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Darwinism & the Divine: evolutionary thought & natural theology

Reviewed by Terry Hinks.

Lacking a scientific background and perhaps influenced by Karl Barth’s dismissive approach to natural theology (quoted within the book), I may not be the best person to review Darwinism and the Divine: evolutionary thought and natural theology. Compared to his more popular books responding to the New Atheism (such as Dawkins Delusion and Why God won’t go away), this is a scholarly book which reflects the breath of McGrath’s research and expertise.  It begins with definitions (Part 1 defining Darwinism and Natural Theology), moves onto a detailed historical survey (Part 2 exploring developments in English natural theology, William Paley’s Natural Theology, Paley’s successors and the work of Darwin himself) and concludes with a careful discussion of the key implications of evolutionary thought for natural theology today (Part 3).

The historical survey is important because it shows the context in which today’s debates take place. It rightly shows the inadequacy of English Protestant Natural Theology as a whole as it developed during the 18th and 19th Centuries.  McGrath describes William Paley’s approach (“physico-theology” movement) as “an intricate and beautifully constructed house of cards” vulnerable to collapse; it was not Darwin, but other Christian theologians who caused its disintegration, by showing both its vulnerability and the presence of better approaches. I found the detailed arguments of these chapters somewhat hard work and was glad that pictures were included! Photographs of the main protagonists made the simple, but valuable, point that these debates were not simply about abstract ideas, but involved real historically specific people (or more accurately men) with all the limitations of perspective that brought.

The third part of the book is perhaps the most interesting with its focus on the present debate. McGrath provides a very even handed assessment of the present discussions, with the aim of encouraging reasoned debate, in opposition to the entrenched positions of fundamentalists, whether of religious or atheistic persuasion. He explores the key questions of teleogy (ideas of goal or design, the place of chance, etc.) and theodicy (the problem of suffering). He dismisses crude ideas of design, but explores Huxley’s “wider teleogy”: seeing the possibility of goal directed processes within natural selection itself. He contrasts the deist natural theologies, which portray God as the grand designer immune from pain, with a properly Trinitarian natural theology which portrays God as entering into the created order and suffering in Christ.  

Although, to my mind, natural theology remains problematic, McGrath shows the value in continuing to study its approach and to grapple with the very real challenges that Darwinian thinking has brought to theology and the task of meaningful human living. He rightly ends by saying that “the natural sciences may clarify mechanisms; they do not determine meaning” and to do so we have to “look beyond the scientific horizon.” I, for one, am grateful to McGrath for his careful and well argued approach to this debate that so often generates more heat than light.