An Open Letter to Atheists Who Question Darwinism
Dear atheist who doubts Darwin,
You need help! In the age of social media, the kind of attention you are attracting is not good. A Newman University/YouGov survey on evolution last year described your position as "startling." And they did not mean it as a compliment:
Of those who identified as atheists (as a sub-set of non-religious people) we found that nearly 1 in 5 UK atheists (19%) and over 1 in 3 of Canadian atheists (38%), somewhat agree, agree or strongly agree with the statement: "Evolutionary processes cannot explain the existence of human consciousness." (This compares to 34% in the UK and 37% in Canada across the whole non-religious sample and 54% in the UK and 55% in Canada of religious or spiritual people.) The survey recorded comparable results for human evolution in general.1
If you won't conform, won't shut up, and won't stop thinking, you need help affirming your reasons.
Trouble from the Top
First, your approach isn't really "startling." The evidence today supports your doubts, though the science establishment is reluctant to discuss it. And you do not need to believe in God to accept the evidence. You need only to believe, in principle, that evidence can be objective, that it comes from outside ourselves, and that we can understand it.
The trouble with current science claims begins at the top. The discoveries that would support a randomly generated universe, where human consciousness is an evolved illusion, were never made. Stubborn problems, old and new, make them less likely than ever to be made. A top science story for 2017 in Cosmos magazine tells us that the universe's underlying symmetry, far from yielding to a simple formula, is "still baffling."2 We also learned last year that researchers at CERN think the universe should not exist due to the exceedingly delicate balance of factors.3 A widely offered explanation is that, in an infinite array of universes, ours just happens to have these particular characteristics.4 But the infinite array itself is an untestable and evidence-free proposition. To make the array science, some theoretical physicists have sought to change the rules to say that evidence is not needed, only theoretical elegance.5 In short, science becomes an art, judged by aesthetics, rather than science as we understand it today.
If you think things have gone wrong, you are right.
Are you surprised when you hear that world-famous chemist James Tour wonders why "everyone is lying" about the origin of life?6 He means that each new year brings yet more hype for easy explanations that don't work, except that they add to swelling bibliographies for the next year's explanations, which also won't work. One basic problem no one addresses is this: Life forms are not just alive; they strive to remain alive. Rocks, by contrast, are not alive and don't even try to be.7 A solution that even addresses such a gap requires new insights, not just another round of papers.
Complex & Messy
So now, what about evolution? We are expected to believe in evolution. But what exactly does it mean? Few dispute that past life forms have differed from present ones; think trilobites, triceratops, and trumpeter swans. But the term "evolution" is often used to mean something quite different: the specific belief—championed by media-friendly figures like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—that natural selection acting on random genetic mutations among fertile life forms produces all life and all of life's aspects, including our own minds. Popular science media assume that this view is "science."
Respected atheist intellectuals, such as philosophers Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) and Jerry Fodor (1935-2017), dispute a number of aspects of that claim. So did Karl Popper (1902-1994), who pioneered the idea of falsification in science. Whole groups of biologists (the Altenberg 16 and the speakers at a recent Royal Society conference, for example) are also rethinking it.8 They are not impressed with the science behind it.
We know much more about evolution than we used to. Genes can be transferred across the kingdoms of life; changes during an organism's lifetime can be inherited; life forms can converge (i.e., they don't start the same, but they end up the same), or else just not change at all for hundreds of millions of years.9 Evolution is a complex, messy history, not well suited to authoritarian demands for only one interpretation. When in doubt, doubt.
All this is before we even get to human evolution, which is where, I gather, you really began to doubt the official story. The last couple of decades have overturned most of what we thought we knew. In 2017 alone we learned that we (homo sapiens) are not recent but are 300,000 years old, tools and all. And that humans left Africa "multiple times" before the famous "Out of Africa" story of 60,000 years ago.10 Our view of our ancestors has changed, too. Neanderthals, who have disappeared into the modern population, were simply not as dumb as we were given to understand.11 There is too much flux right now to put stock in any "overwhelming consensus."
The Main Doubt
And so we come to what you most doubt, that the human mind evolved by purely Darwinian means from something like the sponge mind. Many people believe that. But they don't believe it because of information from the tools of science. Neuroscience, for example, has not shown that we are brainy meat robots with the illusion of autonomy.12 Quite the contrary. Brain imaging shows that, for example, some humans function with very little brain. There are even conjoined twins who retain individuality while controlling each other's body parts.13 Whatever the mind is, it is not anything like a machine.
Even so, we keep hearing that artificial intelligence will become conscious like us—and, says Stephen Hawking, maybe destroy us. But we have no idea at present what consciousness even is.14 Great physicists have understood consciousness as being immaterial.15 "Immateriality" is not in itself a religious concept. It means that human consciousness is more like information than like matter. In that case, we cannot be sure at present if it evolved over time in the way that life forms do, let alone how.
You doubtless want to build your life on science rather than religion. But science culture today is in deep trouble on several fronts. First, while "modern" science was fairly sure of its boundaries (the study of the natural world via consistently fruitful methods), postmodernism does not provide such firm philosophical underpinnings. It is now difficult to determine what science even is. For example, well-known physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder has tried explaining it as a "community of practice,"16 but then, so is voodoo. One could adopt a practical approach instead and say that science is what peer reviewers accept at journals. But journals face massive problems with peer review today. At Times Higher, we read that peer review is an "ineffective and unworthy" institution. At Nature, it has been called "unscientific."17
This problem affects us personally. Recently, for example, nutrition researchers said bluntly, "'Nutrition' is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape."18 Year after year, we hear science leaders say things like this, but few seem to want to have a conversation about whether facts matter and why.
Keep Looking
Science journalism is not much help, either. For one thing, it is not often very thoughtful. For example, at New Scientist, we are asked: Did a huge dose of dopamine make us so smart?19 There is nothing wrong with speculation in principle, but if we grasp what consciousness is, why assume that some quick fix just happened to cause it? That's not science; it's stubborn belief.
The popular certainty that we are merely animals whose brains evolved for fitness, not truth, is ideological. It is not scientific. Perhaps people are beginning to suspect that. Popular science publications are struggling to survive.20 A higher level of education, researchers say, gives us more reasons to doubt establishment explanations, not necessarily more readiness to believe them.21
In short, this is a good time to be an atheist who doubts Darwin. There are people who do not have enough faith to be an atheist, as Frank Turek put it, but if you do, you need to keep looking for the best and truest information. Good luck!
Denyse O'Learyis a Canadian journalist, author, and blogger. She blogs at Blazing Cat Fur, Evolution News & Views, MercatorNet, Salvo, and Uncommon Descent.
Get Salvo in your inbox! This article originally appeared in Salvo, Issue #44, Spring 2018 Copyright © 2026 Salvo | www.salvomag.com https://salvomag.com/article/salvo44/when-in-doubt
