By ARTHUR HIPPLER
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Hippler is chairman of the religion department and teaches religion in the Upper School at Providence Academy, Plymouth, Minn.)
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In the recent Claremont Review of Books, David Gelernter discusses Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt and David Berlinski’s essay collection Deniable Darwin. Provocatively titled, “Giving Up Darwin,” Gelernter draws the conclusion from these controversial works that, while Darwin goes a long way to explain accumulated changes within species, “there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture — not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones. The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.”
Gelernter’s review is not a piece of “creationist” triumphalism. If anything, its tone is wistful. Why? “It is no victory of any sort for religion. It is a defeat for human ingenuity. It means one less beautiful idea in our world.”
It is the last point to which I object in Gelernter’s otherwise fine review. Darwin’s theory, I would submit, is not beautiful. Gelernter seems to believe it beautiful because Darwin has a (relatively) simple explanation of a complex array of phenomena:
“Charles Darwin explained monumental change by making one basic assumption — all life-forms descend from a common ancestor — and adding two simple processes anyone can understand: random, heritable variation and natural selection. Out of these simple ingredients, conceived to be operating blindly over hundreds of millions of years, he conjured up change that seems like the deliberate unfolding of a grand plan, designed and carried out with superhuman genius.” These elements make Darwin’s theory “brilliant and lovely.”
Darwin’s theory declares that what appears to be “design” or “purpose” is an illusion. On Darwin’s view, what appears to be “intelligent” is not. What seems designed is really the work of necessary laws and chance variation. For myself, I cannot see why this explanation would be beautiful.
If Hamlet is the work of a genius who understands the deeper motives of human action and can express these in powerful, evocative language, this is beautiful. But if we discovered that it really was the result of a million monkeys typing for a million years, the poetry would still be beautiful, but the explanation of its origin would be ugly. It would be a letdown. The cause seems disproportionate to the effect.
One does not have to be religious to share this distaste. George Bernard Shaw, socialist and contrarian, criticized the “Darwinian process” as a “chapter of accidents.” Darwin’s theory “seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure.”
Beauty elevates and delights. Beholding the beautiful object, one is pleased. But for many, the disproportion between what looks artistic and the explanation of “blind forces” cannot help but repulse.
Gelernter observes: “Beauty is often a telltale sign of truth” and “Beauty is our guide to the intellectual universe.” But that is why I have always considered Darwin’s theory suspect. At the dawn of the science of biology, Aristotle declared that the study of animals, “by disclosing to intellectual perception the artistic spirit that designed them, give immense pleasure to all who can trace links of causation, and are inclined to philosophy” (Parts of Animals, I.5).
Even to a pre-Christian philosopher, animals appeared to be works of art, works of intelligence.
From that point of view, if the objections that Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski are raising against Darwin’s theory carry the force that Gelernter believes they do, I am happy to discover that what is ugly is also false.
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