False Messiah

Ever since The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Charles Darwin’s followers have co-opted him as the patron saint of materialism. In False Messiah, longtime Darwinist and agnostic Neil Thomas looks at how Darwinism triumphed, and he challenges the official story with an exploration richly informed by his expertise in rhetoric and cultural history. What of Darwinism’s present status? Like Marxism — that other great materialist theory of the Victorian age — Darwinism has become “the God that failed.” As Thomas shows, although Darwinism has done incalculable damage to our culture, there is hope for renewal in contemporary scientific findings that are reinvigorating the argument to design as well as in what amounted to an ingenious flanking movement against modern materialism — the spiritually charged philosophy of nature developed in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Praise

In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Neil Thomas draws on his expertise in European intellectual history and linguistics to examine both the content and context of Darwin’s writings. He draws in detail on the words of Darwin’s contemporaries, such as Charles Lyell and Asa Gray, to examine how Darwin’s ideas were received in the nineteenth century. He also considers the literary context, in the world of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. There is a particularly interesting section on Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, who later changed his mind on some of the key aspects.

Thomas also looks carefully at some of the details of Darwin’s text, and the difficulties of translating the concept of natural selection into other languages, and sets out what these reveal about Darwin’s lack of conceptual clarity. I found the discussion of Darwin’s religious confusion and struggles, and the claim set out here that Darwin’s presentation of natural selection comes close to that of a goddess figure, to be thought-provoking and insightful.

The book provides a stimulating challenge to the lazy assumption that Darwin’s work provided a simple and satisfying scientific explanation for all aspects of the biological world. Anyone who holds onto that view after studying the issues discussed here really is clinging to a false messiah.

Peter Jeavons, Senior Research Fellow, St Anne’s College, Oxford; Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford

How in the world could a theory as transparently lame as Darwin’s win over most late-nineteenth-century academics? Neil Thomas’s brilliant new book, False Messiah: Darwinism as the God That Failed, shows that many intellectuals then were already hoping to explain away the obvious designedness of life, in order to subsume biology into a totalizing, human-centered Enlightenment vision. Darwin merely offered them what they were hoping for. Ironically, as Thomas notes, it is the very progress of modern science — especially the discoveries of non-mechanistic quantum reality and the information-suffused molecular layers of life—that has ultimately quashed their efforts, whether or not they yet realize it.

Michael J. Behe, Lehigh University Professor of Biological Sciences and author of Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves

A beautifully written exploration of Darwin’s thinking, set against the historical context of his time and the diverse responses to his controversial ideas. Neil Thomas offers fascinating insight into the reception of The Origin of Species and the deep uncertainties Darwin himself harbored about his collected ideas. This work showcases careful scholarship and compelling analysis, exposing the flimsy foundations of the many persistent and popular misconceptions surrounding Darwin’s views.

David J. Galloway, former President of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow; Consultant Surgeon and Honorary Professor of Surgery, University of Glasgow, University of Malaysia, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong; author of Design Dissected and Controlled Chaos

Readers of False Messiah will probably already know that Charles Darwin was a product of Victorian culture — in most respects, a typical one. Neil Thomas sheds useful light on the open-minded character of that culture, which allowed The Origin of Species to receive the critically sympathetic hearing that it did, even though the book challenged many of the orthodoxies of the time. As made abundantly clear in these pages, a key factor was the absence of a monopoly over scientific wisdom. Learned people from all fields were given a voice in such existential matters as the origins and meaning of life. Now, nearly two centuries later, various crises of scientific authority are returning us to a similar sensibility. But whereas Victorian open-mindedness opened the door to Darwin’s theory of evolution, today’s open-mindedness may soon see it to its departure.

Steve Fuller, Professor of Social Epistemology, University of Warwick, UK, and author of nearly thirty books, including Science vs Religion? and Dissent over Descent

“Scientists animated by the purpose of proving themselves purposeless make an interesting subject for study,” the philosopher A. N. Whitehead wrote wittily and wisely several decades ago. Prof. Neil Thomas’s deft new book is as timely, judicious, and profound a brief account as could be desired of the defects, dangers, and enduring damage of orthodox Darwinism.

False Messiah contains a tight argumentative line and extraordinarily profound insights and felicitous locutions, as in documenting in detail the “stubborn disparity between Darwin’s theory and the uncooperative facts of objective reality.” Its depiction and rehabilitation of Darwin’s noble contemporary, the pioneering naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a repentant reductionist, is particularly illuminating and heartening.

Thomas’s articulate discussion of the protest against reductionism by the poet William Wordsworth (an instantiation of the Romantic and philosophical protest also found in Blake, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Dickens) reminds one of the truth and importance of Lionel Trilling’s point made over a half-century ago: “Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem The Prelude gives the classic account of the damage done to the mind… by the scientistic conception of mind that prevailed among intellectuals at the time of the French Revolution.” That scientistic conception retains great influential force, damaging human mental health and prospects for truth and justice in the twenty-first century. Thomas’s lucidly written book is an antidote to it.

M. D. Aeschliman, Professor Emeritus of Education, Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism

Although I am a theologian and not a scientist, nonetheless I warmly commend this unusual book by Neil Thomas. Interestingly, Darwin himself was not always totally convinced by his theory of natural selection. And as Neil Thomas pointed out in his previous book, Taking Leave of Darwin, modern evolutionary theory rests on a foundation considerably less stable and reassuring than rock. In False Messiah, Thomas shows that Darwin’s theory “cannot bear the weight of its role as Gospel for a brave new age of atheistical enlightenment.”

Paul Beasley-Murray, former Principle of Spurgeon’s College, London, and author of many books, including There Is Hope

Darwinism is demoralizing. The more you believe Darwin provides an explanation for life, the more meaningless that life becomes. Darwin gave atheists false hope that their decision to reject purpose in the universe is right, and that living without ultimate hope is good. As Neil Thomas expertly demonstrates, Darwin benefited from a rising tide of secularism that warmly embraced his material explanation for life. Thomas’s book may well benefit from a rising tide of skepticism in the sufficiency of that materialist account, as modern science unravels the Darwinian story. This book gives good reasons to see through the messianic pretensions of Darwinism, and to follow instead the divergent path of Darwin’s peer and co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, back towards the overruling intelligence of God.

Alistair J. McKitterick, Senior Lecturer at London School of Theology, Consulting Fellow for the Whewell Centre, Cambridge, and author of Faithful Science

Rarely have I encountered a book so stimulating, yet such a joy to read. With superb insight and his delightful prose, Neil Thomas invites us to come along on his own journey of discovery. Building on his deep expertise in the history of thought, Thomas presents a profound new assessment of the ideas that shape our culture and our lives. An essential resource for anyone wrestling with the issues of origins and their impact on the meaning of life.

Steve Laufmann, co-author of Your Designed Body and chair of the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems

Neil Thomas tackles with considerable verve and wit the central conundrum of our age: the ever growing hiatus between what we think (or thought) we knew about the practicalities of genetic inheritance and its inscrutable complexities as revealed by modern science. Specifically, despite prodigious endeavor, the empirical evidence for the mechanisms of evolutionary transformation has proved elusive. His interpretation of how nonetheless it has dominated biological thought for 160 years, providing an all-encompassing explanation for the near infinite diversity of form and attributes of the living world, is as lucid as it is persuasive.

James Le Fanu, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and author of Why Us? and The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine