I took some time off from a recent conference I attended to browse a local bookshop. In the history section I picked up Darwin’s two novels: the Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man, thinking I must re-read them.
As I was mulling over those who think that Darwinism’s ideas as they have now transmogrified inform the Genesis creation account. I don’t think Darwin saw it that way, though; and nor have many other commentators who consider that account of origins as in diametric competition with the biblical account.
The very title of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” in the light of its content, sets it at odds with Genesis 1.
Indeed, the claim at the outset denies that Genesis 1 does provide any information about origins, because if not self-sufficient, then how accurate? After all, if it did provide information (and not a mythic tale, as some seem to think it is), and was accepted, there would be no need for a competing account!
Darwin clearly thought that his thoroughgoing materialism set to right people’s views of the origin of life and all its forms, denying in terms that there was any real alternative and the alternative explanations offered being merely emergent from the materialism that he proposed as what is finally real.
But Darwin did more than make a claim about sources; he implicitly made a claim about the metaphysically basis for our take on final questions. This is not simply a claim about a technical matter that can be relegated to science’s closet of details, but is an over-arching statement about the nature of the world and our place in it, that has to throw other such claims into competition in their own ‘struggle for survival’
In Darwin’s formulation, man is attached to the soil, but without any ‘breathed in-ness’ of God, and no modelling by God, but by chance; this breaking the relationship of love and joining us not to a person, reflecting his image, but to dust, inevitably seen as being it its image; arisen in a struggle for existence that refers not to a very good creation, which is devoid of struggle, but to an already broken world where the hand of God is obscured by our rejecting of his kinship.
That Darwin sets out from a completely different starting point to the Bible is evident in that struggle for existence in Darwin presupposes and is based on a world in pain. The “Origin of Species’” claim of ultimacy detaches us from the personal and plants us squarely in the material. There is no middle ground.
