Darwin, Evolution and God: The Present Debates - Professor Alister McGrath

and let me begin by saying what a pleasure it is to be here again and to talk to you on this theme of Darwin I'd remember last week those who were here I began to explore some of the themes that emerged from an understanding of creation and we looked at things like fine-tuning and at the end of that lecture I said to you but of course in many ways some of the most interesting questions that emerge from this whole area have to do with Charles Darwin the idea of evolution and so this lecture really is going to open up these questions now let me say immediately that we are not going to settle these in the are I have at my disposal what I can do and what I will do I promise is to map out some of the questions give you an idea what some of the answers might be in kind of way give you the resources for you to think your own way through these they're very interesting questions and of course to do justice to them which I intend to we need to make sure we spend a bit of time talking about Charles Darwin what he achieved what his ideas were and then begin to move on and look at their implications so let's begin by just noting that one of the most vigorous and ongoing debates within modern Christian thought does concern the implications of Darwinism for religious belief and obviously the doctrine of creation the idea that God created the world is very much in the frame of this discussion and this is why I think it's so obvious to move on now to talk about Darwin Darwinism and some of the issues that emerge from that although I'm going to be focusing on Christianity I want to make it absolutely clear that this debate is by no means limited to Christianity for example there's a generally hostile reaction to Darwin and Darwinism in the Islamic world for example especially in Turkey but I just haven't got the time to to go wider I'm afraid so I'm going to focus on one particular area which opens up some very interesting questions and if you have time to explore them more widely then that will be wonderful so where should we begin Winder a very good way of beginning is to ask what this word Darwinism actually means because we use it a lot and it's good to try and focused on and what it actually really means I think most of us would say something like this well it means something like the theories that emerged from the writings of Charles Darwin although of course we recognize that and these have been developed and modified since then and if there any historians in this audience listening yeah you will probably recognize there's a very interesting question to explore here we don't really use the word Copernicanism anymore to refer to the idea that the earth rotates around the Sun we've dropped that we just think it's so obvious it doesn't need to be used but the word Darwinism lingers it's still seen as being significant and so I'm going to continue that tradition and use this word Darwinism and think of it not simply as Darwin's own ideas but these ideas as they've been developed and expanded in subsequent research and if we want a working definition of what the core element of Darwinism is well let me draw on Richard Dawkins I think summarizes the key theme very well a he says it's the minimal theory that evolution is guided in adaptively non-random directions by the non-random survival of small random hereditary changes now the point is making is that these changes seem to occur by accident so in that sense there's a random element to it but once they have occurred the process by which they are selected is anything but random and so for Dawkins himself basically to say evolutions a random process rather misses the point it may be random at one level but at others it's anything but that so what are the alternatives to Darwin well of course in the nineteenth century Darwin was very conscious that he had to defend his theory against two rival positions and there were others but there were two that in effect were were known by many people and Darwin clearly felt the need to first of all distinguishes own theory from those of others and secondly to show was much better one of them is an approach which is linked with a man called William Paley now say more about Paley later in this lecture which basically is that the world as we see it was made pretty much in the way that it is now in other words there's no change that the way things are is the way things always have been and that that view was really in decline by the time Darwin came along but Darwin in FL felt he had to engage it because for love as readers would in effect know about it and want to know how Darwin stacked up against them but the other one of course is Jean Baptiste Lamarck Frenchman who in effect presented a theory of evolution which first of all recognized that evolution happened and secondly proposed in effect the evolution progressed by small changes resulting from organisms responding to their environments and many of you may have seen textbook illustrations of this the classic is of course - the giraffe where and the textbook would begin with an animal kind of small neck and has a trees get more more I've reached the animal stretches and gradually it gets a longer neck which is passed on to its progeny and so on in other words it's an intentional process by which characteristics that are acquired are passed on to their successors and Darwin didn't like that and we'll see why in a few moments one more point before we begin to look at Darwin in more detail the phenomenon of evolution was fairly widely accepted by by 1850 at least in educated circles the issue really was how you explained that how did this happen and Darwin's genius son and I think with that word geniuses absolutely legitimate is to find a mechanism to in effect say look something is happening and I think I can provide an explanation of how this process actually happens now of course again I must make the point that there are ongoing debates within evolution biology and many of you know only some of these the one that very often people talk about is Stephen Jay Gould idea of punctuated equilibrium punctuated equilibrium what really and Gould means by that is evolution is not a continuous process it in effect goes since in starts no there's there's a period of relative questions and then something happens and a lot goes on in our brief period then it settles down again and then something else kicks it off and there is some evidence for that but it's not universally accepted so lots of interesting debates about the evolutionary biology of Darwin's approach which we could look at but really I'm focusing today not so much on the science but on its potential religious implications and in general scholars tend to focus on two broad areas which are clearly opened up for discussion by Darwin's Origin of Species which of course appeared in 1859 1859 and of course later in his more radical book actually the descent of men published in 1871 and the first major approach is to say we'll look what what was the religious response at the time how can we begin to understand this how significant was it and very often I have to say this is slightly overstated I mean there was hostility particularly in nonconformist circles within the Church of England on the whole there was a sort of feeling that this was this was okay and I hope out of time talk about that a little bit more in this lecture but the second is perhaps more interesting and that's to say look let's not worry about the history let's just stand back and say in general terms if Darwinism is Right what are the issues that emerge from it and I'm going to mingle these a little bit trying to look at some historical episodes but also trying to stand back and look at some of the more specific questions which just arise anyway not specifically from Darwin's Origin of Species but from this general understanding of our species came into existence but I think we need begin by doing a little bit history and so I'm going to do that Darwin didn't exist in a vacuum I think went to make the point there were many before Darwin who laid the foundations for his approach many of you will think of Alfred what was so actually in the view of these some scholars in effect got there first but in effect Darwin published robust and resilient account of a phenomenon before Wallace did or we might think of Henry Lyle's with our Charles Lyell's very famous book the principles of geology in 1830 well Lyell began to open up a number of ways of explaining the rather interesting geological features he was observing and so there's a whole series of things in the background which I think help us understand how Darwin's theory fitted in like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle remarkably well at the time but I must emphasize that Darwin is original and saying there were others who laid the groundwork for him doesn't in any way diminish the fact that this man was quite exceptional Darwin in effect set out as the naturalist on HMS Beagle in September 1831 and his task basically was to document the biological species that he encountered on this five-year journey round the world and I think you need to just pause and imagine what a five-year journey collecting biological specimens might have felt like but anyway Darwin found this very very interesting and he makes it very very clear that it was his time on the Beagle that really opened up some of these questions and in his memoirs of this he talks about how he observed various things particularly in the population of islands particularly in parts of Latin America done by the Tierra del Fuego area which in effect began to raise question marks in his mind about the about exists understandings of biological diversity I think the point I'd like to emphasize before I read this and comment on it is that if you're in England all the time you're not perhaps aware of the extent of biological diversity and some of the unusual features you find particularly in small islands which are remote from any mainland were very often things happen which actually can be explained quite well by Darwin's proposals and so Darwin's journey actually gave him the evidence he needed to begin to break with existing understandings so Darwin talked about the pivotal role of this five-year voyage when on board HMS Beagle is naturist I was much struck with certain facts in a distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America and a geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent these factors will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume seem to me to throw some light on the Origin of Species that mystery of mysteries has been called by one of our greatest philosophers now the evidence suggests that when Darwin came back he had all the material he needed to develop his new theory but I think most scholars would say that the theory actually wasn't yet in place actually Darwin required to reflect on his theory and begin to are not some difficulties he could see in it so the the voyage on the Beagle gave him if you like the building blocks but the actual emergence of Darwin's theory would take another 15 or so years before it really began to happen so let's begin by just focusing on a little bit more on what the alternatives were because clearly Darwin in proposing a new theory has to show it's better than existing understandings now one of the most influential which I've hinted at already is due to William who died in 1805 paly was a sort of establishment figure he was Archdeacon of Carlisle and he basically argued that the world as we now see it is pretty much the way it's always been and Bailey's genius actually lay in his development of an analogy which helped him to depict God's act of creation in ways that connected up with the culture of his day and I'm looking the book he published in 1802 called natural theology and Begley I think is really quite remarkable he needed some good analogies to help his audience understand his ideas and of course by this stage England was transitioning into the Industrial Revolution and in effect what pay they did was to pick up on the analogy of industrial machines like spinning jellies which were clearly designed they were clearly constructed and they were clearly constructed for a purpose and Paley's argument is that you can see these same basic ideas in looking at the natural world it seems to be designed it seems to be constructed and there seems to be some sort of purposeful intention lying behind the old whole thing but the image that sticks with us in our imaginations is not the spinning jenny but the watch and peleas best remembered for his image of God as the divine watchmaker in effect Paley spends I think it's three or four pages of this book natural theology describing a watch in intricate detail and the point he's making is that each of its components fits into place it does something and these things don't just happen so pay these pointers look imagine you're walking across a Heath and you stub your toe on a stone you look down and say well there's nothing unusual about stone lots of them what's special about that and then you walk on and you see a watch lying on the ground and Paley's pointers there is something about the watch that makes you think that's different you know it doesn't just happen to be here there's something about this which makes it stand out from its environment as being different and Paley's basic argument is that intelligent observation of the world leads you to the conclusion that it cannot have arrived it can have arrived that by accident and the controlling analogy of the watch is very very important for painting and Paley uses the word contrivance now for us the word contrivance is a slightly negative word if I were to talk about somebody contriving something I think you would probably understand me to mean something like they offered a slightly unnatural and forced explanation but in Paley's day the word contrivance was a good word it meant something that had clearly been designed and constructed we've developed the meaning since then but for Paley a contrivance is a complicated piece of machinery that's clearly been designed and constructed and he writes this here's a quote from that book I mentioned every indication of contrivance and I remember for Paley that's a good word every manifestation of design which existed in the watch also exists in the work of nature and in fact a Penny's argument is that the natural world especially its biological elements show a far greater degree of contrivance than a human watch now Richard Dawkins you may have read his book the blind watchmaker Dawkins is eloquent about Paley's description of a natural world especially his description of the human eye and Paley in effect uses this lyrical description of the complexity of nature to bolster his argument this simply could not have happened at random this is clear indication that something was constructed iater emphasize the Paley's is a static worldview there is no development the way things are is the way things always have been and therefore for Paley there is no possibility of evolution or development simply because things are what they've always been and one of the questions that historians ask and fail to answer I think is what would happen if Paley had kept his emphasis on contrivance but allowed that there might have been development within the biological order and I'll touch on that a little bit later in this lecture buying to say to you that Paley didn't do that now Darwin knew about painting and the evidence is that Darwin read Paley while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge in fact some of you will probably know this so actually both William Paley and Charles Darwin went to the same Cambridge College which of course was crisis College so there's a connection there and I think as a young man and Darwin was actually quite favorably disposed towards Paley but it is voyage on the Beagle for the kind of reasons you can see in that slide began to raise questions and obviously it's very very difficult for me to summarize some of the questions that were raised for Darwin what I'm going to do if I may is put up on the screen for things that Darwin noticed that seemed to him a to require an explanation and that be Paley's theory didn't really explain very well so let's look at what those are here we go here's the first one Darwin basically noticed that the forms of certain living creatures seem to be adapted to their environments and their specific needs in other words they seem to be armed at Shh between biological species and the environment in which they lived now actually Paley's theory copes with that it says God designed both the environment and the creature but darwin's point is that his theory is simpler and of course as you look at their how you validate scientific theories when they're very often though not I have to say always simplicity or elegance is a a good criterion to use in judging rival rival theories and Darwin actually this just came to think that Paley's theory was a bit clumsy it clunked a bit so this is not decisive this is simply something were Darwin felt he could offer a neater explanation but then there are others here is one that Darwin thought was very important the phenomenon of extinction now this was a relatively recent discovery this is going back no more than 80 or 90 years when people began to realize the significance of fossils in other words that there were biological forms that existed in the past but don't now exist and the question is why did they become extinct now of course and there are all kinds of theories around one of them is well sometimes called catastrophe theories that in effect yes there were previous forms of biological distance and these were destroyed in some kind of universal catastrophe perhaps the Noah's Flood so in effect it doesn't really impact on our contemporary affection but Darwin thought this mattered because if something becomes extinct then it has to be a reason for that and if it becomes extinct surely it's replaced by something else and so Darwin just felt you need a bigger theory which was able to cope with the phenomenon of extinction thirdly again I've relates very very easily to walk Darwin did on the Beagle he was convinced that certain island populations were very very unusual and of course the main example is the Galapagos Islands with their features and their turtles and things like that and Darwin began to realize that you might be able to explain something of this if you were to say look these islands are so far from any mainland that there is no way that animals could make their way from the mainland to the island and therefore the island is what you and I probably call a micro environment in effect something completely isolated were in effect what Darwin litical evolution took its own distinctive direction and so Darwin thought look there is something going on here and again Paley could give you an answer but again it just seemed a slightly unnatural a forced answer but the main point I think for me which clinched it for Darwin was this one and many of you will probably know all about this and reflect on it many creatures Darwin pointed out possess what we'd now call rudimentary structures but some of you will know the older term which is vestigial structures and these basically are functions which or structures that clearly exist but don't actually seem to do anything and it seemed to be completely redundant I'll give you some examples you might think of the nipples of male mammals the rudiments of a pelvis and hind limbs in snakes and the wings which are still there on flightless birds you know how do you explain those at this point Paley does hit a difficulty because in effect if you think Paley is right and the God designed things and made them as we now see them why would God design redundancies why make something if it doesn't do anything and again Paley could give you a sort of answer but again it's clumsy and paleo Darwin is saying look these are clues I can develop theory which actually explains why these things are still there and of course for many people this was the clinching argument for Darwin's approach so again to reiterate these could be explained by existing theories but not that well and so Darwin felt his own theory was much better and at the heart of Darwin's theory lies the idea of natural selection natural selection so why need to explain to us what that idea is and then we'll begin to look at and why it's so interesting and important Darwin again knows how important analogies are you may remember that Paley had this analogy of a watch Darwin also has an analogy and he assumes that a lot of his readers will know about the phenomenon of artificial selection what's that it's the means by which breeders for example of plants or livestock in effect use selective breeding to bring about populations which have certain features like cows that give more milk which were present in some of the progenitors but by selective breeding you make them be present in most of them in other words it's a way of manipulating it's a way of directing processes so you get the kind of outcomes that you want and Darwin uses the term variation under domestication to refer to this process and the key point that Darwin makes is this look you you all understand about pigeon breeding or sheep breeding or whatever what if there is in nature a similar process of selection to that which we see in domestic stop breeding and just as Darwin talks about artificial selection for the human process he uses the phrase Knapp selection to refer to some unobserved but hypothesized process in the natural world which in effect brings about the selection of certain species and not others so for Darwin this is the the core analogy and obviously Darwin faced a number of difficulties he was very very honest about this and this is towards the end of the Origin of Species he's just saying look they're an awful problems with this theory a crowd of difficulties will have a code to the reader some of them are so grave that to this day I could never reflect on them without being staggered but to the best of my judgment the greater number on the apparent and those that are real or not I think fatal to my theory those are internal flossy of science this is a very interesting quote what Darwin is saying is that a theory can coexist with anomalies in other words in plain English if the theory is sufficiently good explaining things you can cope with some tensions you know the effective Magus B we haven't sorted everything out and what Darwin is saying is look there are problems but my hunch is that these will be sorted out in due course now one more point about Darwin and then we move on to think about the questions that arise this is Darwin talking about the origin of biological species in his book the Origin of Species 1859 what about human beings now Darwin doesn't talk about human evolution in the Origin of Species and my hunch is that he felt that this was just a bridge too far and actually his audience would not be ready for it and of course it's implicit when you read the other species you can in effect join up the dotted lines and see what Darwin is taking you but it wasn't until 1871 that Darwin in effect published the Descent of Man notice the phrase descent some of us we think about a cent but Darwin doesn't want to go that way it's about a lineage you descend from your ancestors and Darwin is cautious about the natural assumption we have as human beings that in some way we are superior so I think we need to begin to ask what sort of issues are raised by Darwinism and I think that there are a number which we need to look at one of them clearly is that Darwin renders Paley redundant now the issue that arises from that is is that simply William Paley or is it bigger than that is in effect Paley as a representative of some bigger trend and certainly will I want to say to you is it's quite clear that Darwin's theory in effect pulls the rug out from under and Paley what the pain is for example account of the human eye is beautifully described but in effect his argument is this couldn't have happened by accident it's just too complicated and Darwin in effect was saying that complexification does happen over time over vastly expanded extended series of times Bank the issue really is what are its wider implications so they begin to look at a number of headings of issues that we might think about here's the first of them and I've labeled this Darwinism as a universal theory what do I mean by that well Darwin clearly saw his theory as an explanation for the origin of species it was a biological theory Darwin believed he was writing you couldn't prove he was right but he hoped that future generations would show that this theory was better than the Marx approach or am Paley's approach but one of the questions is this is is Darwin's theory bigger than the biological realm in other words is Darwin simply saying my theory applies to the origin of biological species or is it in effect a bigger theory almost like what we call a meta-narrative like Marxism or Freudianism which in effect is able to give a bigger account of for example the way in which we think the origin of morals and so on and certainly Richard Dawkins in a well-known essay called Universal Darwinism in effect says look at Darwinism is bigger than biology it is a universal way of looking at the world and that in effect it is about sort of a naturalist materialism mades implicitly atheistic and so on so one of the questions we have to ask is how do we understand Darwin's own theory my own feeling is it's probably best to say that really Darwin thought of as theory as being applicable to the biological realm although there are points at which Darwin says you know maybe this applies also for example to the evolution of a language in other words recognizing that actually this this goes perhaps into culture as well as into biology but certainly it is a very interesting point again just sticking Richard Dawkins Dawkins argues that there is clearly something that's distinct about human beings and the Dawkins locators are two levels one is the fact that we've developed culture the other is that in effect there's something distinct about us and he says in effect that we alone are able to resist our genes so as an ending point there so that's the first question to raise I'm not going to do very much more with it but just to say to you there is this issue is Darwin about biology was it about ideology as well but we come now to what I think were probably the most interesting and important aspect of this which is Darwin's implications for the nature of humanity and we know that Darwin himself um was unsettled by his own theory I mean as I think I mentioned last time we met traditionally certainly in Christian theology humanity is portrayed as being the height of creation not really in terms of the bestowal of privilege but more the bestowal of accountability towards the the rest of the created order and in Christian theology as again as I mentioned briefly last time the idea of being made in God's image is very often seen as as a good way of conceptualizing or framing this understanding of human beings but Darwin is clearly saying something very very significant if I pulled like as Darwin is contracting the gap between the animal world and human beings he's accentuating the fact that we human beings emerged from the animals and we're not quite as distinct as sometimes we like to think we are and Darwin also emphasized that we must not think of evolution as intentionally moving from lower to higher forms so in effect humanity because we are here in a certain form in effect are the is the perfection or the endpoint of the evolutionary process that was what the mark the mark I mentioned earlier that's what he said Darwin says it's not like that he says look the evolutionary process just happens it doesn't have goals it doesn't have apexis it just happens as these Darwin to draw a conclusion which he frames like this at the end of the Descent of Man and if you look at this I think you'll see he he's he's articulating both his own theory and also his slight concern man may I be excused feeling some pride at having risen nah nah Darwin has to pause at this point because for us that will mean you know the self may man we got there by ourselves we made ourselves happen and I'll have to say known that that's not the case so look at the next sentence though not through his own exertions there's not something we did it's something that just happened to the very summit of the organic scale and the fact of its having thus risen still having been Aboriginal II Aboriginal II here in a sense of from the word go placed there may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future in the words M Darwin is taking a very optimistic view of humanity's place in nature but here were not concerned of hopes or fears were but in effect just you know question of how he came to be here we must look at this however acknowledge as it seems to me that man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his own lowly origin now that final sentence is really the one that opens up all these big issues and let me just begin to throw at you some of the issues that emerge if you're an evolutionary psychologist you might argue like this well but one thing that Darwin is getting at here is maybe our ideas about morality actually go back to our distant ancestors and they arose in a very different context so in effect what we take as being moral might reflect the way we were a long time ago but we've moved on since then and the words there's this issue about whether morality our sense of morality was a very important thing actually may reflect a bygone situation now I'm not saying it does to understand there's a big debate about this but you can see how this question naturally arises from this and you see also how this leads us into a big debate some who will know linked with the writer Peter singer Peter singer Princeton and he introduced or rather gave wider currency to the phrase speciesism speciesism not very nice word but but he uses it so I'll go with it and this is the argument that in some way we fall into the error according to singer of saying that we are better than other species in other words if Darwin is right then actually because we've emerged from a lower form of life we need to recognize that actually that lower form of life has a very important place in nature and we to be respected now again there's some very very interesting questions here one of the debates which I got involved with in the last couple of months is very very interesting it is whether in effect you emphasize the continuity between humanity in the Apes which primatologists like France the vowels do or whether in effect you say well you know yes there is a link but what's different about us is that we've moved on we are ex Apes and a lot of things about us that don't really have a counterpart in the animal world and the example it's very often given this culture although there there are clearly forms of culture in the animal world but there's something different about what we have so I think there are really interesting issues here and this is far wider than religion this is very much opening up the question about why we privilege humanity and you can see that for example a lot of political and ethical theories are predicated on the assumption there's something different about we get the vote but animals don't so you know what does this go and all I can say is this is an ongoing discussion and I'll be a very foolish man if I were to predict where it's going to go but it is a discussion that's happening but another question of course is debated it's whether Darwinism makes God redang I'd have to say to quite honestly that if you if you frame this whole discussion in the terms that you find in the writings of William Paley and I think the answer is yes the in effect Paley specific idea of divine design divine construction is really changed quite dramatically by Darwin's approach but I would want to emphasize that actually Paley's approach is only one and actually there is rather more to this than you might think basically one of the questions is whether Darwinism is atheistic intrinsically and I think that you could give two reasons for saying this might be the case number one it doesn't require any divine action in order to happen and number two that that there's this recognition of the role of randomness surely is inconsistent with the idea of divine design which seems to so we rule out the idea of any randomness or arbitrariness in the natural order but I think nevertheless there are it slightly more complicated than that I'm going to talk to you about some of the issues that is a Reisman I'm going to mention one writer man called Benjamin B Warfield a very conservative Protestant writer who in effect in the late 19th century while responding to Darwin said look I don't actually see a problem with the suggestion that evolution is an apparently random process which nevertheless seems to move towards certain goals and his argument is that in some way God's providence is active and obvious within that evolutionary process so there is a an issue there perhaps the most widely proposed mechanism which Christian writers have used to think about how God might be involved in evolution in process is what's sometimes called secondary causality and secondary cause a letís is a quite easy idea to buta grasp and God in effect according to a Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century can do certain things directly but nevertheless delegates causality to other entities and so for Aquinas God delegates certain functions to the natural order and therefore in effect the the natural order in effect contains processes entities things that are happening which are ways in which God intends things to happen now clearly Aquinas doesn't know about evolution I don't think anybody could have before about 1750 but and Aquinas does not discuss this issues what we are doing in effect is to extend his approach and say maybe we can use this framework to make sense of evolution so for Aquinas what God is doing is in effect delegating handing over a certain degree of autonomy to the natural order and then standing back and letting this move on and certainly a number of writers did find that quite helpful so I think that there's an issue there and I might just mention at this point and the contribution of Charles Kingsley many of you were know Charles Kingsley from his social reformist writings perhaps most of you from his novel the water babes which is a very revealing social critique of of Victorian society at that time but Charles Kingsley and was also a well-known British theologian based on Westminster Abbey and in effect said on reading Darwin's Origin of Species that we used to think God made things and now we understand God made things make themselves in other words is this transfer of initiative or causality to the created order now the reason I'm mentioning Charles Kingsley is that Darwin doesn't mention him by name but in the later editions of the origin species he picks up on Kingsley and says look this divine he called him divine doesn't name him actually has spotted what the key idea is here so it's a very interesting point and those are again who know how this question developed well know that Frederic Temple who later became Archbishop of Canterbury used that approach in a series of very influential lectures in effect saying look there there isn't a problem with Darwin's theory of evolution we can accommodate us perfectly satisfactorily there is no need for us to get and threaten brothers are worried by this and temples basic approach more or less gained the ascendancy in the Church of England by about 1885 but I think there is another question that doesn't match here and it's this um what are the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution for religious thought now there are two ways we can approach this one is to look at Darwin's own religious views the other is to ask a slightly different question which is what did Darwin think those with conventional religious views would make of his approach so let's look at the first of these which is Darwin's own particular religious viewpoint again this is slightly controversial but my reading of Darwin suggests that as he became older he became fed up with an awful religious people he did not really go along with what we might loosely call conventional Christianity but he never actually became an atheist Darwin there's several letters which he talks about this and we know the points of which Darwin found fault with Christianity and let me tell you what they are number one it was too dogmatic number two it didn't really seem to engage with the problem of suffering very well and of course Darwin's thought and these ain't many of you will know died very very young to the great distress of Darwin and his wife and that certainly played quite a big role in his and development what's interesting is that Darwin never talks about his own biological theories as having negative implications for religious belief Darwin certainly was critical Christianity but actually not for not for evolutionary reasons it's more to do with its dogmatism its failure to engage suffering that's really well the difficulties lie but interestingly Darwin at several points asks this question would my ideas about natural selection cause difficulty to a conventional religious believer and Darwin just says I cannot see any reason why they should now that's an interesting point because Darwin is obviously trying to if I'm put like I secure the religious vote but I think he's also just just saying look there isn't a problem here you don't have to give up on God to buy into my theory obviously in a century fifteen hundred fifty years later we might debate that a bit more but there are I think reasons for saying that Darwin himself didn't really see things in the very polarized way in which we now do them now clearly there are other points at which Darwin raised some difficulties are very obvious one for example is traditional interpretations of the book of Genesis and Darwin's approach I think it's fair to say would raise very substantial difficulties for the idea that God created the world in seven days I mean Darwin's understanding of evolution requires vast timeframes for it to happen so you know the 90 of all this happening very in a very very brief period of time just didn't really seem particularly realistic but I mean you might make several points one is that actually it's widely thought that the biblical reference to days of creation at sixth extends to new vast epochs rather than simply biological days and of course there's another point which is very interesting and again became an important point in the Victorian debates about this and it does you who know Genesis chapter one just think of those parts of it which talks about the earth bringing things forth again the earth bringing things forth now how much do we read into that it seems to suggest that there's a delegated causality to the earth which gives rise to other living things and certainly that was very much topic of debate at the time why did you say to you if I'm good like this is that actually and if you look at the Victorian debates you can make a very clear sociological distinction between why I'm listicle describers nonconformist approaches which tend to take a very literal reading of book of Genesis and the kind of more sophisticated approaches you'd find in the Church of England which said in fact said Lucas is a this requires careful interpretation and the result was I think that in the Church of England there wasn't really all that much of an issue but clearly of course in modern American conservative Protestant ISM that debate has researched in a very big way and I haven't got time to talk with that in more detail but many of you will know that debate and find it very very interesting so even if I may now and talk about what seems to meet one of the most controversial issues linked with Darwin's theory of evolution there's a whole debate about eugenics eugenics here's the point Darwin helped us understand how the evolutionary process happened there are many including Francis Galton who said to themselves something like this Darwin has shown us how evolution happens and in doing so he's allowed us to take charge of the process in other words we can in effect control the evolutionary process i in fact what golden did was to bring in some of the ideas about what we would call artificial selection and apply them to human beings now I just say to you and I have to say this with some regret it is actually I think some of these ideas maybe they're in Darwin himself this is Darwin reflecting on whether you should look after human beings who were in some way deficient and it's very uncomfortable reading but we're going to read it anyway and and the argument that is really here is that sometimes it's better just let things go no others attendance the breeding of domestic animals will dump that this must be highly injurious to the race of man Lords caring for the hospitals that kind of thing it is surprising how sooner want of care or care wrongly directed leads to the degeneration of the demand of a domestic race but accepting in the case of man himself hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed now why do you say to you is that golden picked up on that an effect said if Darwin is right we ought to be employing selective breeding in relation to humanity and that opens up this deeply disturbing area of eugenics and sometimes these are just amusing but I need to warn you there's a very very dark shadow cyclist as well here is an amusing bit this is golden reflecting on Oxford Don's now what you need to know is in the late Victorian period Oxford Don's didn't marry you know heads of house were allowed to marry dongs were single and golden in effect of saying look we ought to abolish the requirement for celibacy for fellows and Oxford and Cambridge universities because these are intelligent males who would be expected to have superior offspring and thus they ought to be encouraged to breed I mean I find that I'm using actually was very interesting actually is the doulton articulates a number of criteria for good human beings there's all things you want to breed and actually they are just Victorian values you know it's very much no resonating with the social norms of the period but I think we just have to say that there were other areas in which this these theories came to be applied I want to say although I've just been little bit critical of Darwin that one cannot blame him for the use people made of his theories Adolf Hitler like this you know Hitler in effects all racial purity as essential for human well-being and there's no way we blame Darwin for this but you can see how somebody with with an agenda could take these ideas and develop them again in nineteen twenties Britain you will probably all know this again something that I'm very glad we've moved away from there were very prominent figures in British liberal society arguing for the forced sterilization of the mentally ill or in effect preventing certain classes of people from breeding and again it's it's this sort of thing so I'm saying to you is that there is a shadow side to this and it's not Darwin's fault but these are some of the issues that emerge from his theory of evolution now in this lecture what I have done is to skate over the surface of a vast number of issues but why would you take away is that first of all Darwin's ideas are really interesting secondly it's very clear that they open up lots of religious questions it's not quite so clear how these are to be answered and down himself I'm just prepared to keep an oval of these open one of them that I focused on towards the end of this lecture is something we need to think about further and it's this and I've suggested to you that you could look at Darwin's understanding of the evolutionary mechanism and say now that we understand how this works we could apply this to human beings and the human race would be improved as a result and that that leaves me very very unsettled man leaves many of you unsettled as well but he does raise this fascinating question of the interaction of science religion and morality and so in the next lecture what I'm going to do is just begin to open up some of these questions and we will touch on and Darwin the things like that but it's a much bigger question this science religion values how do all of these hold together what I'm going to do is look at some recent writers who said look science can actually give us a moral system on its own we don't need to appeal to philosophers or theologians or anybody else and actually ask whether those work but in general terms just reflect on the importance of value and meaning for human beings and how this works art in the way which we can strap meaning ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for listening I've

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, gresham professor, free video, free lecture, free talk, public lecture, Event, free public lecture, andreos idreos, Professor, professor mcgrath, alister mcgrath, apologetics, Christian, christianity, Christians, Christian writing, theology, philosophy, Ministry, divinity, atheism, faith, agnostics, atheists, Science, science and faith, Darwin, Evolution, charles darwin, Evolutionary Biology

Id: Dgt_tNVp6bE

Length: 56min 19sec (3379 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2016