Abstract
The nineteenth-century Anglican theologian Aubrey Moore once said that ‘Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend’. David O. Brown would agree and, in this ambitious book, sets out to explore the main implications of neo-Darwinism for Christian theology. However, I suspect that the conclusions he reaches are very far from what Moore had in mind.
For Brown, while most theologians accept the fact of evolution, very few are prepared to acknowledge what Darwinian natural selection, as a mechanism for driving evolution forward, is actually telling them about God and God’s relationship with the world. Neo-Darwinism, Brown tells us, reigns supreme and offers a complete understanding of existence. We have no alternative, therefore, but to accept its conclusions, and this means that many traditional Christian doctrines simply have to be jettisoned. Out goes a God who influences the world; what used to be called ‘sin’ is simply a biological necessity for survival; human beings are not uniquely created in God’s image and there is no essential difference between them and other animals; death, pain and suffering are permanent features of the way the world is; and there will be no divine healing of creation or eschatological hope of redemption. Evolution has no telos, direction or purpose, nor does God ‘create’ the world; he simply ‘preserves’ it in its current state. Oddly, Brown says that Christ, through the Incarnation, becomes the sole agent of divine activity. I struggled, however, to square this with Brown’s repeated insistence that it is impossible for the mind of God (or, indeed, any mind) to interact with matter. The upshot is that his thesis can be accepted only at the expense of abandoning huge swathes of orthodox Christian belief.
But are there any grounds for believing that Brown’s claims are true? In short: no. His work is deeply problematic both theologically and scientifically. Most theologians since F. R. Tennant and Teilhard de Chardin have recognized that evolution is perfectly compatible with theistic belief because the drive towards ever increasing complexity in nature reveals it to be shot through with divine purpose. Granted, we would need to accept that neo-Darwinism is only part of the explanation for biological evolution and that there may be teleological laws of nature at work. But this is something already recognized by a growing number of scientists, including Simon Conway Morris. Worryingly, Brown uncritically embraces the naturalistic and materialistic assumptions at the heart of neo-Darwinism. He does not engage with renowned philosophers, such as Thomas Nagel, who persuasively show that neo-Darwinism’s failure to account for consciousness, intentionality, meaning and value is a major problem threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture. Nor, in his positivist-like faith in the Darwinian world view, does he appreciate that natural science is limited and can only ask such questions as it is competent to answer.
Brown seems sincere in his belief that he is a ‘friend’ helping Christians face the uncomfortable ‘truths’ of neo-Darwinism. Unfortunately, while reading his book, I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s aphorism about a man sawing off the branch on which he is sitting.