The ancient Greeks were not evolutionists (Essay 1, “Origins and the Greeks”). It was not that they had an a priori prejudice against a gradual developmental origin for organisms (including humans) but that they saw no real evidence for it. More importantly, they could not see how blind law – that is to say, natural law without a guiding intelligence – could lead to the intricate complexity of the world, complexity serving the ends of things, particularly organisms. This need to think in terms of consequences or purposes, what Aristotle called “final causes,” was taken to speak definitively against natural origins.

It was not until the seventeenth century – what is known as the Age of the Enlightenment – that we get the beginnings of evolutionary thinking (Essay 2, “Evolution before Darwin”). This could have happened only if there was something, an ideology, sufficiently strong to overcome the worry about ends. Such an ideology did appear, that of progress: the belief that through unaided effort humans could themselves improve society and culture. It was natural for many to move straight from progress in the social world to progress in the biological world, and so we find people arguing for a full-scale climb upward from primitive forms, all the way up to the finest and fullest form of being, Homo sapiens: from “monad to man,” as the saying went (Fig. Introduction.1). It was not generally an atheistic doctrine, being more one in line with “deism,” the belief that God works through unbroken law. But it did increasingly challenge any biblical reading of the past, and it went against evangelical claims about Providence, the belief that we humans unaided can do nothing except for the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.