A New Noah
The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth
by Edward O. Wilson
W. W. Norton, 2006
(173 pages, $21.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
Written as a letter to a Southern Baptist pastor, Harvard biologist Edward Wilson’s newest book invites Evangelicals to put aside their differences with Darwinians and join them in the common cause of saving life on earth, but he does not stop at offering a pragmatic association with Evangelicals. He yokes their sacred words— Creation, Eden, stewardship, truth, mystery, human nature, miracle, meaning of existence, and heaven—to pull the cart of his naturalism.
In The Creation, the word Creation does not refer to God’s Word calling Nature into existence, nor is Eden the garden from which our first parents were expelled for sin. Rather, both Creation and Eden are defined as autonomous Nature, free of God and man.
We were not, Wilson says, driven “from this Eden. Instead, we destroyed most of it in order to improve our lives and generate more people. Billions of more people, to the peril of Creation.” He blames even the “Paleolithic hunters,” for driving giant mammals to extinction, adding that extinctions are now “100X higher than before the arrival of modern Homo sapiens about 150,000 years ago.”
Multiple Sins
So we sinned from the start, but for Wilson, original sin consisted in our multiplying, filling the earth, and claiming dominion over other creatures. Our species made the initial error of trying “to ascend from Nature instead of to Nature.”
He faults the Bible for not explaining this point clearly: It is a “larger truth not adequately expressed in Holy Scripture.” Well, it is “adequately expressed in Holy Scripture,” but it is called idolatry and roundly condemned.
Wilson’s interpretation of the Fall of Man as a Fall from Nature is not a new one. The first systematic atheist, the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, had the same idea, as seen in the Appendix to his Ethic (1678), where Nature is constantly deified by the phrase “Deus sive Natura,” “God or Nature.”
Wilson also strips the words heaven, paradise, and Ark of their biblical meaning and makes them serve his agenda. With fewer human beings, he says, Nature would be “heaven on Earth” and “paradise.” The wolverine is one of the “jewels in the crown of the Creation,” but man is a destructive “meteorite” causing mass extinction.
He hopes for a huge reduction in our numbers before the century is over, and makes this hope a kind of eschatological fulfillment: “With the smaller population that can be reached within a century,” this world “can be paradise. But only if we also take the rest of life with us.” That would make earth the “planetary Ark.”
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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