Darwin’s ‘Creator’
It may be conceit, but I believe the subject may interest the public
Charles Darwin
In a letter to his publisher, asking if he would be interested in publishing On the Origin of Species.
I started with a couple of pop ghost books, but they were too vague and sensational and contained photographs that were too easily fakeable; and none of them had any ideas on what ghosts really were. Then a friend lent me Mysteries by Colin Wilson. I’d read The Outsider, and knew CW for a thoughtful and responsible writer.
§ If you are not persuaded that there are some very strange things going on in the world that science has never explained and seems happy to ignore, try Colin Wilson (Mysteries, Poltergeist, etc), and Lyall Watson (Supernature I and II, The Romeo Error, etc). There are many similar books which are unreliably sensationalist. Wilson and Watson both trained in biology, and can distinguish evidence from fantasy and rumour.
This book reminded me that our universe is a most peculiar place, which, despite the efforts of my old biology teacher to reduce everything to mindless chemicals, is actually full of baffling anomalies.
§ Were you ever told by a science teacher, usually with some glee, that you are nothing but 20 kilos of carbonated water, or whatever, and enough iron to make a nail? And did you find yourself thinking…’Hmm.. something missing here, surely? How can chemicals think, for example? And why is this teacher so pleased to be telling his students that they are essentially worthless?’
Colin Wilson documents cases of dowsing from maps with pendulums, lucid dreaming, psychokinesis (moving objects by mind-power) and levitation, among many other strangenesses. How can a bunch of chemicals do any of these things?**
Science wasn’t ignoring just ghosts and the Ouija board but a huge field of weirdness such as premonitions, clairvoyance, near-death experiences, and out of body experiences, many of which had been well-attested by people who would usually be regarded as good witnesses: policemen; teachers; clergy; pilots; doctors; university professors, even.
The more I read, the more I became convinced that there was something awry in the way Science viewed reality, as it seemed to be ducking dozens of anomalous issues.
William James, the C19 psychologist, said that you only need one white crow to disprove the theory that all crows are black. Could Science’s reason for ignoring anomalies stand up to a potential white crow, if I could find one?
I decided to channel my reading down two paths: the philosophy of science including the history of the philosophies of science; and psychical research, to try to find one clear-cut, well-attested, and unfakeable anomaly. Then, once I had discovered by what absolute principle Science was dead set against anomalies, I could hold up my white crow, and say ‘But what about this?’ It might be of no interest to anybody else, especially not biology teachers or chaplains on their respective desert islands, but it certainly would be to me.
§ ‘How do you meet an elephant?’ ‘One bit at a time.’
I thought I would start with what was perhaps the most important scientific book ever published: On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. In measured sentences, backed by mountains of evidence, Darwin slowly spelled out his sensational theory: that the world’s species of plants and animals were not created as fixed and ‘perfect’ entities as had been previously accepted as dogmatic truth, as propagated by The Church. In fact, Darwin suggested, species slowly changed over time, morphing from one form to another, as climates and conditions varied. Thus, finches from one Galapagos Island differed in beak shape from finches on a nearby Island, depending upon what food sources were available. Those birds with the most suitable beaks survived to breed others like themselves; the others didn’t. Eventually each island sported its own finch variation.
This was not earth-shattering news, as people had always known that dogs and pigeons could be bred for specific shapes and capacities, but Darwin went a step further, suggesting that species themselves could variegate over many millennia according to the process of ‘natural selection’, as the Galapagos finches had done, right up to the point when one localised group of creatures could no longer breed with their previous peers, and thus became what we generally call a new species.
§ Darwin eventually adopted the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ from Herbert Spencer, the philosopher. This phrase has often been mistaken by people like Hitler to mean ‘survival of the most brutal’ rather than ‘most appropriate’, as Darwin intended it.**
The world-changing book ended:
‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.’
‘The Creator’? And with a capital? I’d always thought that Darwin was an atheist. How had I come to think that? And what of that phrase ‘breathed into’? What did the breathing? Only living entities ‘breathe’. I knew that breathing onto things, to create or cure, had a widely used religious (non-material) connotation. So what Darwin is suggesting is a paranormal being ‘breathing’ life and ‘powers’ into ‘forms’.
Whatever, Darwin made such a strong case for evolution, that surely no reasonable person could gainsay it. But many did gainsay it, led by The Church who held a dogmatic monopoly on theories of cosmology and creation.
§ The Church of England and the Catholic Church both had trouble with Evolution.
And many people still gainsay it, according to The New York Times in 2005:
According to a CBS News poll,51 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution, saying that God created humans in their present form. And reflecting a longstanding sentiment, 38 percent of Americans believe that creationism should be taught instead of evolution, according to an August poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington.
In 2019 Gallup put the number of Creationists at ~40%. Pretty consistent….
Intriguingly, despite the reasonableness of Darwin’s theory, I understand that no definitive proof has yet been discovered: ie, no new species has been incontrovertibly shown to have directly derived from another one. This may be because the definition of ‘species’ has never been clearly resolved. (Is it actually resolvable? I wonder.**) Or might it be (gasp!) that there is a flaw in the Theory?
Archbishop Usher of Armagh (C17) calculated from the Old Testament that the world was created by God about 6,000 years ago, during the six days following Oct 22 4004 BCE. This date was anonymously inserted into some Authorised Versions of the Bible in 1701, and gradually became a dogmatic truth.
§ This calculation is too unreliable to be worthy of serious consideration (especially as the good bishop also calculated the end of the world to be due in October 1996). However, dogma has never had much in common with logic.
The Archbishop also calculated that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 BCE, and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on 5 May 2348 BCE ‘on a Wednesday’.
The geologist Charles Lyell and Darwin had shown, beyond reasonable doubt (as opposed to dogmatic rejection), that fossilised sea shells such as those embedded in the rocks of Mount Everest, and the trillions of animal skeletons that make up the white cliffs of Dover, not to mention all the weird remnants of fossilised dinosaurs that had begun popping up all over the place, suggested overpoweringly that species had not been created perfect and changeless, once and for all, one October a few brief centuries back, (shortly before the Egyptians started to make their mark), but instead had arisen via the track of ‘natural selection’, according to the climate and availability of food in a given region at a given time. It was clear that millions of years must have passed to account for entire species to have arisen, flourished, and then died out. Geological processes required even longer periods of time.
§ The fossilised seashells of Mount Everest result from rock deformations caused by India crashing very slowly into Tibet, thus forcing up the Himalayas, sedimentary fossils and all, as a crumple zone.
§ Along with ‘evolution’, ‘fluidity’ had now entered the world of biology, just as Copernicus and Galileo had introduced it to astronomy 300 years before.**
I was impressed by Darwin’s simple reasoning and evidence. It was more evidential and reasonable than The Church’s Creationist view. It explained more things, more coherently, and more rationally.
§ More on Creationism later. Meanwhile, it seemed to me that most Creationists are not idiots, and they know perfectly well that there are problems with taking every word of the Bible literally, not least such contradictions as ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘turn the other cheek’. Their problem is that they don’t know how else to protest against what they see as the absolute and ungodly power that Science has over society.
But a series of questions remained:
Why has Science become as ‘ungodly’ as it clearly has?
Why is ‘evolution’ considered ‘ungodly’ by Creationists, while Darwin himself refers to ‘the Creator’, ie, a supernatural or paranormal entity?
Why had my biology teacher, a great fan of Darwin, been so scathingly anti-paranormal?
The next step, I thought, would be to read more about Darwin and his times, and then see what modern scientists had to say. I found a Penguin re-print of Origins containing an interesting Introduction, but was pulled up sharp on page 13, where the author claimed that Darwin was offering ‘a purely material’ view of Nature. But how can one square his use of the phrase ‘the Creator’ with ‘purely material’?
§ If I understood ‘purely material’ correctly. To me, ‘materialistic’ meant being greedy for worldly goods, so a ‘purely material’ explanation must presumably mean ‘an explanation in terms of worldly things’, and not other-worldly things like ‘the Creator’. I chased this up, and was most surprised by what it led to.**
The last sentence of this reprint reads…
‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.’
I found on page 49 a note which explained the missing Creator: this edition was not the final thoughts of Darwin (as in the sixth edition, of 1872) but a reprint of the first edition of 1859.
Why would anyone reprint an author’s first thoughts and not his final ones? Had anybody done this with Einstein or Newton?
The note added that this first edition was ‘in many ways a more clear-cut and forceful version… than the later editions’.
But if I’d written a world-altering book which ran to six editions and sold by the multiple millions, I would certainly want my final thoughts reprinted and not my first. I was puzzled.
The Introduction then claimed that Darwin watered down his theories in later editions after criticisms by fellow scientists Kelvin and Jenkin. But, the author explained, these criticisms were to do with estimated eras of geological time, and a point of genetics. They were not to do with ‘the Creator’. Therefore, presumably, the addition of ‘the Creator’ to the final sentence of later editions was Darwin’s own idea, and nothing to do with ‘watering-down’ following scientific criticism.
It was the ‘Creator-or-ape’ business that really mattered (although not spelled out by Darwin in Origins) and which caused all the ructions with The Church and society at large, not details of geology or genetics.
§ There are plenty of interesting books on Darwin’s views, but my concerns here are:
What did Darwin actually say in Origins?
What have people claimed Darwin said in Origins?
And why do people claim what they claim?
In his television series Twelve Books that Changed the World, Lord Bragg quoted the final sentence from Origins. But again, it was from the first (Creatorless) and not the definitive final edition. Why?
The good lord also claimed that ‘We are an accidental event’ and ‘Darwin thought that life came about naturally’. Not so. It is clear that Lord B has overlooked Darwin’s ‘Creator’. How could such a respected polymath have missed this? Curiouser and curiouser.
It is hard for us, 160 years on, to appreciate the ructions that Origins caused. The Church, with its power over people’s minds, especially in the fields of cosmology and ontology found the notion of Evolution, and its implications for the origins of Man, profoundly threatening, and responded with smug derision. Scientists and ‘rationalists’ thundered back.
§ Ontology: the study of ‘being’ and what it means.
§ Rationalist: originally meaning ‘one who pursues reason’. Its meaning has changed, however.**
Opinions became polarised: shouting replaced discussion; arguments were reduced to slogans, and the real issue, along with its subtle implications, became lost in a welter of anger and triumphalism. I read more books and learned that Darwin was aware from the start that his book was a bombshell. He was so anxious that he sat on his findings for twenty years before publishing,
§ Given this, you would think he would have mentioned ‘the Creator’ more times rather than fewer in his first edition, wouldn’t you? But in fact he started with seven mentions (of which two were definitely positive) then revised this up to nine, including that famous last sentence.
and, even then, he published only after receiving a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, another biologist who had come to similar conclusions to Darwin. Charles Darwin became a household name, while Alfred Wallace sank into near-obscurity.**
Why was Darwin called ‘purely material’ while he refers positively to ‘the Creator’ twice in the first edition, and more often in later ones? And why would anyone publish a non-representative edition of Darwin’s final views? Could it be that someone was embarrassed by The Hero of Evolution admitting to a paranormal necessity, and thought that the first edition was thus more ‘suitable’ than the last?
§ CD did have problems with ‘religion’, meaning ‘Christianity as practised in middleclass Victorian England’. His daughter Annie had died aged 10 after a nasty illness. As a result CD could not accept the Christian dogma of a personal and benevolent God. But as a clear thinker he knew that a Prime Cause (which he called ‘Creator’) is a separate matter from ‘a personal and benevolent God’. Hence, he insisted on a Creator while rejecting the God of Love of Established Christianity.
He wrote in a letter of 1879, to a Mr J Fordyce:
‘In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.’
This was written three years before he died, and 20 years after Origins first appeared. I think we can call this a mature opinion.
I’d heard Richard Dawkins mentioned as an expert in evolutionary studies, and found a copy of his book The Blind Watchmaker in Oxfam. Would Mr Dawkins, a ‘neo-Darwinist’, solve my problems?
Some Puzzling Logic
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler
Albert Einstein
I understood that a ‘Darwinist’ was someone who accepted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. But what was a ‘neo-Darwinist’? Darwin completed his theory without knowing of Mendel’s pioneering work on genetics. A decade or two later it became apparent that genetics was a powerful new tool, and after a period of competitive in-fighting, biologists realised that the two new theories and mechanisms could be elegantly integrated, and neo-Darwinism was born…