When science doesn't douse faith
Charles Darwin actually had a sidekick, Alfred Russel Wallace, with whom he put forth the theory of evolution that challenges religious doctrine to this day. But though this duo agreed on the science, Wallace saw religious possibility where Darwin saw heresy.
By Jonathan Rosen, USA Today 7/7/08
The great English poet William Blake maintained that when he looked at the sun, he did not see a "round disk of fire" but rather "an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.' " But it isn't only mystical poets who see divine sparks in the natural world. For Francis Collins, a distinguished scientist who spearheaded the Human Genome Project, DNA is "the language of God." At the other end of the spectrum, biologist Richard Dawkins says any attempt to locate religious meaning inside a scientific world amounts to "the God delusion." He sees genes as the amoral, selfishly replicating engines of human existence.
The nature of this disagreement between scientific absolutism and religious possibility is often simplistically viewed as one between creationists on the one hand and those who accept the theory of evolution on the other. But as Collins, no creationist, makes clear, the debate is subtler and more complex than that. Indeed, the theory of evolution was independently proposed by two men — Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace — who came to have radically different views of its meaning, even as they agreed on its method.
The theory of evolution by means of natural selection was put forward by Darwin and Wallace 150 years ago, on July 1, at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. Both men actually were absent at that meeting. Darwin's son had just died, and Wallace, who didn't even know about the meeting, was still in the Southeast Asian Malay Archipelago on an eight-year collecting trip. But it is Wallace who has been pretty much erased from the equation, in part because of his subsequent religious divergence from Darwin, which Wallace himself referred to as his "little heresy."
For Darwin, the theory of evolution became part of his increasing identification of the blind materialist processes of a soulless world. (Though it is worth noting that Darwin lost his faith in God not as the result of his own theory but after the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.) For Wallace, the theory of evolution became not the end of religious inquiry but the beginning of it. Without ever renouncing the theory of evolution, he felt that human beings were evolving toward a higher purpose; he saw evolution as part of a larger plan and felt that human beings were too complex morally, emotionally and intellectually to be accounted for by mere biology. When Darwin got wind of Wallace's growing theism, he wrote in distress to Wallace: "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child."
But Wallace and Darwin are both fit parents. What makes Wallace so interesting is that he started out as an unsentimental scientist who chastised Darwin for using the phrase "natural selection" because it implied agency in nature. And it was Darwin who famously ended The Origin of Species, almost mystically, by noting the "grandeur" of evolution, with its "several powers having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms, or into one." Though Wallace became a devoted spiritualist and went to séances, you can't dismiss him as a crackpot. He remained a rigorous defender of what he called, with characteristic modesty, "Darwinism."
Yet he was also a man who could quote Shakespeare in his autobiography: "There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will." Wallace understood that the imagination, essential for scientific discovery, opened the door to metaphoric possibilities in our own lives. After all, the main difference between Ovid's Metamorphoses, those ancient tales of animal transformation, and The Origin of Species, is time. Evolution just stretches the magic out over eons.
For Wallace, the natural world always contained more than the answers derived from it.
Wallace had gone to the Malay Archipelago to solve the riddle of the origin of species, but he also went to find the rare and beautiful bird of paradise. When he did find the bird, he called it his most important discovery — despite the fact that he had already discovered natural selection! He even managed, at enormous cost, to bring back a pair of the birds to England. What is so stirring about his quest for the bird of paradise, and so emblematic, is that he was looking for a bird whose name conjures the very Eden that his own theory helped destroy.
In a beautiful prose poem, D.H. Lawrence wrote that "birds are the life of the skies, and when they fly, they reveal the thoughts of the sky." Do the skies have life beyond the birds that fill them? Some would argue that after Darwin, the skies have lost their divinity. Others would say that biological processes themselves contain the possibility of transcendent truth — like Francis Collins' fanciful, and yet serious, designation of DNA as "the language of God."
We are still figuring out what has been lost, and what has been found, in the aftermath of Darwin's and Wallace's great scientific discovery. Does recognizing that we are closer to nature automatically mean that we are further from God? This question is no more answerable today than it was 150 years ago, of course. But thinking about the men who devised the theory and drew such different conclusions from it restores a certain wholeness to the debate that has lately, with ultra-Darwinian notions of "the God delusion" and equally irresponsible ideas of "intelligent design," grown nearly as polarized as it was in the mid-19th century when the theory was just floated to a world that still read the Bible as a scientific text.
It is foolish to be arguing about creation vs. evolution in the classroom, given the mountain of evidence for evolution by means of natural selection. But talking about Darwin and Wallace together, and the vastly different conclusions they drew from their theory of evolution, makes a great deal of sense in this fractured and contentious moment. We need them both.
Jonathan Rosen is the editorial director of Nextbook and the author, most recently, of The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature.
