Delivered on Sunday 22 March 2009 in St George's Chapel

Mothering Sunday

Today is Mothering Sunday. By a happy coincidence this year is also the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species. So on this Mothering Sunday, I thought we could spend a little time taking a look a mother nature or as I suppose a Darwinian would have it, the absence of any motherly quality in nature.

But before going onwards let me take a few step backwards. As every schoolchild knows Darwin saw the finches of the Galapogos in the five years he spent on board HMS Beagle. From this research he proved that men descended from chimpanzees. And furthermore he came up with the idea that evolution was about the survival of the fittest. ... Well, all this is a parody of the truth. Darwin was a wealthy man who did not spend five years travelling on the Beagle, rather five weeks. He had actually very little interest in his collection of finches, lumping all the corpses in a rather indiscriminate mass. And he never used the phrase 'survival of the fittest' - that honour, if honour it is, is due to Herbert Spenser when he attempted to summarize the notion of natural selection.[1]

But it is certainly true that Darwin came up with one of the most famous and influential theories in all of science - the theory of natural selection. So successful has his theory been that very few can realistically doubt the overwhelming evidence that appears to point directly to a process of some kind of evolutionary adaptation. By any measure Darwin's theory is immense.

Having said that - and it being his anniversary year - there is much speculation about at the moment concerning the theory of natural selection. I am going to mention just two. The first ironically concerns human beings. As we look around the world today we see some considerable problems. You need only think of the state of the financial markets or the rate at which we appear to be destroying creation. Why are we in this mess? Well, taking Darwin seriously, you might argue that the kind of mind we have wasn't evolved to cope with the kind of world we live in. Our kind of mind was naturally selected to solve the sorts of problems that confronted out hunter-gatherer forebears some thirty-thousand years ago. These are problems that arise for small populations trying to make a living in an ecology of scarce resources. But that kind of mind - so the argument goes - doesn't work well in modern London, where there's more than enough population and café's on every corner. In London survival depends on dodging traffic, finding a good investment broker, knowing how to avoid the difficult parts of town. It's not that our problems are harder to solve than our ancestors' were, it's rather that the mental equipment we've inherited from them just isn't up the job we are asking it to do. Why are we in a mess? Because our minds evolved to do solve completely different kinds of problems.

That reading of Darwin's theory has been doing the rounds for a little while, but for it to have any credence, you really do have to accept that the notion of adaptation. Creatures - over time - adapt to the demands of their ecological situation. In fact Darwinists like Dawkins and Dennett have been known to say that adaptationism - as they call it - is the best idea anybody ever had. But adaptationism does not go unchallenged.

For adaptationism to work there is an assumption that phenotypes, characteristics, carry information about the environment in which they evolved. So, for example, when you look at a seagull you see that it has wings; those wings imply that the creature whose wings they are is excellently adapted for flight. What you have here is the view that an orderly environment is in charge of natural selection. And it's at that point that the challenge comes in.

Critics point to particular instances of natural selection. For example they ask us to think about specific experiments. Apparently for over forty years a group of scientists have been breeding silver foxes, trying to increase tameness from one generation to the next. The results are impressive. But while tameness has been achieved the foxes also developed a host of other characteristics - they evolved floppy ears, short curly tails, and grey hairs. For an animal to become tame, it appears that they have to also take on several other characteristics and it's not clear why those characteristics are most useful for their environment. What advantage, after all, is gained by having a short curly tail?

So the adaptationist is claiming that as creatures evolve they are responding to their environment; the critic is saying that changes can take place, not because of the environment, but just because of what goes on inside the creature itself.

I am not competent to judge these various readings of Darwin. What I see, though, is an extraordinarily complex task. In trying to understand why creatures are the way they are, theorists have taken on massive challenge. They argue about adaptation, they produce explanations, they wonder about the evolution of human beings. Listening in to these discussions is intriguing. And as a Christian I don't find them threatening. We can talk long and hard about how things have developed, we may even have our theories about why things have developed, but ultimately we may still place our trust in almighty God. In his almightiness God is the ruler of everything or perhaps you might say the holder of everything. In amongst all the complications of the diversity of life is a presence, a holder of everything. There is no situation in which he is not to be relied upon. Throughout everything God is mothering nature.