Two Men & a Maybe
My daily Internet reading often provides me with fascinating topics for lectures, discussions, and reflections. This was especially the case on June 14, 2006. The first item to attract my attention that day, from an on-line philosophy journal, was an essay by one of my colleagues at Berkeley, the English professor Frederick Crews, the introduction to his new collection Follies of the Wise.
By “the wise,” Crews apparently means fools who rank high in the social realm or academic pecking order, and their chief folly is belief in God. This belief ranks as folly, according to Crews, because it has been discredited, both by the logic of Darwinism and by the occurrence of natural catastrophes, specifically, the great Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.
In pre-modern times, religious leaders could ascribe natural disasters to God’s anger at human wickedness. By 2005, only an unschooled person or a blinkered zealot could fail to understand that a thoroughly natural conjunction of forces had wiped out populations whose only “sin” was to have pursued their livelihood or recreation in lowlands adjacent to the ocean.
Freudian Apostate
Crews was particularly disgusted by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s attempt to justify belief in a God who would permit suffering on this scale. The archbishop proposed that God had decided that human life could best be lived in a world where effects predictably follow causes in a way we can chart, and so it is unreasonable to expect God to step in whenever this pattern of cause and effect turns dangerous.
Crews denounced the whole idea that God designed the world to suit humans as “complacent anthropocentric vanity.” He surmised that, if asked, the archbishop would say that he subscribes to Darwinian scientific principles. In that case, wrote Crews, “he can hardly go on to assert that nature’s laws were fashioned for the benefit of Homo sapiens, a great ape whose entire period of existence has occupied not even a nanosecond of the cosmic hour.”
Just as many have wondered how a Berkeley law professor became a prominent critic of Darwinism, some may ask why a Berkeley English professor has dedicated himself to an uncompromising defense of the embattled theory with all its philosophical implications. The answer is that Crews came to be a militant scientific materialist by way of a disenchantment with Freudianism.
He was a Freudian literary critic in the early years of his career but eventually realized that Freud’s scientific pretensions were bogus, and he became a bitter apostate, continuing to flog the dead carcass of psychoanalysis long after those pretensions were everywhere discredited. I hoped that this experience might lead him to question the scientific pretensions of Darwinism also, but instead, he embraced a mission to protect good scientific practice, proceeding from a solid metaphysical basis in materialism, from deviants on the right (religion, tradition) and on the left (postmodern relativism).
Crews sees himself as fighting the all-too-human tendency to confuse fantasy with reality and then to protect the fantasy from empirical disproof with attacks on dissenters, mixed with assertions of authority and appeals to tradition. I approve of Crews’s mission in principle. I just wish he would apply the same unsparing scrutiny to Darwinist defenders and their tactics.
If he did, he might see that Darwinians have also dabbled in some of the pseudoscientific tricks that materialists like to identify with religion, and that it is a good thing that there are some skeptics around to point out these faults, even if the skeptics don’t have a satisfactory alternative at hand. If Crews were to follow such thoughts out at length, perhaps one day he would want to consider whether Darwinism might be one of those follies of the wise.
Perfunctory Darwinian
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
32.6—November/December 2019
The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs by Jesse Russell
24.3—May/June 2011
The Making & Endurance of the King James Bible, 1611-2011 by Barton Swaim
22.3—April 2009
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by J. Daryl Charles
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
