On Darwinism and Mystery

by G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News August 21, 1920

(Source: G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume xxxii,
The Illustrated London News 1920-1922, Ignatius Press, 1989, pp. 74-77)

Mr. Edward Clodd [Footnote 1], the distinguished student of Folklore,
has asked me a question touching a passage which appeared in this paper.
He was writing with reference to the larger question of Darwinism,
to which I may return more fully at some other time.  But as the sentence
he quoted from these columns stands somewhat separate it may be proper
to treat it separately.  The words he wishes more fully explained are:
"Even the Evolutionist is now shy of explaining Evolution.
To-day the scientific temper is... scientific doubt of science,
not scientific doubt of religion." He especially wishes to know
what I mean by the phrase "scientific doubt of religion."

Now I take it that my negative statement at least is evident enough;
I mean that the most recent revolutionary scientific
suggestions do not happen to throw any doubt on any religion.
The Book of Genesis does not say that God formed the substance
of the world out of atoms, and therefore a scientist cannot be
rebuked as a Bible-smasher if he says it is formed not of atoms,
but of electrons.  The Council of the Church which laid down the dogma
of the Co-eternity of Father and Son did not lay down any dogma
on the Conservation of Energy.  Therefore Mme. Curie [Footnote
2] could not be burned as a heretic even if, as some said,
her discovery disturbed our ideas about the Conservation of Energy.
The Athanasian Creed does not say that parallel straight lines
never meet, so it would be unaffected by Professor Einstein saying,
if he does really say, that they are not parallel or even straight.
The prophets did not prophesy that a man would never fly,
and are, therefore, not discredited when he does fly.  The saints
certainly never said there was no such thing as wordless talking,
and therefore have nothing to retract if there is such a thing as
wireless telegraphy.  In many ways it would be far easier to maintain
that the modern inventions have verified the ancient miracles.
Now in these technical and utilitarian examples it is still
true to say that, if they do not disturb religious doctrines,
they also do not disturb scientific doctrines.  But the former class
of more theoretic discoveries do disturb scientific doctrines.
It is the doctrines about gravity and energy, about atoms and ether,
about the very foundations of the purely scientific universe,
that have been affected or threatened by purely scientific research.

Hence I was led to say that the scientific men are pulling to pieces
their own scientific universe.  It was something relative to this that I
said they were not primarily concerned now with doubt about religion.
The phrase (in a positive as distinct from a relative sense)
refers, of course, to various spiritual and teleological ideas
that were supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be disturbed by an
earlier phase of science.  Some seem to suppose that I am here
arguing for these doctrines; but that is a complete mistake.
Of the pre-Darwinian doctrines of the popular Protestantism in England,
there are some that I believe and some that I heartily disbelieve;
but none that I have made the basis of my remarks on Darwinism.
They are based on the inconsistencies and illogicalities of
the Darwinians themselves.  Many sincere critics seems to find
it very difficult to believe this.  One of them asked me quite
sharply why the wing of the bat had not been divinely designed
with feathers like the wings of the owl--almost as if I myself
had culpably neglected to provide the animal with proper plumage.
All this is to miss my whole purpose in this particular discussion.
If I do personally believe in design, it is for somewhat deeper
reasons which have nothing to do with the wings of bats; and certainly
I never dreamed of demonstrating it from the wings of bats.
I never professed to trace the causes of these things at all.
I have not written a book called "The Origin of Species." I have not
conducted detailed researches or proclaimed dogmatic conclusions.
I do not know the true reason for a bat not having feathers;
I only know that Darwin gave a false reason for its having wings.
And the more the Darwinians explain, the more certain I become
that Darwinism was wrong.  All their explanations ignore the fact
that Darwinism supposes an animal feature to appear first, not merely
in an incomplete stage, but in an almost imperceptible stage.
The member of a sort of mouse family, destined to found the bat family,
could only have differed from his brother mice by some minute
trace of membrane; and why should that enable him to escape out
of a natural massacre of mice?  Or even if we suppose it did serve
some other purpose, it could only be by a coincidence; and this
is to imagine a million coincidences accounting for every creature.
A special providence watching over a bat would be a far more realistic
notion than such a run of luck as that.

But as for the positive conclusions to be drawn, I am
perfectly content to accept Mr. Clodd's basis of "an area
of the unknowne where, as he quotes from George Eliot,
"men grow blind, though angels know the rest." But I still think
that the Darwinians, being men, were blind leaders of the blind.
There must have been a real greatness about Darwin's science,
of the detailed accumulations of which I should not claim to judge.
There certainly was a real greatness about Huxley's literature,
of which I can judge rather better.  Nobody says that either
was not a great man, but merely that he made a great mistake.
And as to what remains when that mistake is admitted, I repeat
that I am content with Mr. Clodd's phrase.  It is not my theology,
or the old Puritan theology any more than the old Darwinian biology.
What remains is mystery--an unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable mystery.
What remains after Darwin is exactly what existed before Darwin--
a darkness which I, for quite other reasons, believe to be divine.
But whether or no it is divine, it is certainly dark.  What is the real
truth, what really happened in the variations of creatures, must have
been something which has not yet suggested itself to the imagination
of man.  I for one should be very much surprised if that truth,
when discovered, did not contain at least a large element of evolution.
But even that surprise is possible where everything is possible,
except what has been proven to be impossible.

For the first time, in short, the agnostics will become agnostic.
That is the point of my reply to Mr. Clodd's question about the
"scientific doubt of religion." The doubt to-day is a real doubt;
before it was an inference from some dogma like Darwinism.
The Victorian agnostics were not really agnostics.  At the back
of their minds was a materialistic, or at least a monistic, universe.
But that monistic universe is in its turn becoming mystical, or at
least very mysterious.  The next time of transition will probably
be one of real agnosticism, or of more or less exciting ignorance.
And Mr. Clodd and I can than agree about the borderland in which men
are blind and angels know the rest, though he may be more content
to rest in the blindness of men, and I in the knowledge of the angels.
But I never advanced this argument as a way of being on the side
of angels.  I am so far merely on the side of men; of the great
mass of reverent and reasonable human beings, who would rather
admit that they are blind in the dark than be burdened in the dark
with old-fashioned scientific spectacles, and told by a quack
that they can see.


[Footnote 1:  Edward Clodd (1840-1930) was the author of a number
of books on primitive religions, myth, comparative religion, folklore,
and philosophy.  He also wrote several books on science and evolution.]

[Footnote 2:  Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish
scientist who won two Nobel prizes, one in 1903 for her discovery
of radioactivity and one for her discovery of radium and polonium.]