MIDGLEY, Mary -Evolution as a Religion. Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears - Routledge Classics 2002 - 225pp Review: Midgley is one of the most acute and penetrating voices in current moral philosophy. Her great gift is clarity, both of thought and, especially, of expression. To follow her reasoning is like watching a ballet dancer walking in the street: there is a litheness, a gracefulness, an ease of articulation, which attests to years of learning lightly worn. –John Banville, The Irish Times A graceful, refreshing and enlightening book, applied philosophy that is relevant, timely and metaphysical in the best sense. – The New York Times Book Review About the Author Mary Midgley (1919 - ). A philosopher with a special interest in ethics, human nature and science, Mary Midgley has a widespread international following for her work. Her latest book is Science and Poetry. ************ Evolution as a Religion was first published in 1985 and appears revised with a very brief introduction by the author that reasserts its relevance, its companion piece, Science as Salvation remains unrevised, for the approach of both still strikes Midgley as ‘reasonable’. A moral philosopher, Midgley describes evolution as the ‘creation myth of our age’ (ER, p. 33), and science in its scientistic form has become a reconstituted religious form of salvation-promise based on an irrational faith in humanity’s limitless potential. Midgely is not so much anti-science as she is opposed to the false and destructive antagonism that exists in many scientific quarters between science and religion. In fact, she tells us, science and religion are not that far apart. Thus they need not be competitors, but rather are most beneficial when they are understood as providing differing aspects or perspectives on humanity’s quest for meaning. For Midgley, meaning involves finding order that underlies reality, and that order can only be understood in terms of contexts and relationships. The problem with ‘scientism’ is its ‘veneration for the idea of science’ that is ‘detached from any real understanding of its methods’ (p. 31), although she doesn’t tell us what those methods are. The reader can only surmise from Midgley’s numerous references to a variety of scientists that there is some debate about what science means, or how it should be proceeding, among scientists themselves. One of Midgley’s main objections in Evolution as a Religion is to the ‘escalator fallacy’ or myth of evolution invented by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, where evolution is interpreted in progressive linear terms, with humankind marching onward and upward to a utopian ideal that was clearly contrary to Darwin’s understanding of evolution as arranging species in the form of a radiating bush rather than a ladder that accounts for development as well as non-change and regression (ER, p. 38). Midgely’s irritation with this view of evolution carries over to Science as Salvation, where she is highly critical of what in her view are extreme, grandiose claims made by science for human potential. As part of this critique she cites scientists such as Stephen Hawking, and his belief that human reason may one day come to penetrate ‘the mind of God’ (SS, p. 8), which she clearly thinks constitutes an inflated belief in the power of knowledge. Even more astonishing and disturbing for Midgley is the ‘anthropic principle,’ advocated by writers such as John Wheeler who state that the reality of the universe is dependent upon the observational activity of human beings, which gives scientists inordinate power: ‘Scientists, having made the world real, will also fulfil its ultimate purpose’ (p. 199). Those scientific theories that advocate the hard division of science from the humanities, such as Jacques Monod, or those that proclaim that complete knowledge is within our grasp, such as Peter Atkins, or scientists like Richard Dawkins who isolate one power in the physical world over others (the selfish gene theory), are constructing theories that for Midgley are both cognitively and morally dubious. In her view, ‘scientific visions’ of anthropic supremacy and scientific grandiosity are not very different from religious quests (SS, p. 220). To claim that science is by definition irreligious is naïve thinking, because it refuses to see that science, no less than religion, is based on faith that the world makes sense, that there is an underlying order to reality, and that there is a pattern to that reality. Science represents a part of our efforts to understand our world, and can never be the whole story; for Midgley, science ‘opens into metaphysics’ (ER, p. 121). Midgley objects to the way that some scientists, at least, proclaim themselves and their work to be beyond religion and, implicitly, morality. In her view it is the height of human hubris and foolishness to suggest that there is such a thing as direct experience from which ‘objective truth’ may be derived. Theories depend on faith, and faith in turn is based upon choices individuals make as to how to regard the universe; faith is ‘something to be rightly directed’ (ER, 125). While she is heavily critical of scientists such as Monod, Dawkins, Wheeler, Atkins and William Day, Midgley is quite partial to those writers who hold the universe and all of physical reality in awe and reverence, such as Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and Theodosius Dobzhansky. These writers see, in Midgley’s view rightly, ‘the inevitable slightness of the whole scientific achievement and its absurd disproportion to the vastness of what there is to be known’ (ER, p. 128). What Midgley seems to be calling for in both books is for balance, where scientists can learn from ‘good writers’ that all the elements of experience must be brought into a ‘harmony, so as eventually to convey a new and complex message’ (SS, p. 214), although she never really tells us what this message is. Scientists are not supermen, although Midgley implies that some of those she holds up for critical scrutiny think of their kind as new gods, and salvation is not a ‘technical fix’ (SS, p. 221). For her, science has lost its moorings by imagining itself to be superior to and isolated from other modes of human inquiry and feeling, and has thereby become distorted and distorting. What Midgley wants is for science to right itself morally by acknowledging its implicit faith and basic trust that there is meaning in physical reality, and by acknowledging that myths of omega man are no more than that, and that we may not be the only intelligent life forms in the vast universe. ‘[W]e have not the slightest idea about the possibility of intelligent beings unlike ourselves, and [we] had better not make fools of ourselves by dogmatizing about it’ (SS, p. 203). Evolution as a Religion and Science as Salvation are interesting, lively polemical books that do not repudiate science, but only its grandiosity and ignorance of its own faith-based structures. Midgley optimistically conceives of a universe where religion and science may co-exist in peace and harmony, and this is the underlying and overarching theme of both books. It is a wish that is more asserted than argued, but none the less interesting for that. Marsha Aileen Hewitt Trinity College, 6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto, Canada M5S 1H6 Email: marshahewitt@hotmail
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 02:29:34 +0000
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