Cold wars and grand conclusions

In his autobiography, Darwin muses that he is often so impressed by "the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man … as the result of blind chance or necessity" that he feels the need for an intelligent first cause. At those times, therefore, he says he can rightly be called a theist. Yet, on reflection, he remains agnostic because he cannot believe that the faculties which produce this thinking – faculties which "have been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals" – can be fully trusted when they draw "such grand conclusions'.

This was the very interesting form in which he conceived the tension which has confused our culture so much during the last two centuries. His approach is, of course, far less extreme and exciting than the cold war model which has lately come in fashion. It may be worth noticing the difference and asking how the recent fit of extremism – the insistence on a vast, irreconcilable conflict between abstractions called science and religion – has arisen.

On the religious side, of course, extremism is nothing new. In America, many Protestants have long accepted the literal inerrancy of the Bible, a belief which goes far beyond the simple respect for that book taught by the original Protestant reformers and inevitably does conflict with modern science. And that belief has become deeply entangled in local political feuding. Until lately, however, champions of fundamentalism lacked something that all extremists need, namely, violent and colourful opponents whom they could denounce. Messrs Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris et al have now obligingly supplied this missing piece of equipment. Both sides have thus become free to fulminate at will against their opponents' most extreme doctrines, ignoring the more interesting ones. This saves them the trouble of understanding the meaning of the whole conflict. Most crucially, it stops them seeing that the debates that really matter to us are always internal ones – conflicts, not between different parties in the world but within each one of us, between different parts of our own nature, exactly as Darwin's were.

The atheist party has been brought into this war by the discovery – largely conveyed by the political violence of Islamist fundamentalists – that religion has not actually gone away, but may even be an increasing force in world affairs. By contrast science, which was booked to take over religion's role in life, does not seem to have done so – indeed, science seems, if anything, to be rather less revered today than it was 50 years back. That proposed shift of roles has, of course, always been rather odd since (as Dobzhansky put it) science deals in facts and religion in meaning. To bring their functions closer together those who are anxious to enthrone science have therefore always used an enlarged, philosophical notion of it, which amounts to a world-view. The way in which this is now being done is one of the more alarming features of the current feud.

Recent converts to creationism, when asked to explain their conversion, often say that this move is their only alternative to "scientific atheism" or "Darwinism" which they find intolerable. What then is the "Darwinism" they fear? It is actually Dawkinsism. Richard Dawkins expounds it, not only in the brutally egoistic rhetoric of The Selfish Gene but, more explicitly, in River out of Eden, a book which he has subtitled "A Darwinian View of Life" – "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference … DNA neither cares nor knows; DNA just is. And we dance to its music" (p 155).

This is clearly not Darwin's vision. He would not have dogmatised so hastily about matters that he was convinced are totally mysterious to us. Nor, certainly, would he have made the mistake of mixing claims to scientific objectivity with melodramatic rhetoric based on personifying the gene – a mixture which gives Dawkins his own grand conclusion that the cosmos is both a random, meaningless jumble and also a callous, brutal fate-figure that manipulates us. Small wonder that his readers say "If that is evolution I don't want it".

Evolutionary theory calls for no such confused worldview. As Charles Kingsley pointed out, it is perfectly compatible with theism, though of course not with biblical inerrancy. And it is not even clear that evolutionary theory casts the doubt that Darwin thought it did on our tendency to see the world as purposive. True, our minds have developed from simpler ones by evolution, but what is so sinister about that? They are the only minds we have, and we must trust them for all our calculations, including the ones by which we make this criticism. Evolution is perhaps even less frightening than he supposed.