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Anne Clifford examines
Darwin’s The Origin of Species in
relation to nineteenth-century British natural theology. Though the latter was
considered a form of science it actually offered a union between science and
Christian belief in a creator. Its primary text was nature, not Genesis, and it
attempted to provide evidence from nature for God’s sovereignty and purposeful
design. Clifford warns us not to let the hegemony that Darwin’s theory now
enjoys undercut our interest in natural theology, partly because we would not
fully appreciate what Darwin’s revolution accomplished. She sets out to trace
that accomplishment, being mindful of the way language in both science and
theology, with its metaphorical character, shapes our claims about reality.
Her first move is to
challenge the “warfare” model of the relationship between Christianity and
Darwin’s theory fostered by Andrew Dickson White and John Draper. Wilberforce’s
attack on evolution was actually based primarily on scientific grounds, not on
concerns about biblical revelation. He accepted natural selection as a process
that weeded out the unfit within a species, but he felt Darwin had not provided
sufficient evidence for the evolution of new species. Wilberforce’s argument
drew implicitly on Francis Bacon’s earlier distinction between the book of
revelation and the book of nature. Though God was the author of both books, the
distinction provided scientists freedom from forcing their results to conform
to biblical texts. Darwin too drew on the two-books tradition and on a close
reading of William Paley, who argued from nature to an intelligent designer.
Paley went further than Bacon, though, by discussing nature’s purpose and by
moving from purpose to a personal designer and thus to a personal God. He
rejected randomness in nature as well as the extinction of species. The Bridgewater Treatises continued this
argument, insisting on the fixity of nature and on divine sovereignty which
maintains nature and natural laws. These are the actual positions that Darwin’s
theory of natural selection would reject.
Data gathered from his
voyage on the Beagle triggered Darwin’s “conversion” from natural theology to
his theory of natural selection as an account of the variety and mutability of
species. Recent discoveries in geology enhanced his account, including the
ancient age of the earth and the possibility of sequencing the fossil record.
Also contributing was Darwin’s knowledge of animal breeding as well as Malthus’
work on population and resources, with its focus on the struggle for existence.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection and its theme of the survival of the
fittest broke with natural theology not only in the concept of God as special
designer of each separate species, including their direct creation and their
immutability, but also with the benevolence of God. Natural theologians, it
seems, had been particularly blind to the abundance of suffering and death in
nature.
Clifford then analyzes the
role of metaphor in science, drawing on the writings of Janet Soskice, Paul
Ricoeur, and Sallie McFague. She focuses on two of Darwin’s key metaphors: “the
origin of species” and “natural selection.” Darwin’s theory in effect shifted
the meaning of “origins” by describing the emergence of new species while
bracketing the question of the origin of life as such. He also transformed the
meaning of species; rather than fixed and discrete, they came to be seen as
fluid, possessing the capacity to evolve. Darwin’s metaphor, “natural
selection,” combines meanings drawn from animal breeding by humans and from
nature in the wild. It suggests that nature “chooses” and, though Darwin
rejected vitalism, he has been read as deifying nature. Clifford also points
out that Darwin considered his theory compatible with belief in God, though his
personal position seems to shift from belief to agnosticism.
According to Clifford, then,
Darwin did not intend a warfare against Christianity, only against natural
theology, and here only in the form of a highly rationalistic Christian theism
coupled to a limited body of scientific data. He challenged Paley’s watchmaker
analogy that assumed a God of radical sovereignty and a passive and static
world. What might we find to replace it? McFague proposes the metaphor of the
universe as God’s body. Clifford modifies this by suggesting the metaphor of a
mother giving birth. It brings together in dynamic tension the reproductive and
evolutionary character of nature with the biblical doctrine of God as creator.
It is panentheistic, rather than pantheistic, and is, according to Elizabeth
Johnson, the “paradigm without equal,” drawing on a wealth of biblical texts
for God’s relation to the world. Finally it is compatible with Darwin’s
rejection of God as designer, the immutability of species, and it takes up his
concern to acknowledge the extent of suffering in nature.
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