![\"St.](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2025\/03\/St_Louis_Gateway_Arch_1916.jpg\")
<\/a>The flight today from Salt Lake City to St. Louis took something on the order of two and a half hours. \u00a0O, the suffering that I endure for my art! \u00a0I couldn\u2019t help but associate myself in my mind with the discomforts and hardships undergone by nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint pioneers, who often traveled roughly the same route, albeit in reverse. \u00a0(They commonly came through St. Louis for supplies as they began their journey across the plains and over the Rockies to settle in the Great Basin.). But they<\/em> were able to devote a leisurely six months to sauntering along the trail, as opposed to my<\/em> frenetic pace of 150 minutes. \u00a0And do you think that they<\/em> had to settle for mini-bags of pretzels? \u00a0Were they<\/em> required to listen to piped-in Muzak as they waited for take-off? \u00a0Clearly, I\u2019m a martyr.<\/p>\n Among other things, during the flight from Salt Lake City I began reading Neil Thomas, Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design<\/em> (Seattle: Discovery Institute, ) \u00a0Here is an associated biographical blurb about him:<\/p>\n Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England, and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich, and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. There his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern German history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic. He published over 40 articles in a number of refereed journals and a half dozen single-authored books, the last of which were Reading the Nibelungenlied<\/em> (1995), Diu Crone and the Medieval Arthurian Cycle<\/em> (2002) and Wirnt von Gravenberg\u2019s \u2018Wigalois\u2019: Intertextuality and Interpretation<\/em> (2005). He also edited a number of volumes including Myth and its Legacy in European Literature<\/em> (1996) and German Studies at the Millennium<\/em> (1999). He was the British Branch President of the International Arthurian Society (2002-5) and remains a member of a number of learned societies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019m certainly not a dedicated enemy of theories of biological evolution. \u00a0I think that my favorable column in Meridian Magazine<\/em> about\u00a0Samuel T. Wilkinson, Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence<\/em> (New York and London: Pegasus Books, 2024) \u2014 \u201cHow Can We Make Sense of Evolution?: A Latter-day Saint Perspective\u201d<\/a> \u2014 especially when it\u2019s coupled with my subsequent October 2024 video interviews with Dr. Wilkinson and Ben Spackman,<\/a> should establish my credibility in that regard beyond reasonable dispute.<\/p>\n I simply don\u2019t think it tenable (or helpful to religious faith) to claim, flatly, that there is no serious evidence for significant biological change over time, let alone to pretend that the theory of evolution is solely or principally the result of some imagined godless conspiracy.<\/p>\n That said, atheistic ideology has sometimes motivated certain advocates of evolution, just as, unfortunately, some onetime religious believers have fallen into naturalistic atheism because of what they believe to be the entailments of evolutionary theory. \u00a0More to the point here, though, I believe that informed critics of the several varieties of Darwinian theory have raised important questions that shouldn\u2019t merely be brushed off with a dismissive wave of the hand, as is commonly done. \u00a0In that light, I\u2019ve enjoyed the very limited portion of Taking Leave of Darwin<\/em> that I\u2019ve read thus far, and I think that I\u2019ll share a few of the passages that I\u2019ve marked in it to this point. \u00a0For now, I\u2019ll confine myself to a few things from his Prologue, as well as the epigraph to his first chapter:<\/p>\n After years of simply assuming Darwinism to be true, he says, he gradually began to entertain the possibility that \u201cthe grand story of evolution by natural selection was little more than a creation myth to satisfy the modern age.\u201d \u00a0And, in his view, this isn\u2019t merely an academic issue, \u201cfor if there is one subject that has had huge, often convulsive implications for the generality of humankind, it is Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution.\u201d<\/p>\n Thomas readily admits that, while he has now read widely about the topic, he possesses no formal qualifications for writing on the subject of biological evolution. \u00a0But, he writes, \u201cthe subject is of too universal an import to be left entirely in the hands of subject specialists, some of whom exhibit an alarming degree of bias and intransigent parti pris<\/em> unconductive to the dispassionate sifting of scientific evidence.\u201d \u00a0Of himself, he says that \u201cI have long been a non-theist and can at least give the assurance that the critique which follows will be based solely on rational criteria and principles.\u201d<\/p>\n As the epigraph to the first actual chapter of Taking Leave of Darwin<\/em>, Thomas cites the prominent American philosopher Thomas Nagel, of New York University, who is an avowed atheist. \u00a0In his book Mind and Cosmos,<\/em>\u00a0Nagel writes,<\/p>\n I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist Neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. \u00a0It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. . . . \u00a0 I find this view antecedently unbelievable \u2014 a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. \u00a0The empirical evidence can be interpreted to accommodate different comprehensive theories but in this case the cost in conceptual and probabilistic contortions is prohibitive. \u00a0(Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialistic Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Almost Certainly False<\/em> [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], 6, 128)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/a>