by Mike Gray

Unlike so many of today’s putative spokesmen for traditional beliefs—but especially those academicians on virtually all the campuses of schools founded for the training of seminarians—the great twentieth century English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton wasn’t afraid to mix it up with some of the best atheists of his day in his defense of orthodox Christianity. In his writings and his debates, his eloquence, confidence, and sheer brilliance often compelled his critics to submit to the force of his arguments while nevertheless retaining a warm respect for him personally.

At CMI, Lita Cosner highlights some of Chesterton’s thoughts on the subject of Darwinian evolution. In his day, nothing seemed to be able to withstand “the new science,” the central foundation of which was an adamantine commitment to materialism:

‘Things that the old science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles [he said] are hourly being asserted by the new science.’

Chesterton derided this inflexible materialism as essentially self-defeating, an impediment to clear thought and progress:

Chesterton conceded that these materialists were completely logical and reasonable in their belief system, but that it was a very small internal consistency which denied even the possibility of miracles; their belief system explained everything by natural events, which can be logical enough (bearing in mind that there is a difference between logical consistency and truth), but because that was the central tenet of their ideology, they could not admit even one miracle. He argued that the orthodox Christian was freer than the materialist because Christians could believe in both natural and supernatural causes for events; Christianity can explain both physical laws and miracles.

As Chesterton put it:

‘As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. … He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.’

Concerning that narrower brand of materialism, Darwinism:

One of Chesterton’s main complaints against Darwinism is that it was advanced as a fact long before it was even a well-established hypothesis …. Chesterton argued that it would have been more productive to discover ‘what is actually known about the variation of species and what can only plausibly be guessed and what is quite random guesswork,’ but ‘the Darwinians advanced it with so sweeping and hasty an intolerance that it is no longer a question of one scientific theory being advanced against another scientific theory. … It is treated as an answer; and a final and infallible answer.’

Even today, Darwinism is treated as “a final and infallible answer.” To Chesterton, however, it was more than just a scientific dispute:

As dubious as the scientific claims of evolution seemed to Chesterton, the philosophic implications of Darwinism were to him the more dangerous threat. … ‘The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism and modern cosmic religion [he wrote] is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.’

Cosner ends her essay with a short account of a 1931 debate between Clarence Darrow (for Darwinism) and Chesterton. A member of the audience remembered it:

Whatever brilliance Darrow had in his own right, it was completely eclipsed. For all the luster that he shed, he might have been a remote star at high noon drowned by the bright incandescent light of the sun. Chesterton had the audience with him from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not wishing to leave.

Shortly afterward Henry Hazlitt wrote in The Nation:

Ostensibly the defender of science against Mr. Chesterton, [Darrow] obviously knew much less about science than Mr. Chesterton did; when he essayed to answer his opponent on the views of Eddington and Jeans, it was patent that he did not have the remotest conception of what the new physics was all about. His victory over Mr. Byran at Dayton had been too cheap and easy; he remembered it not wisely but too well. His arguments are still the arguments of the village atheist of the Ingersoll period; at Mecca Temple [where the debate took place] he still seemed to be trying to shock and convince yokels.

Mr. Chesterton’s deportment was irreproachable, but I am sure that he was secretly unhappy. He had been on the platform many times against George Bernard Shaw. This opponent could not extend his powers. He was not getting his exercise.

People—students, parents, and a handful of professors—who chafe at the censorship and authoritarianism of today’s campus commissars could use an intelligent and charismatic champion like G. K. Chesterton.

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Lita Cosner’s CMI article.

The American Chesterton Society homepage.

A few non-fiction Chesterton books available on Amazon.com: Orthodoxy – Alarms and Discursions – What’s Wrong with the World – Eugenics and Other Evils – The Everlasting Man.