This book had support from the religiously inclined Templeton Foundation, which according to its website funds research about human purpose and ultimate reality; it benefits from the idea of Cambridge Divinity Faculty's Sarah Coakley, ‘to place scholars of religion into active research groups in the sciences’ (151), in this case with evolutionary biologists. Peter Woodford tackles questions of what, if anything, biological evolution tells us about religion's nature, ethical values, and life's meaning and purpose. He argues that new light is shed by discussion of Darwin in a context of nineteenth-century Germany, introducing Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ‘life-philosophy’ arising from engagement with evolutionary ideas evoked fruitful responses. The author considers three such responses, and consideration of these four men comprises the body of the book. He understands that for some the approach may be too historical.
Woodford's other players are theologian Franz Overbeck, sociologist Georg Simmel, and neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. Exploration of value is central (cf. 122, 167 n. 41). Woodford's four key figures ‘all approached the relationship between religion and science through the question of the place of value in nature’ (17). He sees science and religion as relating to one another with his thinkers’ approach shaped by two claims. ‘The first of these claims is that all human action, including the activity of thinking, is teleological; it is directed by and aimed at ideals, values and norms that guide and are meant to be realised in or through action’ (17). At the forefront is the question of how science and religion understand the teleological (21–23). ‘The second claim is that some of these values have the peculiar characteristic that they are taken to be normative’ and ‘understood to be intrinsically valuable’ (17). There is ambivalence on Nietzsche's part between the descriptive and, on the other hand, the normative (38).
The Introduction picks up not only on historical background with Aristotle and Kant on teleology (22) but also on recent research and on popular culture. For example, attention is given to several individuals from among the so-called New Atheists, whom Woodford finds ‘not very sophisticated’, not least because ‘science and religion are contrasted crudely in terms of “faith” versus “fact” ’ (9, cf. 149–150). There is engagement with the development of morality (23). Woodford discusses altruism, especially William Hamilton's concept of ‘kin-selection’ and evolutionary game theory (6–7). I would not myself describe Hamilton's position as Woodford does, but careful footnotes referencing recent work are helpful. Nor would I see altruism as so neatly accounted for yet by scientists, as Woodford initially suggests, though this is tempered later (159 n. 46).
Woodford notes the interest in purposiveness in nature that scientists interrogate, and also notes Nietzsche's interest in self-organizing entities (36). The author had cited Kant's saying that there could be no Newton of a blade of grass (2). I'm not sure why divergence with Darwin seems suggested here. The reason may be that Woodford takes Kant's teleology to be more akin to that of some theologians than it can really sustain. The issue is the apparent intentions of developed entities, compatible with mechanistic natural selection. Even so, Woodford is careful here, and rightly so. Kant's dictum is much disputed and difficult to interpret. Kant claims in the Critique of Judgement (Ak.5:400) that we should not hope for laws of nature to explain the apparent purposiveness of living entities as Newton had provided for physics. Kant means that causal explanation in biology needs to be worded differently from causal laws terminology in physics. This is the case in Darwin's own explanation of natural selection, which in any case is a diachronic exploration, as distinct from Newton's and Kant's synchronic focus in physics and teleology respectively. Botanists and others may aspire to explain the seeming intentionality of daily activities in living entities in as mechanistic a form as possible, but for accuracy any mechanistic formulations, whether provisional or offered as canonical, are answerable to basic phenomena of apparent purposiveness or intention.
Natural selection as mechanistic is not fully acknowledged in saying ‘Darwin convincingly argued that life forms arise and go extinct over the longue durée of geological time through struggle and competition’ (21). Natural selection is relevant for a discussion of teleology, but this is not examined here; instead Woodford discusses its repercussions for questioning what forms of agency humans had within this process (21; cf. 130–131). Returning to Nietzsche, I recommend turning to Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 461–466, for an engaging discussion of Nietzsche's response to Darwin. Indeed, this is a book that Woodford cites in his Bibliography.
Nietzsche pits life against the nihilism that he perceives in modern scientific culture (34–35). He sees an even longer tradition of negative thinking (39–40). Importantly, ‘Nietzsche's shocking thesis about science and religion is that, far from being the enemy of the Christian, moral-religious vision of life, science is actually driven and sustained by the latter's core ascetic project’ (47). This radical view is accompanied by ‘a plea for an affirmation of life’; this was to be a ‘human flourishing in harmony with the universe’ (49). However, the author delivers an objection which he had already raised in the Introduction in speaking of G. E. Moore's ‘open question’ that had reinforced recognition of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (8). The devastating criticism of Nietzsche's project comes in the conclusion to chapter 1: ‘As Nadeem Hussain points out, even if we grant that life is driven to affirm itself, and that this offers a genuine form of human flourishing, this still does not entail that we ought to affirm it or to pursue this form of flourishing’ (49, 159 n. 35; cf. 123).
For all that Woodford makes an inspiring case for insight from Nietzsche into attitudes to life, I found it difficult to extrapolate to a view of Darwinian evolution either as pessimistic or as anti-pessimistic. It was helpful, however, to be clear that the basic Darwinian science was readily accepted by Nietzsche. It occurs to me on the topic of nihilism or pessimism that famously, before publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, in mourning for the death of the closest of his friends, takes up geological time and speaks of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’. In appraising responses to evolution, we are not in a new field of pessimism, the dark night of the soul for the believer being well known.
A close personal friend of Nietzsche, Franz Overbeck was a church historian in the theological faculty in Basel. His later influence on twentieth-century theology is seen in Karl Barth, who concurred with ‘Overbeck's critique of the turn to history ushered in by nineteenth-century liberal theology’ (55). While Overbeck rejected attempts ‘to place theology on any foundation other than life’, Barth found the division between scientific history and religion sufficient reason ‘to turn to the immediacy of encounter with scripture’ (55). It is worth quoting here from Roger White's Talking about God, 141 n. 11: ‘In “Unsettled Questions for Theology Today”, Barth quotes Franz Overbeck . . . : Theologians expect indeed “to put God daily in their bag”.’ I suspect many historians would find much of interest in this chapter. I found it helpful to have Bernard Williams referenced on the distinction between history and myth (60–61, 65, 157 n. 2). Woodford, I think, concludes that Overbeck mirrors Nietzsche's tension between wanting to be free of values while needing to use them.
Next, Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money is discussed at length (87–97), though his view of science as ‘dedicated to truth for its own sake’ (101) is relatively unexplored, as is his rejection of ‘Kant's universalising “categorical imperative” ’ (103). Kant reappears in the chapter on Heinrich Rickert. The dizzying array of other names, citing influence by Rickert, includes William James and pragmatism (106, 115, 129, 148). William James would emphasize disambiguation to dissolve conflicts. Meanwhile Rickert's concern for truth is emphasized (119).
The book's very title is stimulating. For Darwin, sympathy is the origin of morality (42). Two issues not taken up by the author, but which so greatly concerned Darwin, require change of direction from the origin of morality. Darwin questions morality in nature, first whether nature is cruel, second whether some of nature's inhabitants could really be supposed to be destined for a hell hereafter. On the first topic, Darwin on the famous example of ichneumon wasps is arguably anthropomorphic about physiology in entomology. On the second topic, while we met Thomas Malthus on competition and cooperation (6), it is ironic that, in using so far as I know the sixth edition, Darwin missed out on Malthus's first edition, where in his last chapter the clergyman Malthus raises what would be Darwin's objection, positing that we should think of annihilation at death rather than a hell. Darwin's mentor for his science here wears a theologian's hat.
Nevertheless, Peter Woodford's book ranges very widely. It is of particular interest for the historical background to some of the questions in contemporary philosophical debate. A number of typos are easily resolved except, when citing the source for John Hedley Brooke's article ‘Darwin and Victorian Christianity’, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin lost its editors Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick. In the Conclusion there is a fascinating discussion of Marjorie Grene (143–144), whom Woodford sees as shifting attention away from Kant, though I should want to acknowledge her excellent work with David Depew in 2004 on Kant's biological essays, which they see as potentially anti-racist. The book's strengths for me lay not so much in the Conclusion, as in enjoying such an invigorating Introduction. While science's own relation now to truth and relevance to human needs is under conflicting discussion, I wonder whether the pursuits of science and theology in this respect are significantly and intrinsically different, so that while indeed we should wish to learn as much as possible of relevance from science, these two great disciplines are essentially complementary, a feature the author may under-emphasize.
