How Darwinism Dodges the Iceberg

Scottish electronics engineer Guy Douglas, in his recently published Evolution’s Iceberg, claims that ”the amazing discoveries in the early late 20th and especially in the 21st century, together with the hierarchical layers of regulatory control systems inside living cells, have become Evolution’s ‘Iceberg.’”¹ His nautical image is advanced as an analogy to link the fate of the Titanic and the alleged “capsizing” of traditional Darwinian notions occasioned by the progress of molecular biology in the last half century or so.  To be sure, the metaphor about Darwinism’s being irreparably “breached beneath the water line” is implicitly supported by scientists like Micheal Denton, Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, and others now too numerous to name individually. But is his and the work of those many other scientists really the danger to the Darwinian paradigm that Douglas assumes (or hopes?) is the case? I have my doubts.

Iceberg? What Iceberg?

Were reason the only arbiter involved in the discussion, Douglas’s iceberg metaphor would be entirely appropriate, yet his prognosis must remain problematical for the simple reason that HMS Darwin has for well over a century been permitted to sail serenely on as if over an oceanic millpond with hardly a scrape to fore, aft, or center. To overlook that fact is to ignore the elephant in the room and to disregard the fact that we are not dealing with empirical science here (or even common logic) but with an entrenched scientific dogma. Douglas surely overestimates the readiness of mainstream science practitioners to reexamine the evidence dispassionately and to question what has become a cultural idée reçue. To use Douglas’s apt term, most of us have been acculturated into accepting Darwinism rather than having been educated about it in a properly contextualized way (hence the brouhaha in many American school systems and associated legal tussles).

The stubborn fact remains that the good ship Darwin remains in so singularly robust a state that an apter analogy than the Titanic might be with that medium-sized cargo vessel or “scow” which since 1918 has been beached on a rock shoal about a mile or so upstream from Horseshoe Falls in the middle of the Niagara River (pictured at the top). When I viewed that stranded vessel in 1992 it looked remarkably well preserved (apart from its spookily faded pallor), but of course functionally it was a mere “zombie” craft kept aloft only by the invisible layer of rocks just beneath the water’s surface. 

The specter of the stricken craft I observed that day seems to me to be a more suitable image than that of the Titanic to evoke the protected status of Darwinism in our culture — a belief system kept afloat only because it is shored up metaphorically by a vociferous chorus of never-say-die partisans. Hence any talk of the eclipse of Darwinism seems premature and so for me the more relevant and substantive issue concerns the question (to reformulate Douglas’s original metaphor), 

Why has Darwinism NOT gone down in the same way as the Titanic and why does its sinking not look to be on the cards anytime soon?

That is a question which must be answered as an indispensable prelude to being able to put the question of the continuation or discontinuation of Darwinism on the agenda at all. It is, alas, anything but easy to get a handle on since the issue has come to have more to do with religion and secularism in one form or another, than with science per se (whose role in the affair can sometimes appear to be alarmingly tangential, sometimes almost irrelevant). The science of Darwinism (such as it is) all too often acts as a feint and as a proxy for debating more profound matters of cultural anxiety.  Darwinism itself, despite superficial appearances, is not the true casus belli in the conflict but has simply been drawn in as a rallying point in an ideological culture war which, at least in its “hot” form, has only increased in intensity in the last half century or so. In what follows I shall of course give some attention to what I take to be the purely scientific criteria underling the cultural conflict. That task has already been performed with more subject-specific expertise than I can lay claim to, and my main focus will therefore be on the equally significant ideological aspects of the issue, particularly in the last half century, an era which I have lived through and of which I can claim some relevant first-hand knowledge.

Why, asked Annabel Lustig two decades ago, have arguments pro and con Darwin come to resemble more the erstwhile proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition than routine scientific discourse?² In an attempt to answer that question I shall begin with a short historical reprise which not all younger readers will be familiar with but which I believe has played a seminal role in consolidating the particularly intransigent attitude towards Darwinism (either for or against) which we have witnessed since the 1970s. My initial focus will be the year 1963. That date is anything but arbitrary, for the events of that year exerted an incalculable influence on succeeding decades. This influence may easily be overlooked by those who for understandable reasons are more preoccupied by the more media-friendly Woodstock generation and the numberless social protests made by those whom the French call les soixante-huitard(e)s (the 1968-ers).

1963 — Seeds of Cultural Revolution

It would be an act of gross impiety not to preface what follows with the acknowledgement that the most tragic and quite literally world-shattering event of that year occurred on the 22nd of November with the assassination of President Kennedy. Nothing of that tragic scale happened in Great Britain. Still it was a year in which a number of extraordinary events came into a synergetic conjunction, forcing Britons to “get real” and make a decisive break with the somnolent era of the 1950s when older ideas concerning hierarchy, social deference, sexual mores, and conventional piety went largely unquestioned.  

Culturally the year was marked inter alia by the (unsuccessfully prosecuted) obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (where a prosecuting counsel ludicrously warned that this was not the sort of book “one’s servants” should be permitted to read) and by the Profumo Affair (which in summary hinged on Minister of War John Profumo’s dalliance with some good-time girls). It became an imbroglio with further ramifications which need not be detailed here but which at length led to the fall of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. It must I guess be read as a symptom of those staid times that as a schoolboy I was genuinely shocked that people in positions of power and influence could behave “like that”! It might be relevant to note in passing for “millennial” readers that sex before marriage in this era, albeit well-nigh ubiquitous, was publicly frowned upon. No wonder that a very young David Frost³ was able to make his TV debut in a satirical weekly show (the must-see That Was the Week That Was) because there was so much hypocrisy and double-think to satirize in public affairs. It was the time shortly before the Flower Power era brought with it a decisive wind of change in people’s attitudes, aptly embodied in the exuberantly iconoclastic attitude of The Beatles.⁴

God Talk

In 1963 so many Establishment icons were being mocked and / or dethroned — so why not God himself? Indeed, in March 1963 there appeared (as if on cue!) a slim paperback penned by the then Bishop of Woolwich (Greater London), John Robinson, titled Honest to God.⁵ The importance of this publication was such that the other events touched on above seem in retrospect to assume the status of mere “warm-up acts.” For here in terms of painful honesty (many alleged “heresy”), the erstwhile Cambridge theology professor told us that we must abjure the notion of a personal God “out there” together with naïve spatial conceptions of a traditional “triple-decker universe.” Instead, we must earnestly seek the divine in the “ground of our being,” that is, within our own psyche or soul: God is in us. As with his Cambridge colleague Don Cupitt somewhat later, it was clear that Robinson was forsaking objective theism.⁶ Such a “non-realist” view defined “God” as simply love (agape — selfless devotion to the welfare of others) — a guiding spiritual ideal prompting us from within. The crucial bottom line of this way of thinking is that there could no longer be any genuinely transcendent referent or person to whom people could appeal in prayer — no human/divine dialectic. This, needless to say, was found understandably distressing by many.

Theism or Agnosticism?

The dividing line between that position and that of secular humanism seemed so wafer-thin as to be practically non-existent and it is conspicuous that in the Preface to his volume, Robinson writes,

Not infrequently, as I watch or listen to a broadcast discussion between a Christian and a [secular] humanist, I catch myself realizing that most of my sympathies are on the humanist’s side.⁷

One might even suspect an attitude of pious agnosticism on the bishop’s part. In his more recent account of agnosticism, Robin Le Poidevin contends that it is not appropriate to subject religious propositions to strict verificationist standards because religious utterances are essentially value judgements employed to express a commitment to a specific scheme of values and moral norms:

Although the sentences of theology or religion are indeed assertions, they are in code. They do not say what they appear to say. They appear to be about a transcendent being, the all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of the world. What they are actually about is something quite different: us, our ideals and aspirations, our capacity for selfless love and so on.⁸

Such a sentiment seems not far distant from the attitude held to by John Robinson. Indeed, the theologian Alister McGrath went further by alleging that Robinson culpably evaded any traditional ideas of metaphysics and concluded that his “Christian non-realism” was by simple definition atheistic.⁹

The Impact of Honest to God

A companion volume to Honest to God was rushed out by the SCM Press in the latter part of 1963 containing responses by churchmen, a cross-section  of readers’ letters submitted to national newspapers, some reviews and essays by professionals, and a lengthy addendum by Robinson himself (pp. 232-279). One of the reviewers, C. S. Lewis, begins his response with a somewhat surprising statement:

The Bishop of Woolwich will disturb most of us Christian laymen less than he anticipates. We have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven. We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was officially condemned before our time.¹⁰

Yet Honest to God, from the moment of its inception, was designed as a mass-market paperback with a price tag of a mere five shillings (there were 20 shillings to the pound) whose avowed purpose was to achieve the maximum outreach to the greatest number of Britons, religious congregants or not. It certainly achieved this by selling over a million copies, and that number does not include its much-discussed serialization in a national newspaper in advance of formal publication. 

As Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard, pointed out 40 years later, Robinson was in effect giving his readers an extended tutorial on the liberal and “demythologizing” views of German theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer — not to mention Ludwig Feuerbach who as early as 1845 had defined God as the “projection” of the human moral conscience. Gomes pointed out that in that restricted sense Robinson was relaying “shop talk, a discourse among the cognoscenti,” but adds the important point that Robinson “did not realize the extent of the theological illiteracy of the general populace.”¹¹

And this proved to be the nub of the matter, for to judge from the readers’ letters reproduced in the Honest to God Debate volume (pp. 48-81), Robinson’s efforts to introduce the British public to advanced theological thinking proved counterproductive. The Sunday Telegraph’s journalistic contributor, T. E. Utley, expressed many people’s disappointment and sense of betrayal in the most forceful and eloquent terms as he explained how Robinson was vainly attempting to square an unsquarable circle,

The Bishop, of course, says that he is not trying to dethrone God but to redefine him in a manner acceptable to those who will not adopt the premises of the Christian religion … The avowed purpose of the exercise is to make religion acceptable to the irreligious, to prove that it is possible to be in reality a Christian without believing in the teachings of the Church, and to accept God without using the word …

It is one thing to restate the eternal truths of religion in contemporary language [a reference to the recent appearance of The New English Bible in modernized English in the early Sixties] and quite another expressly to repudiate fundamental doctrines which were believed by those who learnt Christianity from the lips of Christ …. At the lowest, Robinson seems to be violating the principles of honest commerce by trying to sell as Christian a commodity that bears no relation to the historical and accepted meaning of that word.¹²

Utley spoke for many ordinary men and women who, when forced to consider critically the import of cherished ancient formularies, came away confused and disappointed. Robinson’s conscientious deconstruction of their faith seemed to them more like a demolition job. Even ultra-liberal Don Cupitt claimed that “Robinson’s use of the word God seemed to be all over the place.”¹³

Darwin Fills the God Gap

There can be little doubt that the Honest to God affair, which began just over a decade before the first of Richard Dawkins’s atheistic broadsides (The Selfish Gene, 1976), would have been found useful to the Darwinian cause. If theologians were “talking God out of existence” (a very common perception reflected in some readers’ letters reprinted in The Honest to God Debate¹⁴) then what, apart from pure chance and so-called “natural selection,” could account for the nature of the created order? That question was also uppermost in the mind of cultural critic Christopher Ryan who objected that cutting out metaphysics altogether and referring to God merely as one’s still small voice begged a whole host of questions. It certainly did nothing to explain the instrumental power necessary to bring about creation/evolution in the first place:

Since in any sphere, activity that can have its origin in the human being the presence of a high degree of intelligibility of actions argues for those actions having had their source in a human intelligence rather than having come about through sheer chance, so also in spheres of action that cannot owe their origin to human beings, the presence of a high degree of intelligibility argues for the existence of a Creator, i.e., a  rational being with the power to bring about such intelligently patterned actions.¹⁵

Guy Douglas concurs with Ryan’s intelligent design argument. The alleged copying errors known as genetic mutations must by the law of logical averages lead not to evolution but to devolution, a slipping down rather than up Dawkins’s metaphorical Mount Improbable. The recently much-bruited “self-organization,” he continues, may be able to produce simple forms of order (such as snowflakes) but not the specified complexity required to produce biological function.¹⁶Even Darwin himself, when referring to the supposed “daily and hourly scrutinizing” of natural selection where each improvement supposedly became fixed in place by some (unspecified) ratcheting phenomenon, was in the view of the present writer merely using periphrastic terminology pointing towards an ultimate divine agency. For chance left to its own devices can clearly produce only that dysfunctional chaos sometimes referred to as entropy.

Those alive to the rational impossibility of an autonomous, self-actuating power of creation and evolution will have been little perturbed by Robinson’s nebulous notions, but there can be little doubt that readers less inclined to think things through may not have noted Bishop Robinson’s failure to explain the nature and modalities of Creation itself. Such readers may have rested content with the Lucretian contention that “it all sorta happened by chance” — a notion once deemed to be a valueless non-explanation, but which has now become mainstream. 

Talk of natural selection, shape-shifting evolution, and quantum fluctuations (held to explain the creation of the universe) are then at the end of the day little but a learned smokescreen concealing unacknowledged ignorance. Yet surely the beginning of wisdom should take as it starting point the acknowledgement that there are very definite limits to our collective knowledge: speculation should not be confused with ascertainable fact. A return to the Victorian conception of the “mystery of mysteries” underlying our lives might be deemed by some to be a retrograde step, but it would at least have the advantage of intellectual honesty.

Notes

1. Guy Douglas, Evolution’s Iceberg: How Molecular Biology Challenges the Theory of Evolution (Lighthouse Christian Publishing: Hochston GA, 2024), p. 75.
2. Darwinian Heresies, edited by Annabel Lustig, Robert J. Richards, and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), Introduction, p. 1.
3. The same David Frost who would later be granted an interview with Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal.
4. On the occasion of what was facetiously termed the group’s British (re)-invasion of America their response to an American interviewer’s showbiz-type questions came in the form of some cheeky Liverpudlian irreverence which studiously failed to engage with the substance of the interviewer’s rather routine questions.
5. John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM, 1963).
6. See Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM, 1980).
7. Honest to God, p. 8.
8. Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2010), citation p. 85.
9. Alister McGrath, “Jesus for Modern Man: The Historical Significance of John Robinson’s Christology,” in Colin Slee (editor), Honest to God 40 Years On (London: SCM, 2004), pp. 111-32.
10. John Robinson and David L. Edwards, The Honest to God Debate (London; SCM, 1963), pp. 91-2, citation p. 91
11. Peter J. Gomes. “Honest to God and the Dangerous Ethic” in Honest to God 40 Years On, pp. 70-82, citations pp. 74, 79.
12. The Honest to God Debate, review, pp. 95-97.
13. “John Robinson and the Language of Faith,” in Honest to God 40 Years On, pp. 37-45, citation p. 38
14. See pp. 48-81.
15. Ryan, “The Language of Theism: Irony and Belief,” in Honest to God 40 Years On, pp. 40-69, citation p. 55.
16. Evolution’s Iceberg, p. 291.