The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [127]
The historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob (in Telling the Truth About History, 1994) criticize Isaac Newton: he is said to have rejected the philosophical position of Descartes because it might challenge conventional religion and lead to social chaos and atheism. Such criticisms amount only to the charge that scientists are human. How Newton was buffeted by the intellectual currents of his time is of course of interest to the historian of ideas; but it has little bearing on the truth of his propositions. For them to be generally accepted, they must convince atheists and theists alike. This is just what happened.
Appleby and her colleagues claim that ‘When Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, he was an atheist and a materialist,’ and suggest that evolution was a product of a purported atheist agenda. They have hopelessly confused cause and effect. Darwin was about to become a minister of the Church of England when the opportunity to sail on HMS Beagle presented itself. His religious ideas, as he himself described them, were at the time highly conventional. He found every one of the Anglican Articles of Faith entirely believable. Through his interrogation of Nature, through science, it slowly dawned on him that at least some of his religion was false. That’s why he changed his religious views.
Appleby and her colleagues are appalled at Darwin’s description of ‘the low morality of savages... their insufficient powers of reasoning... [their] weak power of self-command’, and state that ‘now many people are shocked by his racism’. But there was no racism at all, as far as I can tell, in Darwin’s comment. He was alluding to the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, suffering from grinding scarcity in the most barren and Antarctic province of Argentina. When he described a South American woman of African origin who threw herself to her death rather than submit to slavery, he noted that it was only prejudice that kept us from seeing her defiance in the same heroic light as we would a similar act by the proud matron of a noble Roman family. He was himself almost thrown off the Beagle by Captain FitzRoy for his militant opposition to the Captain’s racism. Darwin was head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries in this regard.
But again, even if he was not, how does it affect the truth or falsity of natural selection? Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves; Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi were imperfect husbands and fathers. The list goes on indefinitely. We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations - perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.
Occasionally, in retrospect, someone stands out. In my book, the English-born American revolutionary Thomas Paine is one such. He was far ahead of his time. He courageously opposed monarchy, aristocracy, racism, slavery, superstition and sexism when all of these constituted the conventional wisdom. He was unswerving in his criticism of conventional religion. He wrote in The Age of Reason: ‘Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It … has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.’ At the same time the book exhibited the deepest reverence for a Creator of the Universe