In a typically dense article in a volume of essays on William Desmond, Milbank suggests that both Darwin and 18th-century design theories were operating with similar post-Scotist and Newtonian notions of God’s relation to the world. He sees a quite direct analog between the development of Darwinian theory and Newtonian physics: “while absolute space and time and the force of gravity represent the direct presence, this is still manifest in a totally regular fashion expressible by comprehensible laws. There appeared to be no biological equivalent to this regular divine governance, so both [The Bridgewater Treatises and The Origin of Species] are interested in compensating for this lack in terms of discovering more regular immanent at work in features exhibiting apparent organic design . . . . The difference is that, in the case of the Bridgewater Treatises, divine design ultimately explains the mutual adaptation of species and environment; while in the case of the Origin of Species the immanent law of one-way selective adaptation of species to environment becomes a sufficient explanans unto itself.”
Mix in some Malthus: “Darwin’s central move was to extend the Malthusian political economy to the economy of life as such. In doing so, he at last completed the Newtonian ambitions of the English design tradition - which one might describe as a bizarre fusion of a rather tame picture of nature on the one hand with the idea of a nature as ‘hard school’ of training in order and excellence on the other. On the one hand, watercolours; on the other, cross-country runs.”
The result is that modern biology suffers from an inherent ambiguity: “insofar as Darwinism remains pure, it belongs to old-fashioned, possibly outmoded Newtonian science; insofar as it can be correlated with modern physics, it ceases to remain, exactly, Darwinism.”
Milbank suggests that evolution only retains its Newtonian feel if one remains, as Dawkins does, as the genetic level. But he says that there’s no reason why natural selection shouldn’t happen at higher levels as well. He notes the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky, who examined “auto-poetic and internal shifts in animal constitution that are more to do with adaptation to an environment than with the struggle for scarce terrain. Indeed, such a perspective has brought to the fore how species actively modify their own environment, and can sometimes modify it in harmony with other species with whom they form a yet larger quasi-grouping.”
He points out that Darwinism cannot “escape the question as to why there is a ‘drive to survival,’ an expression which sounds just as anthropomorphic as, say, the drive to appear, or to appear as beautiful.” He also cannot escape questions about the persistence of organisms: “Why should there by any tendency in nature consistently to remain rather than endlessly to disintegrate, disseminate and re-form only momentarily? In other words, why is not the glissando of continuous variation far more absolute than it appears to be? Why are there any consistent living things at all?” In short, Darwinism cannot escape questions of teleology, and once a telos is admitted, “then there is no reason not to suggest that there is equally a biological drive to expand self-manifestation in terms of growth and engendering.” And once this move is made “it becomes more plausible to read biological life in terms of an intense manifestation on the surface of a transcendental ‘life’ that undergirds all of finite reality and is even coterminous with being as such.”