Editorial
From the Newsletter of Revesby Presbyterian Church
May 2009
Rev Dr Peter Barnes
From 1831 to 1836 Charles Darwin was involved in the voyage of the Beagle, which surveyed South America and the Pacific Ocean. This was a momentous voyage for Darwin himself. After the publication of his theory – or hypothesis – his name became well-known, and at his death in 1882 he was buried from Westminster Abbey beside Sir Isaac Newton. The British author, Howard E. L. Mellersh, claimed that because of Darwin, ‘We now regard all things as flowing, as changing, as evolving. Not only biology but all the other sciences have from Darwin received a new vision, a new, revivifying way of being looked at. So too have philosophy and ethics. Man now realizes a new and different responsibility to the rest of life, to which he now knows he is so intimately related.’ In other words, evolution explains just about everything, including the fact that we grow up.
However, Mellersh is not entirely consistent, and he notes the emphasis of Herbert Spencer in England and Ernst Haeckel in Germany that Darwinism meant that life was simply a selfish struggle of one species against another, and, one individual against another. He is somewhat uneasy at this, and comments: ‘It was Spencer who invented the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and Darwin may well have regretted that he ever borrowed it.’ There is precious little evidence that Darwin ever regretted borrowing Spencer’s term. Rather, he tried to incorporate it into a typically Victorian form of rather vacuous optimism. His conclusion was: ‘Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.’ A protracted war, a famine, or random acts of genocide can apparently do wonders for the human race.
After the completion of the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin summed up some of what he thought he had learned. The following paragraph is the most startling:
Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian, – of man in his lowest and most savage state. One’s mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? – men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.
In his personal life, Darwin was no Hitler, nor even a Peter Singer, but the implications ought to be clear enough.
Almost two hundred years after Darwin’s birth, an atheist, Matthew Parris wrote in The Times on 27 December 2008 that Christianity had greatly helped Africa. His article is revealing: ‘Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid effort. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.’ Rather reluctantly, Parris acknowledged that the Christian faith liberates its adherents rather than oppresses them. It frees the believer from the gangster politics of the tribe, and the dead weight of fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature, and the world at large. He concludes: ‘Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.’
Darwin’s view that life concerns the survival of the fittest has consequences: what matters is that we claw our way to the top of the heap. The atheist Matthew Parris saw that Christianity had consequences: people showed compassion to others, and were liberated from any bondage to biology. Ideas have consequences, for good or ill.
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes