And Another Thing | 7 February 2009

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense. The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect. Some worship science as a faith and a way of life. Others hate it. Occasionally on the Quantocks I see fierce young men in semi-military kits, often crudely armed, who vary their activities between physically attacking staghound followers and besieging laboratories where animals are used for experiments. In appearance and behaviour they resemble the original zealots or Sicarii of the time of Christ, who met nemesis at Masada. I do not exactly fear them, any more than I fear the Muslim suicide bombers whom they so much resemble. But their appearance, on the heath once tramped by those gentle nature-lovers Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth, adds to my concern about what is happening to the world.

The atheistic pantheists who have now taken to advertising their beliefs on buses stand close to those who wish to deify Charles Darwin, and have taken the opportunity to do so on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Of course they are not the first. Leslie Stephen, a former clergyman who lost his faith as a result of On the Origin of Species, ‘admired Darwin as a god’, and some of the things he wrote, about his centrality in modern intellectual history, have the flavour of the Apocalypse.