A son of God?

21st August, Whitby, Yorkshire

I spoke to my father on the phone this week. He’s a mad keen golfer who has spent the last 60 consecutive summers at the seaside town of Sandwich in Kent where he plays on his favourite links course, The Royal St Georges.

He had something important to tell me: “Think about this…” he said rather sharply. “Jesus was a man – right? He was also the Son of God, right? So, how can he possibly have been descended from a monkey!”

Ever since I began writing books about the history of planet, life and people, our conversations about what I do have become a little bit strained. My father was brought up by his fundamentalist Christian mother, his own father having died of tuberculosis - as so many did in the 1920s and 1930s – leaving as his legacy a 3-month old baby son.

Darwin was himself destined for a life in the church. He began training for the priesthood at the aptly named Christ’s College, Cambridge - although he rejected the career in preference for a dream-trip around the world studying nature (tough choice, eh?).

But in 1839, three years after returning from his voyage aboard the Beagle, Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a regular church-goer and devout Christian Unitarian (Unitarians believe in an all-powerful God but reckon Jesus was a just good man, not necessarily the son of God) .

The issue of divinity, therefore, was never far from Darwin’s domestic hearth. And, as time went on, the dichotomy between his razor-sharp observations about the natural world on the one hand and the idea of an all-knowing, benevolent God, on the other, grew agonisingly acute.
The creatures that gave Darwin his biggest cause for religious disquiet came from a family of parasitic wasps called Ichneumonidae. Darwin wrote about their gruesome lifestyles in a letter to his American botanist friend, Asa Gray:

‘I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars …’

Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga is an especially gruesome example. Its prey is a species of spider called Plesiometa argyra. The wasp temporarily paralyses the spider with its venom and then injects its eggs through a tube, called an ovipositor, deep into the live spider’s body. Inside, the growing wasp larvae manipulate the spider’s web-spinning system to make a cocoon of silk. The hapless arachnid is then gradually eaten alive….. from the inside out.

At almost every talk or lecture I give, the old chestnut about evolution Vs “intelligent design” rears its head. However secular we think we are as a society, it seems we still can’t let go of the idea of an all-powerful God, yet how much greater the headwind must have been in Darwin’s day, 150 years ago, before modern secularism gained its grip.

After publishing his theory that even humans had common ancestors (i.e. apes), Darwin was frequently mocked in magazines (see the illustration above from an edition of The Hornet in 1871).

To my mind there are two quite separate questions about the compatibility between evolution and monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam.

The first concerns the issue of whether there is an intervening God – one, as in the Old Testament Bible (or Jewish Torah) who delivers real-time justice (Plagues of Egypt), or even seeks revenge (Noah’s flood). The New Testament idea of God granting humans freewill but culminating in a judgement day (the Book of Revelation) is really the same idea but with the intervention put on ice until we’re dead – a convenient way of combining the apparent injustices of everyday life with an all-powerful, all-seeing God.

I can’t imagine how you could reconcile such a view with Darwin’s revelations about the mechanics of the natural world. Nature harbours no morals, intentions or judgements regarding any of its species. Rather her survival depends on a self- correcting symmetry founded on biodiversity.

Species best adapted to prevailing conditions thrive, while those least suited suffer. As conditions randomly change (as they invariably do) some become extinct while others rise to pre-eminence. Such a system has operated for nearly 4 billion years, surviving even the most dramatic environmental traumas (most of all 252 million years ago, when 96% of marine species and 76% of land species were obliterated). Each time, nature has bounced back.

But the second question proves harder for scientists to dismiss. It’s the one about what set of conditions gave rise to this highly robust, self-correcting system in the first place?
Self-correcting systems are not unique to the biological world. The efficiency of a steam engine’s “governor’s balls” is a parallel in the world of thermodynamics, as is the self-correcting steering of a flanged baton on rails (something I hope to demonstrate on our voyage using two plastic cups and some model railway track!). What forces gave rise to nature’s self-correcting symmetry in the first place?

To rely on random chance is speculative at best and unscientific at worst. Grappling with the conundrum has even got eminent physicists proposing that we exist in some kind of “multiverse” in which our universe is just one of an infinite number. According to them, ours just happens to be the one that harbours the conditions necessary for life exist (e.g. the right forces between atoms, the right strength of gravity, the right chemicals for organic life etc, etc).
Towards the end of his life Darwin had little or no time for the intervening type of divinity. On Sunday mornings he would sit on a bench outside his local parish church while his family went inside to worship.

But that didn’t mean he was an atheist – or that to believe in evolution means you have to be an athiest. Whatever forces gave rise to nature’s infinitely brilliant design in the first place – be it statistical chance, a strike of Thor’s thunderbolt or the machinations of an extra-terrestrial beings experiment in interplanetary horticulture – merit the rare, but essential, quality of all good science – humility.

So, Dad, I’m afraid I reckon Jesus was descended from a monkey, but I can’t deny the fact that he may well have been a son of God.