A naturalist and a gentleman: ABR review of Tom Frame's Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin in Australia

‘The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore,’ says Max Weber, ‘wherever rational empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.’ Darwinism, or so one version of the history of modern culture goes, is the culmination of the process of disenchantment, the last step in the transformation of the world into a causal mechanism.

Where the great minds of early modern science concur in thinking that scientific study of the creation acquaints human beings better with the majesty of the creator, Darwin’s theory of natural selection seems to dispose of the creator without further ado. The famous core of it is the hypothesis that undirected biological change acts as a creative force, generating new species and ensuring that those that are best adapted to their environments have the greatest reproductive success. As plain as it sounds, the implications are startling – species need no longer be thought of as immutable creations of divinity; man himself no longer appears minted in the image of God; the earth, as a whole, acquires a distinctively modern natural history that dispenses with all notion of divine provision for human needs and aspirations. ‘It is like confessing to murder,’ Darwin wrote in an 1844 letter to Joseph Dalton, as the new theory put him on an unavoidable collision course with the proponents of a one-off biblical creation.

Is Darwinism true but deadly to all forms of Christian belief, as it is sometimes claimed to be? Is the causal mechanism it invokes hostile to religious and ethical meaning per se? These are the questions which motivate Tom Frame in Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia. But as the title suggests, they are far from Frame’s sole preoccupation. The first half of the book gives us a highly readable history taking in the formation of Darwin’s mind, his visit to Australia and a range of Australian reactions to his ideas – from the elegant pro and contra of the colonial period to the arid productions of the Creation Science movement. While in the second half of the book Frame gives the social history of Darwinism a contemporary edge by referring it back to his 24-carat question of meaning – how radically has Darwinism changed what it means to be Christian – Evolution in the Antipodes is informative and consummately fair-minded in its dealings with both past and present.

Darwin’s visit to Australia on the Beagle in early 1836 provides Frame with his main historical point of orientation. The brief Australian sojourn was something of a working holiday, with Darwin’s time divided between social obligations, field trips and exchanges with local naturalists. His account of his experiences for The Voyage of the Beagle (1840) gives as good an indication as any of his general mindset. The Voyage contains a fair amount of amateur cultural anthropology, some of it with an ugly undertone belonging squarely to the Age of Empire. Aboriginal Australians Darwin unhesitatingly calls ‘men in their lowest and most savage state’. Missionary Christianity he thinks of as an unambiguous force for moral improvement in the Pacific. (Frame presents it all neutrally as the sort of cultural chauvinism typical of Darwin’s day.) On a different level, but equally of its time, is Darwin’s commendation of the life of the sea-going naturalist – a veritable hymn to wholesome Protestant activity:

In a moral point of view, the effect [of the sea-going naturalist’s life] ought to be, to teach [a man] good-humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence.

Nothing Darwin observed in Australia, Frame tells us, made any special contribution to the theory of natural selection as it was to emerge after his return to Britain. Curiously, Darwin seems to have been unreceptive to his Australian surrounds – unwilling to imagine his way into the physical environment and repelled by its apparent lack of form. His notes about what he saw are a mixed bag – some useful grist for his evolutionary mill, some high-toned visions of a future Australian civilisation and some unconscious rehashings of his own Victorian present.

Frame’s chapter on Darwin’s own religious feeling is especially good. On the existence of God, Darwin was nothing less – though nothing more – than agnostic from his late-thirties onwards. Natural selection, however, led him to unreserved scepticism about the existence of hell, the notion that God reveals himself in nature, and especially the divine inspiration of the Bible. What is notable, though, is that, in spite of this, his personal morality remained well within the orbit of Christian teachings. Unlike some of his followers, Darwin never seems to have questioned whether altruism is the supreme ethical capacity of human beings (though he thought that it could be accounted for as an evolutionary extension of the social instincts of animals). The man himself was a naturalist and a gentleman, an orthodox Victorian one, or, as Frame puts it, an adherent of basic Christian principles, if not a Christian believer. Thinking through the consequences of his new theory for religious belief seems simply not to have been part of what he considered his scientific business. Frame demonstrates conclusively that Darwin’s shift away from his youthful Anglicanism was no lurch towards militant atheism. ‘The habit of looking for one kind of meaning [of the naturalistic variety] deadens the perception of another [religious meaning]’ – as Darwin himself joylessly puts it on mature reflection.

Anyone with a rough feel for the history of ideas will infer that Darwin’s doubts about conventional religious belief emerge from a standard background in Enlightenment philosophy and biblical criticism, mediated by one or two layers of polite English free-thinking. In the light of Frame’s account, treating Darwin himself as ‘the devil’s chaplain’, as some of his contemporaries did, seems ridiculous. But Darwin’s reticence about religion cuts both ways. Chapter nine of Evolution in the Antipodes shows just how unwilling he was to go out of his way to deprive others of their grounds for belief, something the militant Darwinians of our own era could learn from, if they agree that Darwin was something more than a supreme scientific mind. The vulgarity of many a neo-Darwinian criticism of vulgar superstition – kicking obsessively at everything that resembles a metaphysical crutch – is something Frame manages to quietly censor just by sketching more and less moderate possibilities of contemporary Darwinian thought.

Later in the book, Frame ventures into the dark realms of Creation Science and its neighbouring states of extremity, the lunar landscape of biblical literalism, multiplying religious factions and argumentative vicious circles. The debates Evolution in the Antipodes re-enacts between well-funded creationists and testy professors of biology bring out the best in no one. With the existence of God and His relationship with His creation at stake, the parties slug it out with all the paraphernalia of modern marketing at their disposal. The outcome – though Frame hesitates to say so himself – is not so much a nil-all draw but an unedifying game whose players all deserve red cards, a situation in which public discourse of the divine and the natural is cheapened.

So, if the universe was not created by God ex nihilo, and if human beings were not created in God’s image, do we still have reason to believe in God, especially in a Christian God who is loving and all-powerful? The answer suggested by Darwinism and insisted on by some Darwinians is in the negative. Frame’s point in Evolution in the Antipodes is that the negative answer can be taken for granted too easily. Yes, Christian belief is still possible, more than that it is still reasonable, he wants to say, but not without a reinterpretation of the nature and meaning of the deity and His relationship to His (supposed) creation. The trouble with where Frame winds up in the book is that the reinterpretation has not quite taken shape, though the landmarks in the Australian history of the reinterpretation have been generously surveyed. Frame, an Anglican bishop, is very much a believer in the reasoned road to God. Faith for him is an amalgam of observation, reflection and inspiration, a sort of affectively enriched empiricism. His God is one who enacts, or in some sense is, the continuous and ongoing process of creation, an immanent Being quite close to the God of pantheism.

It is a shame there isn’t space for Frame to give us his reflections on some alternatives – for instance that of drawing the dividing line between matters of fact and matters of faith more starkly (the path of a Kierkegaard, for whom faith totally transcends any scientific findings). Frame, in the end, is probably unwilling to take this turn because his is primarily an ethical religiosity, one inclined to appeal to rational knowledge, rather than make Christianity’s moral imperatives into inscrutable commandments of God.

That said, Evolution in the Antipodes remains a superb layman’s introduction, both to Darwin and to one side of Australian intellectual history. It pinpoints the way Darwin’s main ideas were influenced by the intellectual, social and scientific debates of his own day, the way those ideas acted on society and the way society continues to act on itself in the light of its understanding of them. Darwin himself, one feels, would have been bemused to see the mutation of natural selection from an approach to definite scientific problems to an all-purpose attitude, something more than a set of theoretical tools, but less than a philosophy.

Above all, Frame’s use of sources is second to none; Evolution in the Antipodes effortlessly assimilates an enormous array of materials into one coherent line of historical interpretation running from the late eighteenth century to the present. In its way, it is a model of a type of book we need more of in a world where science has its cultural meanings imposed on it by its social surrounds and where the sheer complexity of the scientific enterprise opens an ever wider field to arbitrary assertions of irrational meaning. All in all, this is a thoughtful work of popular science that puts the science in a broad cultural context while also allowing it to appear to one side of all cultural controversy.