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MARY MIDGLEY
REPUBLISHED FROM THE ORIGINAL WITH THE KIND PERMISSION OF BLACKWELL PUBLISHERS
AND ZYGON:
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: MIDGLEY, MARY. "EVOLUTION
AS A RELIGION: A COMPARISON OF PROPHECIES," ZYGON, VOL. 22, NO.
2 (JUNE 1987) PP 179-194).
Abstract. The idea of evolution functions today as a myth as well as a scientific
theory. This use distorts it in some surprising ways. In particular, predictions
of the predestined future development of superhumans (Omega Man) are sometimes
treated by scientists as if they were an established part of the theory of evolution.
Since they rest on the endless-escalator model of evolution, incompatible with
Darwinian methods and not separately argued for, they have no standing at all.
This phenomenon, and others like it, seem to indicate spiritual needs which
are being ignored and thus finding illicit satisfaction. The position is dangerous
and needs more attention.
Evolution is the creation myth of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes
our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought but also our feelings
and actions in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological
theory. In calling it a myth I am not saying that it is a false story. I mean
that it has great symbolic power, which is independent of its truth. Is the
word religion appropriate to it? This depends on the sense in which we understand
that very elastic word. I have chosen it deliberately because I want to draw
attention to the remarkable variety of elements which it covers and to their
present strange behavior. While traditional Christianity held these elements
together in an apparently changeless and inevitable grouping, we did not notice
how diverse they were. Now that the violent changes of modern life have shaken
them apart, they are drifting about and cropping up in unexpected places. If
we ask today "by what myths do people support themselves?" we shall
often find them doing it by ones which they wrongly suppose to be part of science.
My first task here is to draw attention to this phenomenon. It seems an alarming
one, particularly for those quite numerous people who hold that getting rid
of religion is itself a prime aim of science. If the fungicide shares the vices
of the fungus, something has surely gone wrong. However, I think that the matter
has a wider interest than this, an interest which concerns all of us.
Let us start by glancing at a few cases of the procedure in question-occasions
when "science" appears to be stealing its supposed opponent's clothes.
In this paper, I shall concentrate on prophecies, because they provide an exceptionally
clear example.
PROMISING THE MOON
It is a standard charge against religion that it panders to wish fulfillment,
consoling people for their present miseries by dishonestly promising wonders
for the future. It offers "pie in the sky." With this charge in mind,
let us look at the concluding passage of an otherwise sober, serious, and reputable
book by a molecular biologist about the chemical origins of life on earth. William
Day, having dealt with proteins and having discussed critically various possible
conceptions of primal soup, turns in his last chapter from the past to the future.
Evolution, he says firmly, is essentially a development of intelligence. Therefore,
humanity can be expected to evolve in the future a new, distinct, and much more
intelligent type, which will then become "reproductively isolated."
He continues as follows:
He (man) will splinter into types of humans with differing mental faculties
that will lead to diversification and separate species. From among these
types, a new species, Omega man, will emerge, either alone, in union with
others, or with mechanical amplification to transcend to new dimensions
of time and space beyond our comprehension--as much beyond our imagination
as our world was to the emerging eucaryotes .... If evolution is to proceed
through the line of man to a next higher form, there must exist within man's
nature the making of Omega man .... Omega man's comprehension and participation
in the dimenions of the supernatural is what man himself yearns for, but
cannot have. It is reasonable to assume that man's intellect is not the
ultimate, but merely represents a stage intermediate between the primates
and Omega man. What comprehension and powers over Nature Omega man will
command can only be suggested by man's image of the supernatural (Day 1979,
390-99).
Are there any reservations about this prediction? Only one, which concerns
time. There is a difficulty here because (as Day explains) major steps in evolution
have been occurring at steadily decreasing intervals, and the next one may be
due shortly. It must be the one for which he is waiting. "On such a shortened
curve," he explains, "conceivably Omega man could succeed man in fewer
than 10,000 years." (1) Ordinary
evolution, however, is too slow to allow this startling development What is
to be done?
This is apparently a reference to genetic engineering, something especially
important to those whose faith leans heavily on the dramatized idea of evolution.
They demand from that idea not just a satisfying account of the past but also
hope for continued progress in the future. However, there is a real problem
about expecting the human race to evolve further in literal, biological terms.
Human social arrangements tend to block natural selection, even in simple cultures;
and the more elaborate cultures get, the more this happens. Nineteenth-century
Social Darwinists attacked this problem with a meat axe, calling for deliberate
eugenic selection and harsh commercial competition, so that the race could go
back to being properly weeded and could still progress. As we now know, however,
these schemes were not just odious but futile. Commercial competition has no
tendency to affect reproduction. As for "positive eugenics," it is
not possible to identify desirable genes nor to force people to breed for them.
Even if it were, the genes' spread would still be hopelessly slow. The whole
time-scale of evolution makes such schemes ridiculous.
The natural conclusion is that such ideas should be dropped. The human race
must take itself as it is, with its well-known vast powers of social adaptation,
and make the best of its existing capacities. This thought, however, is unbearable
to those whose faith in life is invested in the future and pinned to the steady,
continuing, upward escalator of evolution. "If evolution is to proceed
through the line of man to a next higher form" as Day puts it, there simply
must be another way. That wish, rather than the amazingly thin argument about
recurrent evolutionary steps, seems to be the ground of his confidence.
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS
Where, however, does the evolutionary model come from? It is not part of regular,
Darwinian scientific theory. The idea of a vast escalator, moving steadily upwards
from lifeless matter through plants and animals to humanity, and inevitably
on to higher things, was coined by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and given currency
by Herbert Spencer under his chosen name "evolution." Charles Darwin
utterly distrusted the notion, which seemed to him a piece of baseless theorizing,
and he avoided the name. As far as he could see, he said, "no innate tendency
to progressive development exists .... It is curious how seldom writers define
what they mean bv progressive development" (Moore 1979, 151). His theory
of natural selection gives no ground for it and does not require it. As has
been pointed out, it arranges species in a radiating bush or seaweed rather
than on a ladder. It demands no orthogenesis or predestined straight line, whether
in terms of intelligence or of anything else. It accounts equally for all kinds
of development and also for some cases of unchangingness or regression in terms
of limited responses to particular environments. The notion of a climbable ladder
was of course derived from the older image of the stationary one, the scala
naturae, which combined some sensible ideas about increasing complexity with
some much less useful ones about hierarchy and government. It was not necessary
for classification nor relevant to the process of natural selection.
Darwin, therefore, saw no reason to posit any law guaranteeing that any of
the changes noticed hitherto would continue indefinitely. He also saw no reason
to pick out any particular change, such as an increase in intelligence, as the
core of the whole process. Spencer's approach was quite different. To him it
seemed at once obvious that the whole business could be reduced to one simple
law, which he formulated in terms of increasing heterogeneity. As he stated
it, "Brief inspection made it manifest that the law held in the inorganic
world, as well as in the organic and the superorganic" (Duncan 1908, 556).
Accordingly, as one of Spencer's followers pointed out with pride, "The
theory of evolution dealing with the universe as a whole, from gas to genius,
was formulated some months before the publication of the Darwin-Wallace paper"
(Armstrong 1904, 48)--a priority-claim which Darwin never wanted to dispute.
SCIENTISTS AS RULERS
From that time to this, Spencer's bold, colorful, and flattering picture of
evolution has constantly prevailed over the more sober and difficult one of
Darwin, not only in the public mind but surprisingly often also in the minds
of scientists who had reason to know its limitations. Thus that very reputable
physicist J. D. Bernal shaped it in a way that bears some relation to Day's
in a remarkable Marxist utopia published in 1929. Bernal pointed out that things
might become a trifle dull and unchallenging in the future, after the triumph
of the proletariat and when the State had withered away. He predicted that only
the dimmer minds would be content with this placid Paradise. "The aristocracy
of scientific intelligence," would, he said, therefore start new developments
and create a world run increasingly by scientific experts. Scientific institutions
would gradually become the government, and thus achieve "a further stage
in the Marxian hierarchy of domination." In the end, scientists "would
emerge as a new species and leave humanity behind" (Bernal 1929, 73).
This scheme gives a clue to Day's otherwise startling and mysterious prediction
that the new superhumans would be reproductively isolated. Why should they be?
What made this idea seem plausible was surely the already existing thought that
scientists ought to form a caste apart, running the world without any possibility
of interference by politicians, historians, voters, or members of any other
alien and intrusive group. This idea was strongly promoted by H.G. Wells and
was popular between the First and Second World Wars. It is still often found
in science fiction and in other literature where fantasies are openly revealed,
such as comics. It is a mysterious suggestion because training in physical science
does not of itself qualify people as administrators. Accordingly, the word science
often seems to get a rather odd meaning. It seems, then, to center on membership
in the club or tribe of scientists and on rejection of other competing clubs
or tribes, rather than on the scientific training itself or on acceptance of
theories or even methods of inquiry.
Although it is still with us, this idea of a separate hereditary caste or ruling
race of scientists took a considerable knock to its prestige after the rise
of fascism and the Second World War. Since then, it has not in general been
so openly supported. Instead, the emphasis of those who want to improve the
species has usually been on a simple general rise in intelligence. However,
this still seems to be seen often as equivalent to a proposal to produce more
and better scientists. This interpretation seems the only possible explanation
of these people's strange lack of interest in the problem of conflicting ideals.
What sort of intelligence ought we to aim for? Indeed, more basically still,
why is intelligence as such to take precedence over all other human ideals?
Such problems tend to be bypassed entirely. Thus, the Nobel prize-winning biologist
J. Lederberg writes in Towards Century 21:"Now what stops us making
supermen? The main thing that stops us is that we don't know the biochemistry
of the object that we are trying to produce" (Walla 1978, 52). It does
not seem to strike Lederberg, any more than Day, that we cannot identify or
conceive that supposed object at all. What is the model for the Omega factory?
There is an immense range of human ideals. Do we want supereinstein, supernietzsche,
superbeethoven, superdarwin, superconfucius, superbuddha, supershaw, supernapoleon,
or some highest common factor between all of them, designed by a committee?
Where do the superwomen come in? Even if we somehow made a choice, the idea
of the lesser designing the greater seems incoherent. Could a child invent an
adult, a fool, a genius, or a crook an honest person? Each of us projects our
faults into our work, and the more ambitious the work, the more glaring the
faults become. If some previous century had been given the chance to put its
ideals in concrete form--to design its own superman--we know just what faults
we should expect to find in the products. Other cultures, too, would do the
job in their own way. How could we possibly have a claim to transcend this kind
of limitation?
Superman-fanciers, both inside and outside the scientific professions, commonly
resist this charge of partiality by assuming, first, that what is needed is
simply more or a single timeless abstraction (namely intelligence measured by
intelligence tests) and, second, that this abstraction is a single genetically
distinct characteristic, controlled by its own gene or genes. Both these assumptions
seem fanciful. Intelligence in this sense cleverness--is certainly useful, but
how it is used depends on the aims of those using it. Like other powers, in
bad hands it is simply an added danger. Clever people, as such, can be just
as weak and ju~t as wicked as stupid ones. What we normally mean by intelligence
is not just cleverness. It includes such things as imagination, sensibility,
good sense, and decent aims--things far too complex to appear in tests or to
be genetically isolated. Further, even if this quality of intelligence as the
testers define it were what we wanted, there is no reason to expect it to be
packaged conveniently for us by the genes. It is just a convenient compromise-entity
especially evolved for use in the social sciences, handy no doubt for many purposes
but not related to the biological complexity of nerves and brain any more than
speed in race horses is so packaged. As a distinct, genetically heritable characteristic
it is a nonstarter.
THE DEMAND FOR FAITH
If I seem to be telescoping possible arguments about this rather briskly, I
apologize. What concerns us now is that those "prophets" whom I quote
do not give any arguments at all but present their assumptions about the prospects
of superman-development openly as matters of faith. If one questions the possibility
of genetically engineering improved hominids or of producing them by artificial
intelligence, one is usually accused of lacking faith in science. It is pointed
out that, in the early days of locomotives, people did not believe that it was
possible to travel at more than twenty miles an hour. The moral, it seems, is
that we should have more faith, as George and Robert Stephenson and their backers
had faith in the possibility of railways.
This is odd reasoning. The Stephensons were specialists, highly pragmatic,
experienced engineers who tested their work every step of the way. Their backers
could see just what they were about. Those who now ask us for faith in their
prophecies about the hypothetical technology of the imagined future, based on
theories which are alien to science, are not in this position. Certainly the
Stephensons needed to have faith in their new project. All bold advances in
science and technology do need this kind of faith. Faith as such is not an alternative
to science, nor the enemy of science; it is a necessary part of it. However,
the 'faith which inventors like the Stephensons need is a limited one, for which
they can to some extent give appropriate reasons. The faith which their backers
have in them is based partly on seeing those reasons, partly on a direct impression
of their personalities and their attitude to their work. If we are expected
to extend this faith elsewhere, these are the kinds of grounds which we need
to be given.
We need to ask, what in general distinguishes "blind faith," which
has always been supposed to be the vice of religion, from the legitimate, "open-eyed
faith," which is called for by good scientific projects? It may look at
first as if this is a simple question; scientific projects deserve faith while
nonscientific ones do not. Yet, this cannot possibly be right, because there
can easily be bad scientific projects. There is as much bad science around as
there is bad logic, bad history, bad mathematics, or bad law.
The argument most superman-project is one commonly put forward to recommend
the from the Destiny of Man. The prophets ask us whether we are really so mean-spirited,
so lacking in vision, as to deny the human race the crown which is promised
it? Thus Francis Crick, no less, remarks loftily: "Provided mankind neither
blows itself up nor completely fouls up the environment, and is not overrun
by rabid anti-science fanatics, we can expect to see major efforts to improve
the nature of man himself within the next ten thousand years" (Crick 1981,
118). If we ask in what way science commands us to endorse this project, the
answer will usually be some theory about evolution on the general lines of those
just glanced at, and certainly Spencerian rather than Darwinian. Intelligence,
it seems, ought to go further--it will go further--it must go further--but this
time its fate is in our hands. Dare we let it slip?
Since I am chiefly occupied here with the religious parallels, the first thing
I find striking about this argument is its likeness to one which has commonly
been seen as a defect both in Marxist writings and in the Gospel according to
Matthew. Matthew often says that certain things were done "so that it might
be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets." The idea of a duty to produce
the inevitable does not seem a very satisfactory one. If, however, we avoid
this kind of appeal and rest the case for superman-building on its own desirability,
it must then compete on its own merits with other proposed human schemes. If
it does this, its most striking feature is its irrelevance to all current or
reasonably predictable human needs and problems. It is no answer to immediate
ills like world famine or the arms race or the erosion of the biosphere because,
even if it were capable of eventual success, it would be much too slow. People
are not fruit flies; they take twenty years to grow up. IL on the other hand,
we are thinking in terms of long-term aims, it is again irrelevant because aims
of that sort ought to be things with value in themselves, like perpetual peace
and human brotherhood. These are real ideals which can inspire our efforts now
and which also to some extent are already being practiced. The idea of a superman-blueprint
somewhere in the pipeline does not seem to have any such moral application.
All it seems likely to do is to demand resources, and perhaps to make us shelve
immediate problems in the hope that the superpeople will solve them for us.
It is not an ideal at all but an expedient, and one which could not be put in
hand until existing clashes of ideals had been resolved. This probably means,
not until the millennium.
THE PROBLEM OF THE MULTITUDES
Theodosius Dobzhansky, who held a much more clear-headed, sensitive, and humane
variant of the same general evolutionary faith in Omega Man, was seriously worried
by the difficulty of placing it acceptably as a human ideal. He rightly worried
about what it could mean to the nonscientist. Could people outside laboratories
find that it gave their lives much meaning? Dobzhansky asks: "Are the multitudes
supererogatory? They may seem so, in view of the fact that the intellectual
and spiritual advances are chiefly the works of elite minorities. To a large
extent, they are due to an even smaller minority of individuals of genius. The
destiny of a vast majority of humans is death or oblivion. Does this majority
play any role in the evolutionary advancement of humanity?" (Dobzhansky
1967, 132). Dobzhansky concludes cautiously that it probably does, conceding
that we are not just "manure in the soil in which are to grow the gorgeous
flowers of elite culture." He adds: "It is imperative that there be
a multitude of climbers. Otherwise the summit may not be reached by anybody.
The individually lost and forgotten multitudes have not lived in vain, provided
that they too made the effort to climb." This is a strangely Nobel prize-bound
view. In what sort of spirit could we complacently write that as the epitaph
for nearly all the human race?
In the end Dobzhansky does not leave them in quite this dreary situation. He
signs up, after some hesitation, for Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere.
Whatever its drawbacks, this means that the final ideal is not just the intellectual
self-perfection of a separate caste but brotherly love achieved by the whole
human race. This is something which can be immediately practiced, not just a
remote biochemical possibility for the future. All the same, the passage just
quoted shows the dismal limitations of an ideal which is both centered on a
narrow set of intellectual faculties and placed entirely in the future. The
trouble is not just that only scientists will benefit but that even for them
a very narrow aspect of their natures will be involved. When we turn to prophets
like Day and Crick, these limitations are a ruling factor. The position of nonscientists
is not considered at all. The scientists are to find their fulfillment in the
superman-project. They will be inside the laboratory designing him, not only
to their own specifications but in their own improved image. For them, self-worship
is available, but what anyone else could get from the transaction never emerges.
THE ACADEMIC STANDING OF PROPHECY
Let us turn now to a slightly different kind of prophecy, concerned with the
rosy future of science itself, though involving also some surprisingly confident
views about other aspects of life. It is from the sociobiologist Edward O.Wilson
in the concluding chapter of Sociobiology:
When mankind has achieved an ecological steady state, probably by the end
of the twenty-first century, the internalization of social evolution will
be nearly complete. About this time biology should be at its peak, with
the social sciences maturing rapidly .... Cognition will be translated into
circuitry. Learning and creativeness will be defined as the alteration of
specific portions of the cognitive machinery regulated by input from the
emotive centers. Having cannibalized psychology, (2)
the new neurobiology will yield an enduring set of first
principles for sociology .... Skinner's dream of a culture predesigned for
happiness will surely have to wait for the new neurobiology. A genetically
accurate and hence completely fair code of ethics must also wait (Wilson
1975, 574-75).
This means, however, that we shall get happiness in the end, once the neurobioIogists
have done their stuff. (Neurobiologists themselves are not particularly keen
on this kind of story, but there is not much they can do about it.) Wilson,
to do him justice, does go on to admit that some of us may not like his future
world very much when we get it, partly, it seems, because of doubts about genetic
engineering; but this will be due to our unscientific attitude. What we like
or do not like affects neither the dogmatic confidence of the prediction nor
the desirability of the outcome from the impersonal, scientific point of view.
A very interesting point about the predictions we are making is, then, dogmatic
confidence. Scrupulous moderation in making factual claims is commonly taken
to be a central part of the scientific attitude. Julian Huxley, listing the
bad habits Which infest religion, naturally mentions Excuse "dogmatism"
and "aspiring to a false certitude" among them; he explains that science
corrects these vices (Huxley 1927, 372). Remarks like those just quoted do not
on the face of it seem to meet this standard.
When I have complained about this sort of thing to scientists, I have found
that some of them make a rather surprising defense. They reply that these remarks
appear in the first or last chapters of books and that everyone knows that what
is found there is not meant to be taken seriously. It is just fluff for the
general public. The idea seems to be that this fluff constitutes a kind of a
ritual. If so, it must surely strengthen our present uneasiness. Addiction to
ritual is another fault supposed to be characteristic of religion. It might,
of course, just be meant to sell the books. If grossly inflated claims to knowledge
are being used for that purpose, there seems to be either common dishonesty
for personal profit or an attempt to advertise science by making claims which
are alien to it--which, again, have always been thought disgraceful to religion.
Putting these prophecies in a special part of the book will not disinfect them.
What would be needed to do that would be Plato's method of adding a myth at
the end, saying that it is just a myth and explaining how it is meant to illuminate
the serious argument. The category of science fiction is sometimes invoked in
a halfhearted way as some sort of an
for loose speculations which are beginning to look more than usually inexcusable.
It will not work unless it is fully explained, with an explicit withdrawal of
all the claims to Scientific status which these speculations otherwise carry.
Also, in fact one cannot write science fiction merely by launching some unfounded
guesses on scientific subjects. It is a demanding art, having its own rules
and standards. This is not a defense which can cover these fantasy-laden first
and last chapters. The fact that they are aimed at the defenseless general public
makes their tendentiousness worse, not better.
WHAT IS A RELIGION?
I hope that these few examples may be enough to show that the contrast between
science and religion is unfortunately not as clear, nor the relation between
them as simple, as is often believed. Does it make sense to speak of the aberrations
I have discussed as flowing from a religion of evolution? In one simple sense
it obviously does not, and perhaps we had better get that sense out of the way.
The simple sense was illustrated when, during the Second World War, recruits
entering the armed forces were being asked for their religion, and one of them
replied, "Marxist-Leninist-Dialectical-Materialist." "'Can't
spell it," said the sergeant, "put him down 'as Church of England."
The Army was not going to provide Marxist chaplains, and that settled the matter,
but it does not exhaust the subject.
We can understand the recruit's reply. He was speaking of the faith by which
he lived. A faith is not primarily a factual belief, the acceptance of a few
extra propositions such as "God exists" or "there will be a revolution."
It is rather the sense of having one's place within an ordered whole greater
than oneself, one whose larger aims so enclose one's own and give them point
that sacrifice for them can be entirely proper. This sense need not involve
having any extra beliefs about existing facts. Taoism does not, nor does Marxism.
Both call centrally for changes in attitude to the facts which one already accepts
changes in connection, in emphasis, in the meaning and importance attacked to
particulars. Sometimes changed opinions about outlying or future facts will
follow. Thus Marxism (but not Taoism) calls for a new set of expectations about
the future. Yet, even when there are such new opinions, it is not they but the
attitude which generates them that is central. Converts who only have the new
factual beliefs and not the appropriate attitudes will not last long.
This kind of faith is plainly something widespread and very important in our
lives. It need not be formalized. People, in fact, often do not notice that
they have it until the entity they have faith in--perhaps their culture or their
occupation--is threatened. This faith is not itself a religion, but it is one
source of religions. In cultures where a strong, dominant religion already rules,
new minor faiths are simply absorbed into it as they arise. They are not usually
noticed unless they are so distinctive as to demand widespread change. However,
in our own culture, where many people officially have no religion at all, and
those who have can chop and change, new faiths have much more scope and can
make much more disturbance. They are hungrily seized on by people whose lives
lack meaning. When this happens, there arise at once, unofficially and spontaneously,
many elements which we think of as characteristically religious. We begin, for
instance, to find priesthoods, prophecies, devotion, exaltation, heresy-hunting
and sectarianism, ritual, sacrifice, fanaticism, notions of sin and absolution
and salvation, and the confident promise of a heaven in the future.
Marxism and evolutionism, the two great secular faiths of our day, show all
these features. They have also, like the great religions and unlike more casual
local faiths, large-scale, ambitious systems of thought, designed to articulate,
defend, and justify their ideas. Is there still some plain, simple mark by which
we can establish their nonreligious character? This really is not as easy a
question as it may appear. It is certainly not enough to say, on the one hand,
that they do not involve belief in God. Taoism does not do this either, nor
does Buddhism in its original form. Also, the question whether the Buddha is
now "a god" is not a simple one at all; he is, after all, to be sought
and found within us. Moreover, where there are gods, their nature varies enormously.
They certainly need not be creators; the world is often held to be timeless
or to have some other origin. Neither, on the other hand, does religious necessarily
involve the immortality of the soul. Judaism in its early form does not seem
to have involved human survival after death. Even for Buddhism the soul will
eventually be dispersed into its elements. The same-problems would arise with
other similar attempts to distinguish simply the nonreligious character of these
"secular" faiths.
I think it worth our while to refuse to draw a firm line here and to go on
considering these borderline areas impartially, because where religious elements
arise outside their familiar limits, we are liable to miss the special shapes
which they contribute to the systems they affect. For this reason, I think that
to say that Marxism or evolutionism, or indeed art or science, is serving as
a religion can be a useful way of speaking today. It is not the same as saying
that golf is someone's religion, which is probably just a joke, and at most
means only that it is the most important thing in a person's life, the thing
to which the rest gives place. There is not likely to be any system of thought
behind golf, arguing that it ought to take precedence and giving reasons why
it should do so. Moreover, devotion to golf is likely to have only a negative"
effect on those parts of life which do not take place on the golf course. It
leads to their being neglected, not to their being differently conducted. However,
the other candidates we are now considering do have those thought-systems and
that wider impact. They are, not accidentally but by their very nature, dominant
creeds, explicit faiths by which people live and to which they try to convert
others. They tend to alter the world.
THE REVERENT SCIENTIST
In doing this, faiths such as these certainly do not act merely on self-interest,
by the promise of future pie. The pie indeed is too distant to be grabbed; its
appeal is of a more subtle and indirect kind. The emotions involved are those
of awe, veneration, a sense of vastness and mystery, and much of the appeal
to self-interest is of the more indirect kind which offers prestige by association
with this cosmic vastness. Reverence for the thing studied is perhaps even a
necessary part of the scientific spirit, one with a strong tendency to generate
parallels with religion. Today this is a rather surprising matter, and there
are certainly plenty of scientists who dislike this kind of suggestion and would
declare war on the whole notion of revering anything. Others insist that, merely
because our relation to the universe is that of tiny part to whole, our study
of it cannot but be a reverent one. In humanity, says Julian Huxley,
for the first time life becomes aware of something more than a set of events;
it becomes aware of a system of powers operating in events .... Man frames
his own idea of these powers ....We call it religious when on the one hand
it involves some recognition of powers operating so as to underlie the general
operation of the world, and, on the other hand, when it involves the emotions
(Huxley 1923, 209-10).
In such an attitude, awe and reverence are (he insists) entirely appropriate
emotions, and an investigator who lacks them will make a bad scientist. Bertrand
Russell, although he does not use the word religion as widely, makes a very
similar point:
In religion, and in every deeply serious view of the world and of human
destiny, there is an element of submission, a realization of the limits
of human power, which is somewhat lacking in the modern world, with its
quick material successes, and its insolent belief in the boundless possibilities
of progress. "He that 1oveth his life shall lose it," and there
is danger lest, through a too confident love of life, life itself should
lose much of what gives it its highest worth. The submission which religion
inculcates in action is essentially the same in spirit as that which science
teaches in thought (Russell 1917, 29)
Similarly, Dobzhansky writes:
Rejecting vitalism in no way conflicts with what Albert Schweitzer has
called "reverence for life." Man's conscience, the existence of
life, and indeed of the universe itself, all are parts of the mysterium
tremendum .... There is no more succinct, and at the same time accurate,
statement of the distinctive quality of human nature than that of Dostoevsky;
"Man needs the unfathomable and the infinite just as much as he does
the small planet which he inhabits."... In every known human society...
peoples have arrived at some system of religious views concerning the meaning
and the proper conduct of their lives .... Religion enables human beings
to make peace with themselves and with the formidable and mysterious universe
into which they are flung by some power greater than themselves (Dobzhansky
1967, 25, 62, 92)
This attitude owes a good deal to the fact that Dobzhansky, like Albert Einstein,
is the kind of scientist who emphasizes the inevitable slightness of the whole
scientific achievement and its absurd disproportion to the vastness of what
there is to be known, rather than the kind who claims (like Wilson) that the
job is nearly finished, or that, as Crick puts it,
While a scientist is sobered by the economic and political problems he
sees all around him, he is possessed of an almost boundless optimism concerning
his ability to forge a wholly new set of beliefs, solidly based on both
theory and experiment, by a careful study of the world around him and, ultimately,
of himself and other human beings .... The feeling is that within a few
generations we shall have got to the heart of the matter (Crick 1981, 165)
The matter in question is "the intricacies of the brain," but Crick
is just as cheerful about all other ranges of scientific inquiry, including
"major efforts to improve the nature of man himself" (1981, 118).
Readers will inevitably tend to divide here into those who think that the difference
between these two groups of scientists is due to the startling scientific progress
made in the decade or two between their times of writing, and those who explain
it, more simply, by a sharp decline in the quality of scientific education.
The point I am currently making about the idea of "the universe" as
a whole is that, if one means by it not much more than is already written down
in scientific books, one is less likely to be deeply impressed with its vastness
and mystery than if one regards those books as 'small mirrors reflecting only
parts of its more superficial aspects.
Is it in order for Dobzhansky and Huxley to describe their world view as religious
or even as a religion? It is obviously not a religion in the full sense if that
requires--as perhaps it does--that a recruit, for instance, can put it down
in the appropriate column of his army form and expect suitable provision for
worship. However, as I suggested at the outset, some of the elements combined
in Christianity and its more familiar alternatives seem to be dispersing, and
many other religions never combined them in the first place. The intellectual
attitude necessary for science, if given its full scope and not reduced artificially
to a mere mindless tic for collecting, is continuous with a typically religious
view of the physical world. This is one of the varieties of religious experience.
The' sense of a sharp opposition here is misleading. When this connection is
noticed, however, very fishy conclusions are sometimes drawn from it, which
tend to produce the bizarre and sometimes monstrous prophecies that I have cited.
Scientists who see that they are in some sense neighbors of religion are sometimes
moved, not to an exploration of shared interests, but to a sudden hope of loot
and plunder. Huxley often notes with exasperation that orthodox religion, of
a kind which he himself finds pointless, still seems to retain its force, while
science, even when believed, has less influence. He wants a transfer of spiritual
assets. Wilson, noting the same phenomenon, wastes no time complaining but spits
on his palms to set the matter right: "The time has come to ask: Does a
way exist to divert the power of religion into the services of the great new
enterprise that lays bare the sources of that power? [See note 2 above.]...
Make no mistake about the power of scientific materialism. It presents the human
mind with an alternative mythology that until now has always, point for point
in zones of conflict, defeated traditional religion. Its narrative form is the
epic, the evolution of the universe from the big bang..." (Wilson 1978,193,
192).
Wilson's attitude here may look a little superficially like Dobzhansky's, but
they differ profoundly. Dobzhansky is expressing his own highly complex faith,
and he is much concerned with its difficulties. Wilson, in a manner all too
familiar to Christians, is asking "what faith does the age require?"
He is in no doubt about the answer, which he gives in the conclusion of On Human
Nature: "The true Promethean spirit of science... constructs the mythology
of scientific materialism, guided by the corrective devices of the scientific
method, addressed with precise and deliberately affective appeal to the deepest
needs of human nature, and kept strong by the blind hopes that the journey on
which we are now embarked will be farther and better than the one just completed"
(Wilson 1978, 209). (It is of some interest that the hopes are blind.) He is
chiefly concerned with how best to make converts. Dobzhansky, being deeply interested
in other people's faiths and the problems which surround them, recognizes at
once the religious elements in his own position and maps out the various religious
and nonreligious paths which neighbor his own, considering them as real options.
For Wilson the word religion seems to be little more than the banner of an alien
tribe, whose assets are to be stolen. He seldom mentions any manifestation of
religion which is not openly crude and contemptible. Dobzhansky sees that science
and religion cannot, properly-speaking, be in competition: "Science and
religion deal with different aspects of existence. If one dares to overschematize
for the sake of clarity, one may say that these are the aspect of fact and the
aspect of meaning" (1967, 96). He deals with many local conflicts between
views on both sides, but aims steadily to bring both into focus together. Wilson
never doubts either that there is direct competition or that it has been won,
since he thinks that science (in the form of sociobiology) has "explained"
religion while religion cannot explain science (Wilson 1975, 559-62; 1978, 192)--a
desperately confused suggestion. What Wilson is really trying to do is to account
for the existence and power of religion on the uncriticized assumption that
its whole content is nothing but a load of rubbish. Some people approach questions
about the existence and power of sociobiology in the same sort of way, but it
is not a very useful way to understand either phenomenon (see note 2 above).
One last contrast--Dobzhansky really does see the difference between ideals
and predictions, and Wilson does not. Prophets can fairly deal in both these
wares, but they must never mix them Up. Predictions get their support from factual
evidence. Ideals get theirs from considerations of value. From its outset the
Wellsian tradition of prophecy, centering on a distorted, emotive notion of
science, has mixed these methods. It has tended to represent its chosen version
of the future as obligatory because it was going to happen anyway and also as
inevitable because it was good. This confusion launches, under the banner of
science, a farrago of ideas which are as indefensible scientifically as they
are morally and which carry all the drawbacks of a religion without its advantages.
In this paper I have dealt chiefly with one segment of such ideas--a particular
range of prophecies--because their remoteness both from real biological theory
and from humanity's current problems is exceptionally plain. There also are
plenty of other confusions which are just as dangerous. I think it will pay
us to attend to them.
NOTES
1. Terms such as Omega Man and Destiny of Man, as well as
the related usage of man, in this essay are historical and reflect old and recognized
"sexist" views. This word usage does not reflect my position, but
to change it would obscure the point being presented. (Return to
Text)
2. Wilson, who shows considerable power to learn from controversy,
has modified his simple predatory attitude in his later writings (1980). His
book Biophilia (1984), makes a still further advance by admitting explicitly
the lasting need for humanistic ways of thinking which will work alongside the
sciences on an open-ended interpretative task, rather than being displaced and
rendered obsolete by them in the crude way suggested by his earlier books. The
crude pattern is, however, still so widely advertised and accepted that I have
thought it best to point its weaknesses out explicitly here. (Return
to Text)
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Duncan, D. 1908. The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. London: Williams
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Mary Midgley was formerly senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of
Newcastle on Tyne. Her address is IA Coilingwood Terrace, Newcastle on Tyne
NE2 2JP, England. She presented this paper at the annual conference ("The
Science and Pseudoscience of Creation") of the Science and Religion Forum,
Westminster College, Oxford, England, in March 1985. Longer versions of this
article have been published in John Durant, ed., Darwinism and Divinity (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1985) and Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (London: Methuen,
1986). This shorter version is printed here with the permissions of Basil Blackwell
and Methuen. © 1987 by Mary Midgley.
[Zygon, vol. 22, no. 2 (June 1987).] ISSN 0591-2385
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