Origin of Species

Next week is Darwin Day which commemorates the birth of the Victorian scientist Charles Darwin. This year is a significant anniversary because it is 200 years since the birth of Darwin and 150 years since the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, which I am reading for the first time to mark the occasion. There has been a raft of TV documentaries about Darwin and Evolution, including Richard Dawkins’ The Genius of Charles Darwin which was shown before Christmas and more recently David Attenborough’s Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life which was shown on Sunday. Darwin was born in Shropshire and was an alumni of my old alma mater, Edinburgh University, where the Biology building is named after him. Another Edinburgh alumni was David Hume who had demolished the “argument from design” using logic a century earlier, but it was Darwin who hammered home the final nail in the coffin of natural theology. Richard Dawkins said in his book, the Blind Watchmaker:

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Having said all of that, it was whilst studying at Edinburgh that I first encountered Christian fundamentalism. I remember attending a lecture on evolution in the Zoology building (not related to my course) and was amazed by all of the young earth creationists who were studying science. Some of them were a lot more intelligent than me, but the truth is that it is difficult to break free from ideas strongly and repeatedly presented to you as a child by intelligent adults, no matter how barmy. These people arrive at university in an impregnable cocoon of circular reasoning. This is why it is important to reverse the early conditioning by strongly and repeatedly pushing the mantra of the enlightenment scientific world view.