According to initial research published by Theos today, around half of the UK population is sceptical about Darwinism.
This does not mean that 50% of Britons are creationists or advocates of Intelligent Design. Some (about a quarter) would qualify as convinced and consistent in their opposition to evolution, but the rest are simply sceptical: inclined towards evolution but distinctly dubious about it, hedging their bets with bits of creationism and ID.
Why is this? More precisely, how is it that the scientific consensus is about as squarely behind evolution as it is behind heliocentrism but popular opinion is so much more sceptical?
There are a number of reasons (such a large social phenomenon inevitably demands a variety of different explanations) but one of the more compelling is oddly reminiscent of where we were a century ago.
In his seminal work charting the reception of Darwinism in Britain and America in the 19th century, James Moore observes that "with but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution." Popular opinion at the time, particularly in America, was more resistant, however, largely because it encountered evolution as a social rather than scientific doctrine. Social Darwinism argued that might was right, and that to protect the weak and the vulnerable was to defy nature. Only the fittest should survive. Understandably, this doctrine had limited appeal for those deemed weak or unfit, and helped fuel anti-evolutionary sentiment in the early 20th century, particularly in America where Social Darwinism was more influential.
A similar thing appears to be going on today. Popular opinion encounters Darwinism not so much as a well-testified and supremely elegant scientific theory, but as a quasi-metaphysical one, an outlook on life that has become inextricably linked, through the purple prose of its most eloquent modern advocates, with reductionism, nihilism, atheism, and amorality.
This Darwinism is one in which morality (in as far as we can still talk about it) becomes calculating and fundamentally self-interested, ethical systems arbitrary, agency an illusion, and human beings completely irrelevant and accidental. Love, charity, compassion, and altruism are "tendencies... grounded in underlying selfishness. The human mind is "an artefact created when memes restructure a human brain so as to make it a better habitat for memes." The universe is reduced to "blind forces and physical replication" with "no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
Not surprisingly, this vision is neither persuasive nor appealing to many people and as a result, when faced with evolution they are torn between trusting the scientific consensus and yet shying away from the apparent consequences of being a full-blooded Darwinian.
The tragedy in all this is that it is entirely unnecessary. This bleak vision does not reflect Darwin's own view. It wasn't the view of the scientists, many of them committed Christians, who popularised Darwinism in the UK and US. It certainly wasn't the view of some of the original Fundamentalists, several of whom were committed Darwinians. And it need not be the position today.
The scientific evidence for evolution by natural selection is overwhelming and grows by the year. The evidence that evolution also necessitates the death of God, humanity, morality and purpose is tendentious (to put it mildly), and relies rather more on rhetoric than reason.
If we are to hope to reduce the high levels of scepticism about evolution in the UK (not to mention the US), we need to pull apart the now-indisputable science from the far-from-indisputable philosophising that goes on around it.
Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.
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The data are available in the report Rescuing Darwin. Sample data tables are available here. The full data analysis will be available in a report written by ComRes, who conducted the research, and published by Theos in early March.
