Part V Evolution

Darwinism and Atheism

A Marriage Made in Heaven?

MICHAEL RUSE

My aim in this chapter is to consider the relationship between Darwinism and atheism. I take it that by Darwinism is meant today’s version of the theory given in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, evolution through natural selection (Ruse 2006, 2008). Of course no one believes that natural selection is the only cause of change, but the Darwinian is committed to the belief that natural selection is by far the greatest force. It should be noted that natural selection does not lead simply to change but change of a particular kind, namely in the direction of adaptive advantage. By atheism in this chapter is meant the denial of religious belief, and specifically in the context of this volume the denial of Christian belief. In other words, this essay could as well have been titled “Can a Christian Be a Darwinian?”

Biblical Literalism

I shall take in turn a number of points of potential conflict, starting with the most obvious potential conflict of all, namely the clash between the claims made in the Holy Bible and the claims made by Darwinians. If one reads the Bible in any sense literally then clearly there are problems. The Bible tells us that God created the earth and all of the organisms on it in six days. The Bible tells us that humans are all descended from one man and one woman who were likewise created miraculously. The Bible tells us that, at some point after the initial creation, God being displeased with what he saw, decided to destroy almost everything by means of a universal flood. All of these claims and more are denied by Darwinian evolutionary theory. The Darwinian accepts the standard cosmological picture of the universe, namely that everything began some 15 billion years ago with a so-called Big Bang. The Darwinian accepts that the earth is about 4½ billion years old. The Darwinian believes that life began just under 4 billion years ago. The Darwinian believes that organisms developed slowly and naturally (meaning without divine miraculous intervention) from common ancestors. The Darwinian believes that humans are part of the natural evolutionary process, and that we appeared some million or so years ago. The Darwinian believes that human population numbers were once much smaller than they are now, but that they never dropped below about 20 000 organisms. The Darwinian accepts plate tectonics and finds no evidence whatsoever for a universal flood.

Obviously, if religion and science are to be brought together in harmony, something must give. Most particularly something must give on the side of religion. One simply cannot interpret the Bible in the literal way just sketched in the last paragraph. However, as is well known, Christians have long had resources to tackle this problem (McMullin 1985, 1993; Ruse 2001). The greatest theologian that the church has known, St Augustine of Hippo (who lived around AD 400), stressed that although the Bible is the word of God and hence true throughout, this does not mean that the Bible must always be read in a literal fashion. Reasonably, Augustine stressed that had God expressed his views in the terms of modern science the people of the Bible simply would not have understood what he was talking about. Hence, to use the language of the great reformer John Calvin, God had to “accommodate” his speech to the common people. As it happens, Augustine did take most of the early chapters of the Bible fairly literally. But he set in place the methodology to deal with ongoing discoveries and theories of science. In other words, so long as one sees the creation story of the Bible as telling us something about God and his creative power, and also about the special relationship that humans have with God, it is open to the Christian to understand everything else in the terms of modern science. Indeed many would argue that the Christian must understand things in terms of modern science. The Bible tells us that we are made in the image of God. Whatever else that might mean, it clearly means that we have powers of sense and reason which are godlike. Hence, using them is using gifts given to us by God, and not to explore our wonderful world is itself positively unchristian.

Of course, particularly in the USA today, many Christians (particularly evangelical Protestants) find this kind of argument unconvincing. They feel strongly that a true Christian must be guided by the unaltered, uninterpreted word of God (Numbers 2006). Ultimately, I suppose, there is little reconciliation possible. However, it is worth pointing out that almost no one in fact takes every part of the Bible completely literally. For example, Revelation talks much about such individuals as the Whore of Babylon. There is a long tradition in Christianity, especially for evangelicals, of interpreting the Whore in all sorts of nonliteral ways. Hardly anyone thinks that she is an actual person. Rather it is taken to be a metaphorical way of describing evil forces, often for traditional Protestants the Catholic Church or its leader, the pope. So when people argue that Darwinism clashes with the Bible, it is worth pointing out that even the most fervent are usually cherry-picking those parts of the Bible that they insist must be read literally (Ruse 2005).

Miracles

Matters of faith, including interpretation of the Bible, fall under what is known as revealed religion. Let us turn now to the other side of the coin, natural religion or theology, that area of inquiry that deals with religion from the viewpoint of reason. Here we encounter the well-known proofs for the existence of God. I assume that Darwinian evolutionary theory has nothing to say about an argument like the ontological argument for God’s existence, namely that which derives God’s existence from the very nature of his being. I am not sure, to be candid, whether Darwinism has much to say either about causal arguments. However, it certainly does seem pertinent to some of the other arguments and so let us run through a number.

Start with the argument from miracles. This is the argument that says miracles, however defined, point to the existence of a deity (remember we are thinking in terms of the Christian deity). The trouble here is that if miracles are defined in the usual way, that is to say as breaks with the regular laws of nature, this goes against science in general and Darwinian science in particular. The absolutely fundamental, metaphysical presupposition is that the world is regular, governed by unbroken rules or laws.

There are two traditional approaches that one can take at this point (Mullin 2000). The first, going back to St Augustine, suggests that even miracles are governed by laws, albeit laws that we do not necessarily yet know. Hence there need be no conflict with science. Of course today we know a lot more about the laws of nature than did St Augustine. In the modern version, the argument that there need be no conflict is more likely to be phrased less in terms of unknown laws and more of known laws coming together in some significant and perhaps unexpected way. For instance, when the British Army escaped in 1940 from Dunkirk, most atypically the English Channel was very smooth, without any storms or other unpleasant weather effects. Many thought that this was miraculous, but I suspect few thought that any laws of nature were actually being broken or that indeed any unknown laws of nature were involved. It was more a question of things coming together serendipitously.

I presume therefore that pursuing this line of argument, the claim would be that such miracles as feeding the 5000 were in fact law-bound phenomena. Perhaps Jesus’ influence so affected the multitude that spontaneously and atypically they shared their food. The real miracle was this outpouring of love rather than Jesus acting rather like a high-class caterer. Even something like the Resurrection could be dealt with in this way. Presumably one might say something along the lines that Jesus physically actually died and remained dead, but that on the third day the disciples suddenly felt in their hearts that they were not alone and that their savior had arisen. If one goes in this sort of direction then clearly there is no conflict with science, specifically including Darwinian science.

For many Christians, however, this is too weak or radical a solution. They opt rather to go with a line of thinking endorsed by St Thomas Aquinas. He argued that there were indeed actual breaks or violations of natural law. On the third day one would rightly expect the body of Jesus to go on rotting. However, miraculously, Jesus came back from the dead and arose to meet his followers. What can be said by the Darwinian reconciler in the face of this kind of thinking? I suspect that the best solution is that one argues that God is ever immanent and that, no matter how lawlike any situation may be, it would collapse into nothingness without his support. There is therefore no reason why God should not at any point that suits him intervene and break with natural law, which after all is something he created and sustained. Here, therefore, I think one would argue that one is not so much violating science, including Darwinian science, but going beyond the scope of science.

I suspect that many Darwinians would feel uncomfortable with this, but I’m not sure that logically they are in a position to object. I do suspect, however, that if one starts to look for actual evidence of miracles, for instance speculating about how the Virgin Mary might have become pregnant, one is going to run into all of the objections philosophers like David Hume have long detailed. Better therefore take things on faith. Also, I suspect one should be very wary about how far one is prepared to extend the notion of miracle. We shall come later to human evolution, but it is probably a mistake to start introducing miracles to get the arrival of homo sapiens. Better to restrict the notion of miracle strictly to situations needed for our salvation. Let God’s laws do the rest.

Design

The design argument comes in various forms (Ruse 2003). One version, which goes back to Plato, sees design in the very existence of laws of nature themselves. If this argument be found convincing, then clearly Darwinian evolutionary theory adds to its strength. Darwinism extends the rule of law into the area of organic origins, something that previously had been thought miraculous. However, there is another version which goes back particularly to Aristotle, focusing on the nature of organisms. In Aristotle’s terminology, organisms show evidence of ends or purposes, what he called “final causes.” It was Aristotle’s opinion, and this was shared by many down through the course of history, that final causes cannot just have happened randomly. There must be some kind of designing intention behind them. Christians have taken this up and argued that the designer is in fact the God of the Old and New Testaments. After the Reformation, particularly in Britain, the argument for organic design was much cherished, and naturalists like John Ray made much of it, as did theologians like Archdeacon William Paley a century later. In recent years the argument has been reinvigorated, if that is the right word, by a group of American evangelical Christians, who argue that organisms show evidence of an “intelligent design” (Dembski and Ruse 2004).

Well before Darwin appeared on the scene there were strong critics of the organic design argument. Most particularly, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume (1947) showed that there are many problems, particularly for the Christian. For instance, why should there not be more than one designer? And why should we think that this world of ours is the one and only attempt made by the designer? It may be that we had a series of predecessors and that there will be many successors in future years, after we are long gone and forgotten. However, it seems fair to say that even Hume did not demolish the argument entirely, and indeed he himself admitted this. Supporters of the argument invoked a version of what is today known as the “argument to the best explanation.” They pointed out, reasonably, that Aristotle was indeed right. Organisms show final causes, final causes cannot have come about by chance, and that failing some other alternative one really has no choice but to suppose that a designer of some form or another. Here, obviously, Darwin’s thinking did have major implications. He gave a law-bound explanation not only of the evolution of organisms but also, as pointed out earlier, their designlike or adapted nature. Natural selection speaks directly to final causes. Organisms like the eye and the hand show evidence of intention, not because there was a conscious intention but because those that were intention- or designlike succeeded in the struggle for existence and those that were not did not. In the notorious words of Britain’s best-known popularizer of science, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins 1986, 6).

Note, however, what Darwin’s argument does and does not do. It does not disprove the existence of God. Rather, it shows that we do not need directly to invoke God to explain the designlike nature of organisms. In other words, at this level it makes God redundant. (In fact at the time of writing the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin believed that there was a designer who worked through the medium of law. Later, he became more of an agnostic, although never an atheist. Darwin would have agreed fully with Dawkins at this point. God is redundant.) My suspicion is that many thinkers today, probably including Dawkins himself, think that Darwinism at this point actually refutes Christianity. This is simply not so. Showing that something is not necessary is not the same as showing that something is not possible. One should not underestimate the significance of Darwinism, but at the same time one should not over exaggerate the significance of Darwinism.

Morality

Many would argue that morality proves the existence of God in some sense. They would argue that without God’s backing, morality degenerates into mere subjective feelings, and not only is this an undesirable state of affairs but in the light of all that we know and think it is a completely unconvincing state of affairs. Morality does not come across to us as mere subjective feeling rather like a fondness for spinach. It is more, and this more implies God.

Does Darwinism have anything to say at this point? Many evolutionists think that it does (Ruse 2009). In the past 30 or 40 years there has been much interest in the possibility of morality emerging as part of our evolved human nature. In fact, following Darwin himself in his Descent of Man, today’s evolutionists generally claim that morality is highly adaptive. This may seem paradoxical given that evolution forges us all in a struggle for existence. But, as Darwin recognized and as today’s evolutionists endorse, often in the struggle one gets far more by cooperating rather than by fighting flat out. It is argued that what really matters for social organisms like humans are sentiments of warm feeling, extending even to obligations towards our fellows.

It is true that Darwinians are not in total unity about the actual mechanism of evolution at this point. Some favor a fairly rigorous selective process, often known as the “selfish gene” perspective (Williams 1966; Dawkins 1976; Ruse 1998). Here, all benefits ultimately come down to the individual and no one does anything without some hope of personal gain. Others favor a more holistic approach, where selection can work for the good of the group (Sober and Wilson 1994, 1998). But although these differences cause much heated debate among Darwinians, the overall result is the same. Natural selection produces morality. The actual nature of the moral claims is sometimes disputed. Some (like Peter Singer) incline more to utilitarianism, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Others (like John Rawls) are more inclined towards some kind of Kantian position, where there is a great emphasis on fairness and treating others as ends rather than as means. But ultimately again one finds a fair amount of overlap, and most would surely be inclined to endorse something along the lines of Jesus’ Love Commandment, namely one ought to treat one’s neighbor as oneself.

What does all of this have to say about questions of objectivity and subjectivity? I think it’s fairly clear that Darwinians unite in thinking that morality is ultimately a matter of emotions. Note, however, that these are not individual emotions. Morality only works if everyone shares basically the same emotions. In other words, there is no relativity implied by the Darwinian approach to morality. But surely one might argue that morality being in some sense a matter of human emotions does not deny some kind of objective reality out there. After all, who would doubt that ultimately morality has to be a human thing? Think analogously about our perception of the external world. We have eyes and ears which enable us to recognize and track external objects. Thus, for example, if a truck is bearing down on us we can see and hear it, and clearly it is to our adaptive advantage to get out of its way. Our eyes and ears are products of evolution, as is the use that we make of them. But this does not in any sense deny the reality of the speeding truck. Surely analogously one might argue that although morality is something given to us through evolution, it is not to deny that there is an objective morality behind everything, not excluding the possibility of an objective morality put in place and endorsed by God (Kitcher 1994).

However, some Darwinians would push the argument rather more strongly and deny this can be so. They would argue that there is often more than one way of skinning the cat, or less metaphorically that there is nothing in the Darwinian picture to deny that we might have evolved other ways of interacting with our fellow species members. Rather than evolving with the belief that we ought to love each other, possibly we might have evolved with the belief that we ought to hate each other, but that knowing others feel the same way about us we see that it is in our interests to cooperate. In other words, there is no guarantee in the Darwinians’ scenario that what we believe in fact corresponds to the objective moral truth. And, surely, if the objective moral truth is unknown to us it is hardly likely that such truth is something put in place by a loving God. In still other words, perhaps the Darwinian picture cuts more deeply. Completing the argument, Darwinians suggest also that even though morality may be a matter of emotion, it is a matter of emotions of a rather strange kind. Most particularly, our biology deceives us into thinking that these emotions truly do reflect objective morality. If we did not think that morality was objective then we would start to disregard it and, before long, everything would break down. In other words, for our own biological good, natural selection makes us think morality is objective even though it is really subjective (Ruse 1998).

Is this the final word on the matter? Possibly not. The above picture has been sketched deliberately without any reference to the Christian God. If it is well taken, then clearly one does not need God to explain morality. However, this is not to stop the Christian from suggesting that God might be the author of all things, including our moral sentiments. In fact, someone inclined to a natural-law theory of morality might well embrace this route. The natural-law theorist believes that the objectivity of morality comes about, not from God’s arbitrary decrees, but because of the way that God has made us. It is right and proper, for instance, for man and woman to come together and have children, not because God laid down the law, as it were, but because God made us as sexual beings and having children is a natural outcome. There is therefore no reason why the Christian should not accept the Darwinian position and simply say that morality has come about because this was what God intended. Morality is as natural as sex. In other words, although one does not have a proof of the existence of God from the nature and existence of morality, one has no refutation of the existence of God from the nature and existence of morality. Therefore, it seems that Christianity and Darwinism can be quite good friends at this point (Ruse 2001, 2010).

Original Sin

The move now is to one of the biggest problems for the Christian, irrespective of any science, including Darwinism. I refer to the problem of evil. How is one to reconcile Christian claims about a creator God, who is not only all-powerful but also all-loving, and the existence of evil in the world? The point of relevance for us here is that many critics think that Darwinism exacerbates the problem (Dawkins 1995). Attention is drawn to the fact that natural selection starts with a struggle for existence, a phenomenon which is often very painful and almost inevitably ends in death and destruction. How is it that such a process could have been brought about by an all-loving, all-powerful God? Charles Darwin (1985–, 8, 224) himself drew attention to some of the terrible ways in which organisms are adapted to succeed in life’s struggles. He concluded, and many have concluded with him, that it is very hard to see at a point like this how Christianity can be maintained.

To speak to these issues, let us stress, first, that the question is not whether the Christian can give an adequate answer to evil. The question rather is whether Darwinism makes the problem worse. Let us stress, second, that Christians have thought hard about these issues, and that it would be wrong to ignore the fruits of their inquiry. In particular, following this prescription, let us note that traditionally a distinction is drawn between moral evil and physical evil. The Christian argues that some evils, like the Holocaust, are the results of human actions. They therefore demand an explanation that takes account of this fact. The Christian also argues that some evils, like earthquakes and tsunamis, are the results of natural causes. Any explanation must likewise take account of this fact.

Start with moral evil. What does the Christian have to say here? The answer is that moral evil is brought about by human actions and that humans act in bad ways because they are sinful, in some sense tainted. But how does one explain human sinfulness, given that we are made in the image of a loving God? Here the answer is traditionally given in terms of the Fall. Following St Augustine, Christians argue that sin came into the world because of human disobedience and that God should not be blamed for it. (Christians also argue that Jesus’ death on the cross in some way counters this disobedience, but this is not something of direct relevance to us here.) Surely we have a point of conflict with Darwinism. It was not just any disobedience that brought in sin. It was the disobedience of the actual historical figures Adam and Eve. But we have just seen that modern evolutionary theory denies the existence of such figures and so there is a point of breakdown here.

There is one fairly obvious solution to this problem, namely suggesting that original sin should not be ascribed directly to Adam and Eve. As it happens, there is an alternative theological position going back even before Augustine to Irenaeus, one which has long been favored by Eastern Christianity (Schneider 2010). Here one does not see sin coming about as the direct result of moral disobedience by fully aware and formed beings. Rather it is seen as something which was a natural consequence of our immature, evolving nature. Instead of seeing the coming of Christ and his atoning death on the cross as a rather contingent response to an unplanned fall, one sees that the death on the cross was something anticipated and planned from the first. Humans, although made in the image of God, only came slowly to intellectual and moral maturity. Expectedly, when they first appeared, they were incomplete and imperfect beings. God knew that this would be so and anticipated from the first that he would have to suffer on our behalf.

This kind of theological approach lends itself naturally to a Darwinian interpretation (Ruse 2001). Humans are bound to be selfish, because unless we are self-regarding we are not going to succeed in the struggle for existence. We are also going to be moral or, as evolutionists say, “altruistic,” because altruism is a good strategy in the struggle for existence. In other words, we are an uneasy mélange of good and bad, and this is something which emerges naturally out of our background. Sin has not come about because of one individual act, but because this is the natural consequence of an evolutionary process that makes natural selection the central cause. In short, far from refuting the Christian position on original sin, if one goes with Irenaeus rather than Augustine, if anything, natural selection offers support for this way of thinking.

Natural Evil

What then of natural evil? What about the child burnt by the fire or the family destroyed by an earthquake? The traditional Christian position is that best articulated by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (Reichenbach 1982). He argued that God’s being all-powerful did not imply that God could do the impossible. God could not make 2 + 2 = 5. But such a limitation was no reflection on his omnipotence. Leibniz argued that the laws of nature that we have maximize the good even though there are sometimes costs. It is true the burning fire is very painful, but without the pain we would never learn to avoid fire. Better the pain than major burning. It is true that while Voltaire parodied this way of thinking in his satire Candide, many Christians nonetheless feel that essentially Leibniz’s position is the right answer to natural evil.

Does Darwinism have anything to say at this point? It may be that it does. Richard Dawkins (1983) of all people has argued that the only way in which one can get designlike attributes naturally, that is the only way in which unguided laws can bring about final causes, is through the process of natural selection. Dawkins argues that earlier thinkers were indeed right. Normally, blind law leads to randomness and things going wrong. For instance, new variations or mutations, particularly if they are large, almost invariably are deleterious to their possessors rather than helpful. The only way one can get designlike features is either through genuine design or through a lawlike, designlike producing mechanism, namely natural selection. One can see immediately how this argument can bring comfort to the Christian. It certainly does not answer or speak to all of the instances of natural evil. However, it does explain many instances, for example those cases of adaptation which bring about such cruelty that so troubled Charles Darwin himself. If Dawkins is right, since natural selection is the only way to get designlike features, it is no reflection on God’s omnipotence that the process involves pain and suffering.

Of course this does all rather presuppose that God in his wisdom created through law rather than miraculously. However, there are arguments that one can use to suggest that creation through law is preferable to creation through miracle. For instance, if you are going to produce humanlike beings then necessarily we will have all sorts of features that seemingly reflect our past. If God created miraculously, then it seems we are in the kind of position that the nineteenth-century English naturalist Philip Gosse (1857) proposed, namely that God made things all in one fell swoop but then rather dishonestly put in seeming traces of evolution. One might, I suppose, argue that humans could have been made without any seeming marks of the past, but it is difficult indeed to see how this could be done without completely altering the ground plan. So one can see, at the very least, that if one rushes in and denies the importance of law-bound creation, one is probably raising as many new difficult problems as one is supposedly solving.

Contingency

I want finally to turn to an issue which many, myself included, think is the most difficult problem of all to be solved if one is trying to reconcile Darwinism and Christianity (Ruse 2010). It is surely the case in the Christian scheme of things that humans cannot be contingent. It does not at all follow that we must be the only beings that exist, but that we exist is something that in some sense must be necessary. I doubt very much that we have to be exactly as we are. Presumably we could have green skin. We might have 12 fingers rather than 10. Perhaps even we might not have sexuality, at least as we know it, although this does start to stretch the outer limits of conceivability. But, if beings made in the image of God do not exist or might not have existed, then we have a major challenge to Christian belief.

Unfortunately it is absolutely central to Darwinian evolutionary theory that the course of evolution is contingent. This does not at all mean that it is uncaused. What it does mean is that its path is not predetermined. As the late Stephen Jay Gould (1989) used to say, play the tape of life one time and you get one result. Play the tape of life another time, and you get another result. The reason for this is simple. First of all, natural selection does not insist that one form rather than another must always succeed in life’s struggles. Depending on the circumstances, one kind of organism might be better or fitter than another. Depending on the circumstances, the second kind of organism might be better or fitter than the first. Second, genetics – whether it be Mendelian or the later molecular form – insists that new variations or mutations do not come about according to the needs of their possessors. We know a lot about the causes of mutation, but there is nothing in the theory to say that mutation comes to order, as it were. Indeed, usually mutations are deleterious. These two things, the working of selection and the nature of mutation, mean that there is no direction to the evolutionary process. What evolves is, in a very real sense, a matter of chance.

We have here an area of significant potential conflict. For the Christian, the existence of humans is necessary. For the Darwinian, the existence of humans is contingent. Nor should you think that humans are special and must have evolved (Ruse 2011). If anything, Darwinism suggests that in this case evolution is highly improbable. For a start, beings with brains as large as ours require huge amounts of fuel, namely protein. This is very expensive to obtain, usually involving the pursuit and killing of large mammals. There are many other evolutionary strategies which might be at least as good, if not more efficient, than the one taken by us. For instance, cows have the ability to eat and digest large amounts of very low-grade material. There is nothing in the Darwinian picture to suggest that humans are in some sense innately better or likely to be more successful than dumb brutes like cows.

A number of solutions have been offered to this dilemma. Once again, somewhat paradoxically, the greatest atheist of them all, Richard Dawkins (1986), comes to the Christian’s aid. Dawkins argues that organisms engage in (what are known by biologists as) “arms races.” Two lines of organisms compete and as they do their adaptations are refined and made yet stronger. Thus the antelope is pursued by the cheetah and so the antelope gets faster and in tandem the cheetah gets faster too. Dawkins argues that these arms races lead ultimately up the chain of being to intelligence. He draws attention to the fact that, in the military world, arms races have changed, from the development of heavier and heavier weaponry and armory, to the use of more sophisticated methods of attack and destruction, often if not always involving large amounts of electrical hardware like computers. It is Dawkins’s belief that, in the biological world, arms races sooner or later would lead to humanlike beings.

Perhaps this is true, but even the non-expert can see a great deal is being presupposed here. First, do arms races exist and do they always have the results of that Dawkins suggests? Paleontological evidence rather implies that predators and prey fairly rapidly reached the peak of their abilities and get little or no faster after that. Likewise paleontological evidence suggests that the opportunism of evolution can lead to many different forms, not all of which involve intelligence. Without something more being added there is certainly no necessity for the emergence of beings like ourselves.

Another approach has been suggested recently by the British invertebrate paleontologist Simon Conway Morris (2003). Conway Morris suggests that convergence is a major feature of the evolutionary picture. Ecological niches exist before organisms. Organisms seek these out and evolve into them. Thus, for instance, in the jungle there is going to be an ecological niche for aerial insects at the tops of trees. Likewise, once one has herbivores one is going to have an ecological niche for carnivores. Conway Morris makes much of the fact that saber-tooth tigers evolved separately in both the placental mammalian line and the marsupial mammalian line. He suggests even that there might have been saber-tooth-tiger-like beings amongst the dinosaurs. Working from this, Conway Morris suggests also that ecological niches have a kind of hierarchy, and at the top exists a slot open to cultural beings. It is this niche that humans occupied. Conway Morris argues that in some sense it was inevitable that some evolving line would occupy the cultural niche. Had humans not found it then some other beings surely would have. This gives us all the necessity required by Christianity.

Once again, ingenious though the solution may be one can see that there are many unfounded assumptions. For a start, many deny strongly that ecological niches exist objectively waiting to be occupied. Rather it is argued they are as much a construction from what already exists as anything else. Had herbivores not evolved in the way that they did, then surely the carnivore niche as we know it would not exist. Likewise there is absolutely no necessity to suppose a cultural niche existing independently on its own. There is certainly no reason to think that it waits there asking to be occupied by some group of organisms. And even if it does, then there may well be so many barriers or impediments to reaching it that the chances of its ever being occupied are vanishingly small. As with arms races, one should probably not assume that one has a full answer, totally satisfying for the Christian.

What about a more theological kind of solution? The physicist-theologian Robert John Russell (2008) has offered one candidate. He argues that God gives direction to mutations, but not at the visible level. Rather God directs change down at the quantum level, where it is essentially undiscoverable by us humans. It is hardly a surprise to learn that many find Russell’s solution problematic. One surely has here some version of the “God-of-the gaps argument.” One is breaking with science in order to achieve a theologically acceptable outcome. At the very least, one is putting strain on one’s understanding of Darwinism. Indeed, one has a replay of the debate between Charles Darwin and his great American supporter Asa Gray (Ruse 1999). Gray did not think that evolution could lead to design and ultimately to humans, at least not if one relied solely on natural selection. Therefore, anticipating Russell, Gray argued that some variations are directed. Darwin was horrified and responded that to make such a move as this was to take evolutionary discussion out of the realm of science. Many feel this objection still holds today.

Is there any other possible solution? Stephen Jay Gould (1996) thought that (irrespective of the workings of selection) complexity is bound to occur naturally over time, and that this could lead to intelligence. But again I am not sure that this must lead to intelligence. The solution which I favor invokes (for theological not scientific reasons) some kind of multiverse state of affairs (Ruse 2010). There are many, an infinite number, of universes. I point out that humans have evolved and therefore, however difficult, they could have evolved. In other words, run the process enough times and humans will evolve. Note that “enough times” might mean many, many billions of times – an infinite number in some sense. If God creates universes enough times then humans will evolve. The fact that it takes a great deal of time is irrelevant. It would bore us to wait, but God is outside time and space. He sees always that humans will evolve. I argue, therefore, that although evolution is unguided, the coming of humans was not unplanned.

Does this not imply an awful lot of waste on the part of God? Obviously it does from one perspective. However, note that God may not think a universe totally wasted even if we do not exist in it. Already in this universe we have many worlds which presumably are unoccupied, at least unoccupied by humanlike beings. So, if we are going to talk of waste, we are already up to our necks in that problem. (This is an old problem for those reconciling science and religion. Known as the “plurality-of-worlds” problem, it much engaged philosophers and theologians in the nineteenth century. The philosopher and historian of science William Whewell (2001) wrote an engaging book on the subject, trying to reconcile an essentially empty universe with the purposes of a good and intelligent divine being.)

Conclusion

I doubt my proposal will convince everyone or perhaps anyone. So this is a good point on which to end this essay. One can make considerable progress on the Darwinism and Christianity problem or (if you prefer) the counter-problem of whether Darwinism implies atheism. If what I have covered in this essay is at all well taken, it is clear that those who argue that Darwinism leads inevitably to atheism are simply mistaken. There are, however, many difficult problems and perhaps not all have been tackled successfully. This surely is a challenge rather than refutation. There is work in need of completion.

References

Conway Morris, Simon. 2003. Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Darwin, Charles. 1985–. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, Richard. 1983. Universal Darwinism. In D. S. Bendall, ed. Evolution from Molecules to Men. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 403–425.

Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton.

Dawkins, Richard. 1995. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. New York: Basic Books.

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