No, Darwin Did Not Kill God

And nor did "good schools", as I am sometimes told. The best state schools are disproportionately run by churches, and I have never heard of a secular private school. In any case, only about a quarter of people in any given Western country profess to be atheists, agnostics, of no religion, or what have you. Even what was one the perennial call to abolish Easter as a public holiday because it moves around seems to have fallen silent; if anything, the call is now for the (equally objectionable) creation of public holidays on non-Christian festivals, many or most of which are also moveable.

Anyway, what a feast was my friend Conor Cunningham's programme last night. Well worth having to wait until 10 o'clock for the BBC Three repeat of EastEnders.

I hope I can be forgiven for saying that there was nothing it it that I did not already know. Where something like this is concerned, I am not a general viewer. And the general viewer was made aware of, among other things:

- The fact that a literal reading of the chapters of Genesis at least (although Conor did not make this distinction) until the Call of Abram is not the Tradition of the Church, that Saint Augustine warned against it explicitly, and that a purely literal (or purely non-literal) reading of any part of the Bible in un-Traditional;

- The fact that only the fringe of the fringe of Victorian Christianity still accepted the dating of James Ussher, for all its printing in the margins of Bibles, the geological work having been, and being, largely done by clergy;

- The fact that Britain was more religious after the general acceptance of Darwin's theory than before it;

- The fact that Newman and Kingsley, such adversaries (although, again, Conor did not mention that) the rest of the time, were at one in their willingness to accept evolution;

- The fact that Darwin's work was received with that same ease in both Catholic and Protestant parts of the Continent, whereas the idea of God as a sort of Great Mechanic was peculiarly English, deriving from the writings of William Paley, and now experiencing a revival in the form of Intelligent Design;

- The fact that William Jennings Bryan was a Christian Socialist, that he was therefore a passionate opponent of Social Darwinism, that that was why he took the stand that he did, and that he did not believe the seven days to be literally so, but rather to be vast geological epochs, since Young Earth Creationism dates only from the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961 (have you got that? - 1961);

- The fact that the mapping of the human genome is the ruin of the theory (bad philosophy, and not science at all) of "the Selfish Gene";

- The fact that the theory of "memes" (bad philosophy, and not science at all) is the ruin of science; and

- The fact, never quite uttered but certainly there, that serious atheist philosophers regard "Universal Darwinists" in the same way that serious theologians regard creationists and the Intelligent Design lobby.

Among so much else.

It was wonderful to see Simon Conway-Morris on prime time, terrestrial television. How long, how scandalously long, have we waited for that?

The Newman beatification may mean programmes about him. Kingsley should again be known for so much more than The Water Babies. Ussher's calculations are the least interesting thing about him, and his full-length biography was recently published by Connor's colleague at Nottingham, my erstwhile lecturer on the Reformation, Professor Alan Ford. Bryan is a truly fascinating figure, a way into exploring how America once had a proper Left, and a populist, Christian-based, largely rural, totally non-Marxist Left at that.

And so one could go on, and on, and on.

I have criticised Conor for missing things out. Of course, he only had an hour to fill. So, let the wider work begin.

Intelligent Design is a sort of Deism, and it therefore comes as no surprise that it is so popular in a country founded by Deists. Something that can vaguely be called "God" sets everything going, but then just leaves it alone, and therefore might as well not exist. ID is an example of the arrogant streak among lawyers and scientists. Rather than ask the clergy assigned to the sorts of parishes or congregations that contain lots of lawyers and scientists, they have instead concocted this for themselves.

"The survival of the fittest" is a tautology - see above about how proper atheist philosophers regard ultra-Darwinists and consider that this is very largely the reason why.

And for the descent of the human species from another in particular (the only descent of one species from another to be of any moral importance), not the slightest evidence has ever been produced, though certainly not for want of trying. The dog and the duck may or may not be close cousins, but they are in the same moral category either way. There is simply no particular species from which our own has been shown to have descended. We remain in a wholly different moral category from everything else. At least until such time as "the missing link" turns up, we need ordinarily do nothing more than state the fact of its absence in order to make this earth-shatteringly important point.

By contrast, Marx, Hitler, Dawkins and all the rest are wholly dependent on a sort of blind faith such as has no relationship to serious theology or religious belief. Dawkins most of all, since he knows perfectly well that the "link" is still "missing", yet he knows that it will eventually turn up, it will, it will, it just will. He knows the latter, which has no evidential basis whatever, far more definitively than he knows the former, which is a fact: no descent of human beings from any other species has ever been established, and for all anyone knows the first man was created directly from inanimate matter before the first woman was created out of the first man.

When even the BBC shows a programme like Conor's , then the cracks are appearing.

So let's get cracking.