Darwin and the ‘New Atheists’

While I’m mentioning Darwin, I might as well draw your attention to another piece by ‘Our Maddy of the Sorrows’. This time Madeleine Bunting is urging us not to let the great man be hijacked by “New Atheists” – whatever they might be. I rather suspect that they are just the same as plain old atheists, i.e. people who lack beliefs in gods. No matter, after writing some accurate stuff in her article about Darwin’s achievements (to give her due credit), Maddy can’t resist launching off into some very silly riffs indeed.

The fear is that the anniversary will be hijacked by the New Atheism as the perfect battleground for another round of jousting over the absurdity of belief (a position that Darwin pointedly never took up). Many of the prominent voices in the New Atheism are lined up to reassert that it is simply impossible to believe in God and accept Darwin’s theory of evolution; Richard Dawkins and the US philosopher Daniel Dennett are among those due to appear in Darwin200 events.

I would assume that Dawkins and Dennett are amongst those due to appear because they have both done much good work examining various aspects of evolutionary theory. The fact that they are both atheists (Maddy, please note, not “New” atheists) is not really relevant. Besides, neither of those two gentlemen have ever, to my knowledge, asserted that “it is simply impossible to believe in God and accept Darwin’s theory of evolution”. I do wish Bunting would stop constructing strawmen.

What Darwin did was to show how complexity and apparent design could arise in the biological world through very simple principles. The collateral damage of his theory was to remove the need for the hand of God to be at work in the formation of species. Basically, he inadvertently blew a hole beneath the waterline of the good ship “Argument from Design”, which had been steaming about for centuries since being launched by the ancient Greeks and given a refit by the Rev. William Paley. And despite Bunting’s assertion, the best that the theory of evolution can be said to do is to posit an alternative explanation to the “GodDidIt” argument – it certainly can’t be said to prove the “impossibility of God”.

Oh, and one last thing, Bunting misquotes the title of Darwin’s seminal work as “On the Origin of the Species”. As Dawkins can’t resist pointing out (somewhat impishly, I feel):

A telling litmus test of an ignoramus on the subject of Darwin is their rendering of the title of his great book. The diagnostic solecism — remarkably common — is to stick a ‘the’ before ‘species’. Sure enough, Madeleine Bunting falls right into it, exactly as you would expect. The correct title, of course, is On the Origin of Species.