Evolution is a child of the Enlightenment. For the Greeks, ongoing organic change was simply ruled out by the design-like nature of organisms (Sedley 2008). They must be understood in terms of what Aristotle called “final causes.” The eye is for seeing, the hand is for grasping. The Greeks could not see how this intricate, purposeful complexity could have come about by blind law, and so they denied the possibility of what Charles Darwin called “descent with modification.” This fixity was reinforced when Christianity appeared and when the new religion decided to take on board what Thomas Carlyle called “Jewish old clothes.” It was by no means obvious to the early members of the church that they had to adopt the Old Testament as canonical – it was after all the record of a group who had brought on the death of the Christian Savior. However, particularly under the influence of Saint Augustine (ca. 400 c.e.), it was appreciated that making sense of Christian drama demanded the background of the Jewish history, and so the early chapters of Genesis became an integral foundation of the Christian religion.

This happy fusion of Greek philosophy and Jewish religion lasted for more than fifteen hundred years. The earth was young, organisms were created by divine fiat, humans (just one pair) came last, and shortly thereafter almost everything was wiped out by a worldwide flood. As we move from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, various factors acted to break the stranglehold of this vision. First there was the rise of science: in the physical sciences there arose thoughts that perhaps origins could be explained naturally; in the earth sciences, suspicions that so complex an entity as the globe could not be quite as young as once suspected. Then there were the pressures from philosophy and religion. The great French philosopher René Descartes lived and died a practicing Catholic. But his Meditations introduced the idea of a malignant being that deceives us all, and although Descartes himself thought he had contained this being, others were not quite so sure. Even more corrosive was both the Reformation (with at least two variants of Western Christianity, why should one be true and not the other?) and the discovery of non-Christian faiths in the East (who is to say that Buddhists or Confucians are completely wrong in their ignorance of the Christian story?).