A recent book by a Nobel prize-winner in biology, Jacques Monod, is proving a best-seller in France and Germany and is causing much discussion in Britain. Written as it is by an expert in the field of molecular biology with a flair for philosophical thought, it poses a serious challenge to Christian belief in the uniqueness of man and his need of redemption. Monod’s undisguised aim is to demolish what he calls the ‘anthropomorphic illusion’. Galileo in removing the earth from the centre of the cosmos failed to achieve it, advances in biology at the molecular level, he claims, give every promise of succeeding—in fact have succeeded. ‘We would like’, he says, ‘to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophers, and even part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency.’ Armed with the latest advances in molecular biology he sets out with overweening confidence and in places superb skill to lay bare the evolutionary process from the level of simple molecules to the greatest mystery of all, human consciousness. Not content with that achievement he then offers a panacea for the modern spiritual malaise—a formidable undertaking.

Monod stands in the tradition of materialistic philosophers dating back to the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus and the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius. He has more facts at his command but less poetry. Strangely he ignores this tradition and makes a simple opposition between the objectivity of science and ‘vitalistic’ and ‘animistic’ philosophies. ‘Vitalistic’ theories place the teleonomic principle (that which preserves and reproduces the structural form) in the heart of living matter, i.e. these theories imply a radical distinction between living beings and inanimate matter.