This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 45, number 1 (2022).
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Eight years after he published his beloved Jungle Book (1894), Rudyard Kipling wrote another book for children that continues to be read a century later: Just So Stories. In these inventive and memorable tales, Kipling explains to his readers how the elephant got his trunk, the leopard his spots, and the camel his hump. The stories, many of which are based on folktales from India and Africa, are great fun; however, despite their great imaginative power, they have no basis in historical or scientific truth.
DARWINIAN TALL TALES
Bookstores today abound with would-be latter-day Kiplings, natural and social scientists who tell their own Just So stories to explain why humans think and desire, behave and interact the way they do. But with one major difference. Whereas Kipling knew his Just So stories were not true, these writers, who ground their cause/effect explanations in a Darwinian worldview, believe theirs are.
To make matters worse, they don’t just think that natural selection can explain why our bodies function the way they do. They think their Just So stories can also account for mysterious things unknown in the animal kingdom: things like love, virtue, and altruism, as well as our desire for beauty, transcendence, and purpose. When modern readers encounter such explanations, they tend to shake their heads in agreement because they have been trained to believe that natural selection not only can but must explain all the mysteries of human nature.
Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too
The naturalist — the one who thinks that all things can be explained and accounted for solely based on natural, physical, mechanical forces — is inconsistent. He asserts that nature is structured in a certain way (naturalism) and then tries to hold on to a view of reality that demands a supernatural origin for morality, freedom, reason, and meaning.
In the eighteenth century, David Hume admitted that one cannot get an ought (a moral obligation) out of an is (a fact of nature), but that did not stop him from seeking to live a moral life and expecting the same of others. In the nineteenth century, T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s Bulldog, reduced human life to physical causes and processes over which we have no control, but then rejected determinism, insisting that our will is free.
In the twentieth century, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis taught that naturalism is self-refuting, for if naturalism is true, then our reason is the result of random processes, and we therefore have no grounds for trusting our reason — including and especially when our reason tells us that naturalism is true. To back up his argument, Lewis quotes an evolutionary Neo-Darwinist named J. B. S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”1 Needless to say, Haldane did not abandon his naturalism!
Today, in the twenty-first century, Richard Dawkins constantly reminds his readers that our world has only the appearance of design, while continuing to act and live as if the world has the very design and meaning he denies it.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative
The naturalist who would explain all human behavior based on Darwinian evolution refuses to acknowledge that the difference between the most developed ape and the most primitive man is not quantitative but qualitative. As G. K. Chesterton argued a century ago in the opening chapter of The Everlasting Man, the shift from ape to man is not an evolution but a revolution. The so-called cavemen who painted reindeer on their cave walls were fully human. They were not primitive artists, but artists using primitive tools; they were as much artists as Michelangelo or Van Gogh or Picasso. A monkey, in contrast, does not begin to begin to begin to create art. Art marks a leap, a revolution, that allows for no incremental stages or chance mutations.
Primitive vs. Advanced
The power of the evolutionary paradigm is so strong that it has convinced modern people that the flow of history is always progressive and evolutionary. In matter of fact, primitive tribes still exist in the world today while the oldest civilizations we know of, Egypt and Babylon, were highly advanced. The primitive and the urban have always existed side by side. Had I, when my son was born, switched him with a newborn boy from a Stone Age tribe in Papua, New Guinea, my son would have grown up as a full primitive, while the other boy would have grown up as a full modern. More amazingly, when someone who grows up in a Stone Age tribe is afforded the chance to study in a “civilized” university, he quickly learns and adapts, without the need for a score of generations to evolve his brain.
Cavemen and Missing Links
The so-called caveman was as much a man as any Stone Age tribesman living today. Apes and monkeys continue to be apes and monkeys. Perhaps there was a great primate that possessed a hominid shape, but it was a primate, nonetheless. The qualitative leap between the unconscious hominid and the conscious caveman is not like that between two sides of a cavern, but between the Earth and the Andromeda Galaxy.
It is true that in The Problem of Pain, Lewis spins a myth of creation and fall in which he suggests that God might have used evolutionary forces to shape our hominid form. But he makes it clear that that hominid was not human. It was only after God breathed a soul into that hominid — there is that qualitative leap, Chesterton’s revolution, that takes place outside of time and space and in violation of both Darwinian gradualism and Neo-Darwinian mutation — that man became man and “could make judgements of truth, beauty, and goodness…[and] could perceive time flowing past.”2
The Missing Link is called the Missing Link because it is missing. It continues to be so.
NATURALLY SELECTED HEROES
Now that I have described the flawed and contradictory nature of Darwinian Just So stories, I would like to offer an example of just such a story from a recent book that I have enjoyed greatly and from which I have gained much insight: Christopher McDougall’s Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance (Knopf, 2015). In choosing this book, I mean no disrespect to McDougall, nor do I mean to imply that his book is weak or flawed. His book is just one of thousands today that take the exclusive explanatory power of Darwinian evolution as a given and expect their readers to do the same.
A Survey of Books Not Selected
Rather than choose McDougall’s book, I could have taken up the works of Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett, but, like their fellow new atheist Dawkins, they thankfully reject the racist and eugenicist implications of their Darwinian worldview.
I could have considered the fine work of Jared Diamond, whom I respect and admire, but his works are so reductive that they border perilously close on being anti-humanistic. I could have looked at the provocative and entertaining work of Oliver Sacks, but the stories he tells, far from proving Darwinism, prove that Christianity is correct to teach that we are not souls trapped in bodies but enfleshed souls, and that therefore whatever happens to our bodies (brains) has a direct effect on our souls (minds).
I could even have selected the work of my personal hero, Jordan Peterson, but, though he bases many of his bracingly true insights on Darwinian macroevolution, those insights only necessitate a microevolutionary belief that God equipped every species with adaptation strategies and that He sometimes re-used those strategies.
Why Heroism Makes No Darwinian Sense
So, McDougall it is, but let me say again what a wonderful book Natural Born Heroes is. If you are interested in the legacy of ancient Greece, the Greek theater of WWII, the nature of heroism, or the newest breakthroughs in health, diet, and exercise, you will enjoy this book. If, like me, you are interested in all four, then it is a must read. At the core of the book are questions of perennial importance: what prompts people — like the British and Cretan rebels who risked all to liberate Crete from the Nazis — to perform self-sacrificial acts of heroism, and how are they able to accomplish those acts physically?
Though he goes on to suggest all manner of Just So Darwinian stories to account for the heroic altruism of the Cretans, McDougall begins by confessing that natural selection alone cannot explain why people do such things.
Even Charles Darwin found heroes bewildering. Darwin’s great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics: your one and only goal on earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and leave behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk a grave for someone else if there’s no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids: smart. Dying for a rival’s? Genetic suicide.3
Evolved Bodies? Maybe
In trying to account for this Darwinian conundrum, McDougall tells fascinating stories about how our bodies are capable of far more than we might think. The elastic fascia (connective tissue) that runs through our body is remarkably tough and resilient, and we can run off the fat stores in our body for a remarkably long time. Our fight or flight instincts can be channeled, and our fascia retains a physical memory of what we once did and can do again.
Could some of these physical capabilities have evolved in a group of hominid primates? Perhaps, but, as I explained above, those hominids were not human. McDougall does make convincing arguments that early hunter-gatherers had these physical skills, but those hunter-gatherers were as fully human as the “cavemen” artists of Lascaux, and, in any case, they still exist today side-by-side with modern “evolved” humans.
Evolved Souls? Impossible
It is true that our bodies are equipped to perform heroic and altruistic deeds and that our instincts often allow us to call on that equipment in situations of great stress and danger, but that does not explain why we choose (consciously) to perform altruistic deeds rather than run away — which our bodies are equally equipped to do. It is also true that our decision to choose the way of altruism is often instilled in us by myths and legends passed down by our ancestors, but those stories were passed down by human beings who were themselves conscious agents and who made conscious choices that very often ran counter to the instinctual demands of their bodies.
Perhaps a Darwinian scientist will someday come up with a way to account for the chemical composition of the DNA by means of natural selection. Even if he succeeded in doing so, however, he would still be unable to account for the non-physical information that is frontloaded on to those chemical strands.
The Real Root of Heroism
Near the close of his book, McDougall questions a nonagenarian survivor of the Cretan resistance as to why he and his fellow freedom fighters acted so altruistically. The answer he receives strikes him with the power of a divine revelation, and he assures us that he will never forget that rare moment of illumination. But the answer that is revealed to him points not to the iron-clad laws of natural selection but to a uniquely human legacy of people — primitive or modern, hunter-gatherer or urban — who so transcended their biology and their animal instincts as to achieve an ethical spirit and a moral imagination qualitatively different from anything in the animal kingdom: “When you live in a place like this — small, by itself — you’re brought up to give help, not wait for it….When your neighbor needs something, he needs you. The person he knows. Not the army. Not the police. You. And if you’re not there, someday you’ll have to look him in the face and explain” (emphasis in original).4
McDougall, for all his great insight into the way the human body works, cannot reduce heroism to the Darwinian goal of multiplication. Nor can his Just So stories account for why he, and all of us, are so powerfully drawn to the actions of heroes that we cannot stop writing and reading engaging books like Natural Born Heroes.
Louis Markos, PhD, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his 22 books include The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes (CAP, 2020), and From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith (IVP, 2021).
NOTES
- B. S. Haldane, “When I Am Dead,” Possible Worlds (1927), quoted in C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, rev. ed. (1947, 1960; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 22.
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940; New York: Macmillan, 1973), 65.
- Christopher McDougall, Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance (New York: Knopf, 2015), 26.
- McDougall, Natural Born Heroes, 310.