"Almost 200 years ago, whilst walking these very paths in the English countryside and observing the banks and meadows near his home, Charles Darwin developed his ground-breaking ideas about evolution, casting a new light on the natural world and opening our eyes to its true wonder."
So says David Attenborough in the very first words of his new TV series, Planet Earth III. The show is, as you might expect, full of sumptuous footage of astonishing animal behaviour (at least judging from the first episode), and we very much enjoyed watching it as a family. But it was this quote that struck me. The episode had nothing whatsoever to do with English meadows (it was about life on the coasts), and neither Darwin nor evolutionism was, to my memory, mentioned again. So why begin like this? And is Attenborough right?
A hymn of praise
It was later in the evening that the answer to the first question struck me. Attenborough was about to show us the most extraordinary scenes of the natural world - Cape fur seals banding together to mob and intimidate a great white shark; a tiny and beautiful creature called a "sea angel" devouring another called a "sea butterfly"; archer fish leaping out of the water with pin-point accuracy to snatch insects from a branch metres above the water level. At many points our family gave a collective "woah!" as spectacle followed spectacle. In case any of us missed it, two or three times the children turned to each other and said "did you see that?" and even acted it out for one another. In other words, we responded with praise.
The most famous quote about praise is, to my mind, still the most illuminating. C S Lewis, in his (very patchy) Reflections on the Psalms, confesses that in his early days as a Christian, he "found a stumbling block" in God's repeated demand in the Bible that all people should praise him. Before he understood this idea properly, he found it rather distasteful - as if God were "a vain woman wanting compliments." But then came his epiphany:
But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise... The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars... I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?’ The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
C S Lewis, Reflections of the Psalms
When my daughter turned to me and said "Dad, that little turtle was like 'get to the sea! Get to the sea!'" she was praising the glorious (and rather cute) sight she had just seen. But where ought the praise to go?
Of course, the Bible's answer is simple. A personal and powerful God stands behind this grandeur and goodness. He is the designer, creator, and sustainer of all things - so praise him:
How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number— living things both large and small.
Psalm 104:24–25, NIV 2011
Or, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it:
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
So what is Attenborough doing when he puts Darwin's ideas front-and-centre before all this beauty? I would argue that - consciously or unconsciously - he is aiming to redirect our praise. The "true wonder" of this world is not that there is an unchangeably beautiful God who "fathers-forth" all things, but that it all emerged through the cold and mechanical forces of blind evolution. And it is not the Psalmists who are to thank for showing us this wonder, but the scientists. In other words - do not praise God. Praise science. Which (given that science is not a person, and therefore its praise is strangely unsatisfactory to us1) is another way of saying "praise the scientists." Praise man, from whom all blessings flow!
Of course, for Attenborough this is a deeply ambiguous concept. Humankind is very much the villain in his more recent documentaries, as he (justly, in my view) highlights the profound negative impact that much of our industry and appetites have wreaked on the natural world.2 But humankind is also the saviour. It is the scientists, the conservationists, and - yes - the nature documentary film-makers, who are showing us the "true wonder" of the world, and their efforts which (if anything can) will ultimately restore balance and harmony to the planet. We are both enemy and hero, both animal and angel. We are to the world what beer was to Homer Simpson:
So curse man, and praise man - but whatever you do, leave God out of the equation.
Wonder or perplexity?
But what about that second question - is Attenborough right? I'm particularly thinking about that word "wonder." Have Darwin's theories really made nature more wondrous to us?
A few books I've been reading recently would argue against that proposition,3 of which I'll focus on Joseph Minich's excellent Bulwarks of Unbelief.4 Minich's thesis is that a scientific view of the world, coupled with significant technological advances, have worked to dull our sense of wonder - in Charles Taylor's memorable phrase, to disenchant the world. It is not that we in the 21st-century West are no longer religious - it is rather that our posture to the world has fundamentally shifted since the pre-modern era. In that earlier era, the world was full of unpredictability, humans were vulnerable, and living well was about conforming yourself and the world to a given divine order.5 Now, after a few centuries of increasing philosophical scepticism towards God, along with technology which enables us to understand and control the world as never before, we see things very differently:
"[We now have] a sense that the world is such that I could understand any dimension of it that I wanted to or if I tried - a sense that the objects to be known are entirely reducible to and will yield to the categories of my intellectual enquiry."
Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief, 93
The disenchanted world lies entirely transparent to my inquiring mind - and as such, it is now simply raw material for my use: "the disenchantment of the word happens directly in proportion to our ability to manipulate, control, and harness it (obscuring any sense of its prior agency)."6 We get the world. We understand it - or if we personally don't, we trust that some other expert human does, or at least will at some point. The world is explicable. And if it's explicable, then it's exploitable.
That last step is of course not necessary. It is logically possible to simply explain and enjoy the world without then abusing it for one's own purposes - Attenborough himself is a clear example of this. But you can't take the second step without the first. An exploitative view of the created order is only possible within the kind of framework that Darwinism enables - where the world is just there, with no personal agency sustaining it; where there are no universal rules or divine metanarratives to conform to; where the underlying reality of the universe is cold, impersonal, and mechanical. A world, as Darwin's disciple Richard Dawkins puts it, which has "at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." In such a world, why should we care about the planet at all?
And in such a world, what is wonder? Is it just that initial "woah" - a merely aesthetic, emotional reaction? In a world denuded of meaning, that might be all that we have left. But it's clearly not what Attenborough means - he says that Darwin opened our eyes to nature's true wonder. So here is a theory. What Attenborough means by "wonder" is more precisely "perplexity." We now know (according to Darwin) that the spectacles of the natural world are completely explicable by the mechanical processes of natural selection, random genetic mutation, and survival of the fittest. But we don't know how. How exactly did "blind, pitiless indifference" create the beauty of the sea-angel's orange glowing stomach? How did random genetic mutation teach the archer fish to spit a stream of water at an insect two metres above its head? We don't really know. We assume someone will, at some point, figure it out, and the wonder will fade to be replaced with smug, know-it-all expertise. But for now we get the thrill of perplexity, the frisson of not-knowing, that in some deep sense reminds us of what it felt like to live in an enchanted universe. The tragedy of our world, where we assume we should be able to know and control everything, is that the thrill of (we believe) temporary ignorance is the closest we get to experience the vulnerability, humility, and transcendence that we can only truly get from an encounter with the living God.
So at the end, let us take our thoughts away from David Attenborough and Charles Darwin, and give praise where it's due:
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Colossians 1:15–17, NIV 2011
A topic for another time, and not unrelated, I don't think, to why football fans hate VAR. I've written on idolatry before - in sport, in music, and in literature.
Although (again, judging from one episode), his tone in this latest series seems to be slightly more moderate and irenic, focusing on the resilience of creatures in their adaptation to the human impact on the planet. We shall no doubt see more as the series unfolds.
I also argue against it in a course I teach for Crosslands, and it's been something of a relief to find much cleverer people than me who agree with me.
The other books are Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Samuel James' Digital Liturgies, and Andrew Wilson's Remaking the World. If you want to read these yourself, I'd start with James, move on to Wilson, read Minich if you're up for a bit of a challenge, and leave MacIntyre for the time being. I'll write more about all these books in due course I suspect.
Whether that order was Christian, pagan, or something else, doesn't really matter for the thesis.
Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief, 94.