Post Narrative

While we were in Dublin my main book for spare moments was Stephen Jay Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack from 1996, one of the late palaeontologist's collections of monthly-written essays on natural historical topics. Prof Gould's writings are invariably witty, humane, exciting (for a non-scientist), and stimulating in their breadth and range. I can't judge the details of his views on evolutionary theory, but for most people the shades of opinion on that won't matter. For an atheist, he likes to pull religious language and imagery out of the drawer quite a lot, which may be another reason why Richard Dawkins disdained him so much. 

In the essay 'Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?' Prof Gould argues that, although the great majority of people accept the broad outlines of Darwinian theory as historical fact, they've yet to absorb the philosophical consequences of evolution. He blames  'evolutionary spin doctoring' which seeks to pick from the wreckage wrought by the great wrecking-ball of Darwinian thought a shining nugget of human self-esteem: we may be monkeys' nephews and nieces, but in some vague way the purpose of the whole exercise has been to produce us. No, says the scientist:

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.

Evolution, re-iterates Gould, has no purpose; it therefore does not 'progress', because for there to be progress, there must be purpose by which progress can be judged. Evolution does not work for the good of the earth, for the good of species or that of anything else beyond (arguably) individual entities. (Interestingly, though on the face of it Prof Dawkins is more radically reductionist in arguing that the replication of genetic chemicals is the sole driver of natural selection, while Prof Gould maintained that other factors were at work as well, Dawkins would like to retain the idea of progress, at least to describe organisms becoming better fitted to the exploitation of their own environmental niche: Gould would not allow even that). Old-fashioned textbooks or museum displays which pop human beings at the culmination of the tree of life, the end-point - at least so far - are blinding us to the truth.

Were I not a Christian, I would be cheering such iconoclasm. The other day Radio 4's series Futureproofing produced an alternately fascinating and infuriating episode exploring the effects of technological change on faith. It wasn't as superficial as it seemed to be, let's say. Talking about superficiality, the show's presenters spoke to Professor Steven Pinker. 'Faith is explicitly believing something without a reason,' he opined, which is the sort of damnfool thing anyone should know better than to say, and when asked by the presenter 'What is our purpose?' answered 'Our purpose is to have long, healthy, rich, knowledge-filled, loving lives.' I am at a loss to know where this 'purpose' comes from. Were you to gather the human family together to draw up a document that described what they thought the good life might be, it would indeed probably look something like that, but it still comes from nowhere. In a cosmos devoid of teleology, there is no means of deciding 'purpose' other than arbitrary preference: we are here for no reason, an evolutionary accident, and with no reason for our existence, it can have no purpose either.

But, of course, I am a Christian, and the Church is still absolutely and anachronistically committed to human exceptionalism, to a narrative account of reality that envisages history moving towards a conclusion, and a conclusion conceived in human terms. The majority of Christians who accept Darwinian theory are not certain how the mechanism and the narrative fit together, but don't doubt that, despite the difficulties, fit they must. In the Anglican liturgy, Eucharistic Prayer G puts it in a way it's just as well Stephen Jay Gould never lived to hear:

In the fullness of time you made us in your image, 
the crown of all creation;
you give us breath and speech, that, with angels and archangels
and with all the company of heaven,
we may find a voice to sing your praise ...

In this, liberal and traditionalist Christians will find they have assumptions in common. But there is another way in which Christianity has anything but a narrative of progress. It receives from the past its deposit of teaching, and preserves it: and deviations from that deposit are to be resisted, and perhaps suppressed. While science, as Stephen Jay Gould emphasises over and over again in his essays, proceeds mainly by error and correction, sometimes catastrophic error and radical correction, Christianity doesn't want to progress at all. Even its liberal versions envisage themselves as uncovering the true implications of the documents at its heart and the intentions of its deity. Of course, this is not how it actually behaves; Christians have at all times battered out truth by reassessing what they have said in the past, throwing new facts and experiences against what they think they know, discovering new things among the vast and literally incomprehensible mass of the Biblical texts. Christianity has changed, over and over again, while all the time denying it, and often this has been, just as science does, by making mistakes. Science has been more honest about it, at least.