At the WEA on 21 September 09 I attended a lecture by Dr Adam Marchant (I think this is the right link) on Darwin’s work.
It was an unsurprising tour of the orthodox take on Darwin, naturally reinforcing the view that ‘nothing in biology makes sense without evolution’; which, of course, if you presuppose evolution occurring, then build a framework on this basis and use it as an interpretive grid, is inevitable: you get what you pay for!
Nevertheless, Marchant made some comments that are worth discussing.
At the date of the publication of Darwin’s work on evolution the idea of species not being immutable was ‘in the air’. Darwin’s own grandfather had published on the concept, and people like Lamarck and Wallace also had similar views. In short, the ‘time was right’ not only for scientific reasons, but for broad cultural reasons. Darwin had absorbed the progressivist influences of the time and further took into his thinking the work of Lyell and, as Marchant said, Malthus. Noel Weeks has an article that explores this in some detail
Darwin great contribution, Marchant claimed, was the ‘discovery’ of the idea of natural selection. But it was not Darwin’s discovery, he was its publicist, but the idea was previously published by Edward Blyth, a biblical creationist.
An important point to make is that the idea that species were fixed was not biblical, but Aristotelian, and at Darwin’s time the influence of modern science, informed by a biblical view of the cosmos, was able to shake of the pagan shackles inherited from the classical world.
Lamarck’s idea of change was volitionism, which was a sort of supernaturalism, or an intrinsic feature of living organisms (if my notes correctly reflect the lecture), but Darwin cut through this by proposing a complete materialist explanation.
Interesting to note that many Christians have missed Darwin’s point at this explanation. They attempt to marry a type of Christian supernaturalism with Darwin’s materialism to hope that ‘evolution was God’s mechanism for creating’. But Darwin’s point, possibly influenced by a deist line of thinking was that the mechanism’s role was to displace the supernatural and eliminate the need for God as a creative explanation!
Another factor that was in Darwin’s thinking was due to the primitive understanding of cell biology, with the smallest life unit being considered ‘protoplasm’ which contained an inherent life force, as a type of ‘super-material’ factor. This made it easy for Darwin to pin his hopes on the simple early life form and it mutating by lots of small steps into an array of different ‘higher’ life forms. The notion of ‘higher’ also betrays the progressivist flavour of Victorian England that strongly influenced Darwin.
Marchant attributed the advances at Darwin’s time to a number of factors:
“People used to look up to Aristotle” but started to look at the world instead.
It required an Enlightenment change in the way of thinking to do so. Interestingly enough, the Enlightenment came on the foundation laid by Luther of a mind, being made in God’s image, able to independently draw conclusions, and not being bound to ‘authorities.’
A further factor was the investigative tools became available. This was Marchant’s distinctive for science: it used tools, whereas philosophy did not. Not a bad distinction, IMO.
Then he went on to tell us that science needed to engage the real world, and not just think, but did not refer to the role that Christianity had to play in this, in finally breaking the hold of paganism (not to say that Aristotle didn’t attempt to examine the world around him).
He quickly traced this development through the early modern period of science to conclude with an acceptance that life was available for study, and not untouchable: the world became object and ceased to be ‘transcendent’, which is exactly what we get from Genesis 1-3. The world is created, not creator (ironically, evolutionism takes us back to the pagan view that the world is its own creator and that we are its subjects!)
Marchant also commented that the idea of an ‘ultimate vital substance’ was believed until the 1930s and that it takes some effort of will to reject this notion (that life is special) and accept the reduction to chemistry and physics (which are themselves intellectual constructs of the world…very good ones, obviously, but as many scientists, he failed to understand the metaphysic that his work relies upon).
I was fascinated that Marchant used biblical ideas as touchstones at a number of points in his lecture: he talked about a tension between uniformitarianism and catastrophism, explaining the latter by the examples of the Bible’s creation and Noah’s flood ‘stories’. Predictably, one of the audience gave a knowing chuckle of superiority at this mention. I was pleased that Marchant rose above such crassness.
He also contrasted the age of the earth as given in the Bible ‘as 6000 years found by adding up the ages of the patriarchs in the Bible’. But now we know better…
The effect of accepting long ages, instead of biblical ages, is to remove God from the historical continuity that commences with his direct making of us. The long ages remove God as a credible player in our origin and relegate him to being a-historical, and therefore ‘not in our reality’. The implications of this for the incarnation are pointed.
I think the very purpose of the date markers in the Bible, and the genesian use of time references that make sense in our world-experience are to show the direct connection between God and us; that we are not the products of a universe that made itself (pagan-like). They show by each tangible connection, how we are connected to the will of God, expressing his love in creation. If we tamper with this, we undo important parts of Biblical theology, IMO and change how we think about God, Christ, salvation and ourselves!
