The Archbishop of Canterbury is a pompous old gasbag who doesn’t understand evolution
Speaking of old gits with unwaxed eyebrows, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, has a book review in the last Times Literary Supplement. And although His Reverend has no apparent training in biology, he’s been chosen to pronounce on Conor Cuningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong. I can’t link to the review, as it’s not online, and I haven’t read the book, either. Judging from reviews, it seems to excoriate evolutionists for thinking that Darwinism is a “theory of everything” and fundamentalists for espousing creationism. It seems to be a book of accommodationism, showing how God might well have used evolution as his modus operandus, and arguing that there is no conflict between religion and Darwinism. Perhaps those who have read it can give further information.
The Primate gives the book two opposable thumbs up, calling it “the most interesting and invigorating book on the science–religion frontier that I have encountered”. The review is notable for two things. The first is that the prose is absolutely dreadful; Williams writes like a theologian. One example:
“We have been led to assume that there is an irreducible distinction between the “hard” facts of physical interaction and the various decorative excrescences that we think of as mental realities. To understand the former, we are often told, is to understand that the foundational truth about the universe is material happening, described in a way that excludes anything we might call purpose. We must on no account tell teleological stories about the processes we observe – and, as Cunningham says, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this proscription is there in some people’s minds chiefly in order to conserve the necessary clear blue water between science and any kind of theology.”
Translation: Mind/matter monists have a position based not on science, but on hatred of religion. (“Clear blue water”?)
But buried within the leaden prose is a deep and abiding dislike for evolutionary biology and genetics in particular. Despite his apparent comity with Professor Dawkins, Williams just hates the selfish gene. And, to denigrate the gene-centered view of evolution, he drags in both C. S. Lewis (for crying out loud!) and Mary Midgley:
“The gene has been presented as the irreducible monadic agent for biological science, but this begs important questions. We need to remember that the gene itself is part of the evolutionary story, not its sole motor (I was reminded of a passage in C. S. Lewis’s letters where he describes with relish hearing of a passionately enlightened schoolteacher who insisted to her students that all life forms descended from apes). If the only model for evolutionary logic we possess is the mythology of the selfish gene, we leave unanswered and unanswerable the question of the gene’s own history; quite apart from the problems in speaking of “selfishness” as the sole generator of development.”
full article from Jerry Coyne: whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com