Features > Evolution as a Religion

An introduction by Mary Midgley

This book had a very simple origin. In the early eighties I was asked to speak at a conference on 'Evolution And Religion'. This suddenly made me wonder whether the link between these two things was perhaps closer than had been noticed. Was the idea of evolution somehow beginning to be used, not so much as an antidote against religion but as a substitute for it - indeed, as a form of religion itself?
I had been struck for some time by certain remarkable prophetic and metaphysical passages that appeared suddenly in scientific books about evolution, often in their last chapters. Though these passages were detached from the official reasoning of the books, they seemed still to be presented as science. But they made startling suggestions about vast themes such as immortality, human destiny and the meaning of life. These are difficult topics with which philosophical and religious thinkers have long wrestled. But the scientific writers did not usually refer to any earlier discussions. They simply and confidently laid down their own surprising views about them. Their pronouncements seemed to be seriously intended. But it was far from clear on what level they were meant to be taken.
All this seemed to me to raise most interesting questions about the kinds of thought that can go on in the wide areas that lie outside both official science and official religion. Simply defining these two provinces does not help us much when so many other ways of thinking are possible. In this book, then, I tried to sketch out a wider map on which these speculations might be placed so as to tell us something about the general shape of our thought. Some years later, I extended this map further in a book called Science As Salvation , to deal with similar - and even more startling - pronouncements made by physicists - especially cosmologists - and promoters of artificial intelligence.

Today, the approach to this phenomenon that I suggested in these two books still strikes me as reasonable. But has it got out of date? In sixteen years, the kind of quasi-scientific speculation that I wrote about might easily have been quite discredited and abandoned. In that case my books would, of course, no longer be needed.
I wish that this had happened. Instead, quite to the contrary, the idea that science and religion are just two simple entities - rival football teams whose only connection is that they compete endlessly for public attention in some cosmic Cup Final - is still firmly fixed in the minds of many people, especially those of television presenters. In consequence, quasi-scientific speculation of the kind that I wrote about is, if anything, an even more rampant growth now than it was when I first drew attention to it. Moreover, it still comes in the same general forms.
Certainly the balance of emphasis between those forms has shifted somewhat. But I think it would not be sensible to rewrite the book now in order to track that shift. Academic life moves very slowly and strong rhetoric, once launched, can keep afloat for an amazingly long time. Several of the books that I have quoted have had huge sales. They are still regularly used as text-books on countless courses. Their influence, direct and indirect, is bound to persist for a long time, even in those cases where, at a more refined level, they are supposed to have been refuted.

It will persist because the appeal of the myths that underlie them is strong - so strong that, even if particular forms of those myths do become obsolete, new ones are always likely to replace them. And the point of my mapping project is not just to object to the particular forms. It is to make us aware of the underlying myths themselves. That is the only way in which we can get some control over their influence. We still very much need to do this, even where a particular expression of them may be going out of fashion.

Among these recent shifts of emphasis the most obvious one is due to the end of the Cold War. Marxism, which I repeatedly cited as an example of a quasi-scientific faith approximating to a religion, has ceased to play that role in the West. It is, however, still vigorous as a faith in many parts of Africa and South America. And its effect on the history of Europe - and indeed of China - seems to me still persistent enough to make it important for us to understand it. So I do not think it would be sensible to remove it from my text. On the economic front, Marxist mythology has been succeeded by that of its near neighbour the belief in Market Forces, which also sometimes uses religious imagery, for instance in the notion of the Hidden Hand. That faith, however, does not usually appear in scientific books, so it is not relevant to my subject here.
By contrast, prophecies of a dazzling future for humanity, attainable through genetic engineering or artificial intelligence or both, have, if anything, grown louder and more frequent of late. So has then tendency to treat that project as if it were the inevitable next stage of evolution. But I do not think that they have become any more intellectually respectable, or produced any new arguments that I ought to answer.
What I said against such ideas in these two books still seems to me to be valid. I still think, as I did sixteen years ago, that these projects have nothing to do with any reputable theory of evolution. And for our real problems in the world, which are essentially social and moral, biochemical solutions (as proposed in genetic engineering) are usually irrelevant. Nor does it make sense to suggest that machines programmed by existing human beings will be able to reform our society for us when we cannot do it for ourselves. These schemes still seem to me to be just displacement activities proposed in order to avoid facing our real difficulties.
About sociobiology the position is rather different. Here, at the academic level, things have certainly improved. At that level, the crude rhetoric of selfishness has been toned down and solid scientific points about how populations develop have, to some extent, been separated from ideological exaggerations. To mark this greater sobriety, the very word sociobiology is now largely avoided in learned circles.
Unluckily, however, as far as the wider public is concerned, the horse of myth had bolted long before this stable door was locked. Selfish-genery now colours large areas of our intellectual landscape and it is likely to go on doing so until some other invading myth displaces it. Anyone who wants to know what is wrong with the scientific aspects of it should read Evelyn Fox Keller's splendid book The Century of the Gene . But the imaginative aspect of it, which is what I talked about here, still remains, and as far as I can see my discussions of that are still likely to be needed. So I have let them stand.