Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists both get it wrong
Conor Cunningham
Eerdmans £22.99
(978-0-8028-4838-3)
Church Times Bookshop £20.70
Conor CUNNINGHAM’s declared intent is for both the “thinking atheist” and the “thinking Christian” to “move beyond the silly impasse brought about by fundamentalism (whether secular or religious)”.
The atheists remain rather more in view — but Cunningham is a philosopher, and creationists have not perhaps produced very much philosophy for him to consider. That he accepts the lineaments of evolution is provocation enough for them.
This book is an intellectual adventure, touching on the lion’s share of what matters most in theology, philosophy, and even ethics. It sprawls, and the rhetoric is sometimes a little too heady, but in sum it is nothing short of magnificent. Every now and then Providence sends a book to save the day. Darwin’s Pious Idea may be one of those books.
It deals with complex and demanding material with grace and wit. Written with showmanship and an eye for a good metaphor, it is often relatively easy reading (except for some untranslated German terms). Clumps of quotations, found throughout the book, are a particular joy. They range from Leonard Cohen and Henry Miller to Søren Kierkegaard and John Henry Newman. Cunningham’s reading is phenomenal.
In argumentation, Cunningham has two approaches. They are both combative. We might call them the rapier and the tank. His favourite method is the reductio ad absurdum: unveiling the absurdity of a position by pushing it to its logical conclusion. Here Cunningham is a succes-sor of Chesterton, whom he obviously admires.
There is also something to his style of the Anglican apologetics of C. S. Lewis or Dorothy L. Sayers, with their sense of an intelligent non-specialist jumping in to restore sanity. Reductionism is often in his sights: it robs us of our rationality, but, in doing so, it robs us of the means to rob ourselves of our rationality. As Chesterton put it, it says not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”
The relation of matter to spirit (or form, or meaning) is at the heart of the book. There is something of wide-eyed wonder, or even spiritual writing, about some of these passages. Cunningham shows that matter is a very strange place to flee from God and metaphysics, since matter is itself very strange.
The book could have done with a final edit: it is a little too long, bons mots recur without the reader’s being entirely sure that the author knows that they are recurring, and there is an odd sense of a missing penultimate section. Before the conclusion, Cunningham takes issue with the standard Western doctrine of the Fall. Quite apart from disagreeing with him on this point, I assumed that this material was groundwork for a narrative of slow progress, which would “justify the ways of God to man” over evolution’s being wasteful (all that “Darwinian debris” along the way). This never materialises; the point is not driven home.
Darwin’s Pious Idea is “science and religion” as we have rarely seen it before. It is further confirmation of the quickening of theology currently under way in a confident, catholic (in both senses), and thoroughly metaphysical mode.
Cunningham presented some of his ideas in a BBC2 documentary Did Darwin Kill God? We now need the 20,000-word booklet version for the back of our churches.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Tutor in Doctrine at Westcott House, Cambridge. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Imaginative Apologetics (SCM, 2011).