words, it rests on that very notion of scientists as a caste of sorcerers separate from the rest of mankind, which I just castigated.

As I write this on my computer, by the light of an energy-saving bulb, surrounded by shelves full of books, artwork, and music all reproduced cheaply by modern industrial technology, kept warm by central heating worked from a combination boiler, listening to a Mozart chamber work performed on my hi-fi by musicians now mostly dead whose work is preserved on vinyl, magnetic tape, and CD, I have many, many reasons to be grateful to science and technology. And if he who wills the ends wills the means, I have to accept that the Unitarian fanaticism of Newton and the Podsnappish racism of Darwin, along with dozens of more or less egregious cases, have gone into the discovery of truths - not all of them equally pleasing - about nature and reality.

To understand how such men reached such truths, we have to make use of the unscientific discipline of - call it what you will: biography, psychology, character analysis. And this is important, because in a great deal of contemporary debate, character analysis is used to objectively discredit the work of this or that person. If politician A acted according to certain beliefs, it was because of his personal and class background; if artist B produced a novel with a certain content and underlying view of the world, it was because of his peculiarities; and - it will seem to many that I said - if scientist C made certain discoveries and proved astonishingly blind in other areas, it was because of his own personality flaws. There is an unspoken assumption that the worker’s personal features or even flaws not only may but must be used to discredit the work; as if only a featureless impersonality could be a guarantee of truth. This is the unargued assumption behind the universal modern call for unbiased views and impartial attitudes.

To assume that personality is an inevitable flaw in the perception of reality is to assume that human individuality is incapable of perceiving truth. And this is a very widespread assumption. The weight of what is called “vulgar Marxism”, using social analysis to explain - or explain away - opposing viewpoints, and prevalent in the contemporary world, both reinforces it and is reinforced by it. But if we decided that this proposition is fallacious, it would be open to us to say - that politician A was able to see certain opportunities and certain dangers because his personal and class background gifted him with perceptions others lacked; that artist B understood better than most the features of reality that underlie his novel, because of his peculiarities; and - what I have really been saying - that while the personality flaws of scientist C made him astonishingly blind in certain areas, they also allowed him to focus with astonishing clarity in certain others. After all, a lens that focuses on a certain area of ground will inevitably blur other areas. That does not make its perception of its focus area any less valuable.

This leads to an important point. Not only do we have to reject the superficial temptation to reject knowledge reached by such men and through such lenses; but we have to realize that if such views and such men could reach such truths, then even grossly distorted views, even errors as enormous as Darwin’s, as vicious as Newton’s, can be the midwives of specific truths. This is an incredibly dangerous statement, because it is superficially similar to that everlasting heresy that St.Paul sarcastically formulated as “Let us do evil that good may come” and that haunts the Christian West to this day - the temptation by which the Devil reaches Adrian Leverkhn in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus: to imagine that the good result of any bad action is so intimately connected to the evil in that action, that good can actually come out of evil, not as an unexpected by-product, but as an essential and expected result. The opposite should be seen to be the case: if any good comes out of something evil, then its evil was not complete. After all, complete evil is not very easy to conceive. God made this world, and His influence is not so easy to drive out from even its darkest corners. And if an individuality as sick as Newton’s was still capable of capturing essential truths, then that is proof that his sickness was not complete.

Individuality as such does not make for flawed perceptions, dubious perceptions, untrustworthy perceptions, as any logician could understand. Individuality does indeed make for limited perceptions; but it does not mean that such perceptions as it does reach must be untrustworthy. It is another syllogism that is really operative here: that human perceptions are necessarily flawed not just because they are individual, but because the human mind as a whole cannot be trusted. The flaws that analytical readers tend to find in people and which lead them to generalized distrust, are moral flaws: the assumption is that people, consciously, unconsciously, or by habit, argue and perceive in such a way as to advantage themselves and their social group.

In other words, it is the old nightmare of Protestantism that lives on in these untested, unchallenged, universal assumptions. Man is corrupt in his whole being. His best faculties are just as fully broken and twisted by Original Sin as his lowest instincts. No man can be trusted - even his conscious benevolence is exercised through personal qualities so wholly ruined by sin as to come out as itself ruinous and sinful. And as sin is so wholly in control of mankind, there is nothing left for the believer to do except to pray. The fact, indeed, that God has marked a certain amount of this otherwise damned mass of mankind as predestined to salvation seems to me, although no doubt Calvinist theologians will disagree, a genuine case of “Let us do evil that good may come” applied to the good God himself: by His own inscrutable judgements, God has decided to save, from the beginning, a certain number of us.

This is the distant statement about mankind that, through a dozen reversals and rethinkings, hides under the surface of all too frequent assumptions about the value of impartiality and the nature of judgement

At which point I come to suspect that the modern so-called “struggle of science and Christianity” is in effect the final (thus far) drama of the cycle of the Reformation. It is, in effect, a struggle between two schismatic branches of Calvinism. On the one hand, the long wave of Calvinism in the many branches of American Evangelicalism, principally the Baptist empire, diverse in doctrine, but sharing the congregational organization and the distrust of anything except truth revealed in the Bible (for the shadow of Calvinism means war with human reason). On the other, behind the votaries of deist, agnostic or atheistic science, dedicated from the beginning to necessitarianism and opposed to the notion of free will, there also looms the grim unsmiling shadow of the first French theorist of predestination. Jansenius, Holbach. Laplace and Sartre were no more than increasingly unconscious carriers of John Calvin’s torch. Sir Isaac Newton, born in the East English heartleands of the Puritan revolution barely two generations after its triumph and collapse, carried on, in the university of the Roundheads, the negative tradition of hatred of episcopacy, Catholicism and everything related. The French theorists of the mechanical universe, Baron d’Holbach and the rest, carried on in a more - but not much more - polite age, the predestinarian polemic of the Jansenists, and before the Jansenists, of the Huguenots. Their enemies were the same - beginning with the Jesuits, who, in seeing and attacking the rising danger of Calvinism disguised in Church clothes, had earned the undying hatred even of people who had no idea of or interest in Jansenism. The strange lust to imagine oneself under total control, the addiction to the dreadful vision of a universe controlled in every detail by a superior mathematics, inevitably bound to necessity so that the most random event can be predicted if a man only knows all the forces involved, is the common underground stream that shapes and breeds all the various manifestations of the predestinarian, from the fanatics of Geneva to the tenured modern deniers of God.

Reality has infinite aspects. It is just as real to discover the stupid and poisonous features of Darwin’s mind, which both directed and limited his research, and the unpleasant views of Newton, which conditioned his, as to make the discoveries that Newton and Darwin did. In both cases we are learning about reality - and reality manifests He Who created it. And if it turns out that some of the fundamental discoveries were made by men whose vision was conditioned by false beliefs and irresponsible attitudes, I for one will give thanks for everything true in them to He Who can bring good out of evil; and pray for the souls of those who discovered them. May their evil be forgiven, and may all the virtues without which they could never have achieved their particular truths be taken alive with them into Paradise, to give glory for ever to God Who made them. Nature and reality are so many-sided that they afford any amount of different viewpoints room to expand: the Deus Otiosus of Newton, creating a closed universe and allowing it to move by itself, is no less at home in this immense world of blind and unceasing forces, as the strange designs of Einstein, or the defining importance of the observer in modern physics. At any time a strange, even perverse personality may appear, whose own natural gifts are just what is needed to progress knowledge in one particular direction. And while it is important to know how and why that particular person focused on that particular area or notion, results stand or fall by their own merit.