Darwin, deism, Startrek

 Darwin, deism, Startrek

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:    
                          "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin, from [*The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection*](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2009/pg2009-images.html).   

More Deist than I would have expected and would have expected. 

 

I think that's quite plausible. Darwin was writing in 1859, into a culture in which an explicitly godless interpretation of nature would have made Origin considerably harder to swallow.

The wording is almost strategically constructed:

• “originally breathed by the Creator” — gives the religious reader an acceptable ultimate origin.
• “fixed law of gravity” — immediately puts the subsequent history of life into the realm of natural law.
• “endless forms ... evolved” — the actual explanatory triumph of the book remains entirely naturalistic.

And Darwin had already been careful elsewhere to distinguish between saying that natural selection explains the diversification of life and saying that he had proved anything about the existence or nonexistence of God.

So yes, a little theological sugar on the pill seems a reasonable reading. It wasn't necessarily insincere, either. Darwin's own views were complicated and changed over his lifetime; he wasn't simply secretly an atheist putting on a clerical costume for publication.

Your point about the ultimate function is important, too. Natural selection can explain how increasingly elaborate organisms arise without answering whether the process has an ultimate purpose. “There is no purpose” and “we don't have evidence of a purpose” are themselves philosophical positions, not conclusions supplied by the mechanism of selection.

Darwin's final paragraph rather cleverly leaves that particular question sitting outside the laboratory door.

Reminds me of the sugar introduced into the earliest Startrek, where Kirk and company encounter a planet inhabited by the ancient Greek deities, and he says "Our one is enough."

Yes! “Who Mourns for Adonais?” — the Star Trek episode with Apollo. Kirk's “We have enough gods” line is exactly the same sort of rhetorical sugar, though considerably less subtle than Darwin's. 

What's particularly interesting is that Star Trek was doing the reverse maneuver from Darwin. Darwin says, essentially, “Natural processes explain the world, but I'm not going to tell you what to believe about the Creator.” Trek says, “These apparently supernatural beings are actually technologically advanced aliens, and therefore they aren't gods.”

But then Kirk gives the audience the little concession: “Our one is enough.”

It's a remarkably 1960s line. The writers want to make the secular/scientific point without quite saying, “And Christianity is nonsense, folks.” So they leave one God standing while knocking the Greek pantheon off its pedestal.

And it fits your earlier observation rather nicely: sometimes a statement isn't there primarily because the argument requires it; it's there because the audience requires it.

Some in the audience require it, others notice and are either amused or offended.

 

 

Exactly. And that's where the device becomes visible.

For the person who needs the reassurance, it passes unnoticed as a perfectly natural line. For someone paying attention, the little seam shows: “Ah, there it is—the bit we've inserted so the network doesn't get letters.”

And there are at least three reactions:

1. Believer: “Good. They're not attacking God.”
2. Secular viewer: “Oh, come on. You couldn't resist adding that, could you?”
3. Religious but observant viewer: “Wait a minute—that isn't actually very orthodox theology.”

The third is often the most amusing. The attempt to offend nobody can wind up irritating everybody who notices the machinery.

Darwin's sentence has survived rather better because his qualification is genuinely interesting philosophically. Kirk's “our one is enough” is much more obviously audience management. It has the faint smell of a network executive standing just outside the camera frame.

 

I wonder why they call him Adonis when he is obviously Apollo.

  

 

The episode is titled “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, using Adonais as a poetic name for Apollo. In Greek mythology, Adonis was actually a separate, mortal youth associated with Aphrodite and Persephone.

So the title is deliberately literary rather than mythologically precise: it alludes to Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais, his elegy for John Keats. Shelley himself borrowed the name from the mythological Adonis.

In other words, Star Trek managed to put Apollo, Adonis, Shelley, Keats, and television network theology into one episode. Not bad for 50 minutes.