Darwin after Dawkins after Derrida

Abstract

One of the principle tropes in the Western religious imaginary is that of God as a master craftsman (or, alternatively, the idea of the demiurge). Such an idea is self-evidently the product of a culture or cultures in which handicraft is the main, if not sole, means of production. With the emergence of mechanistic philosophies, and mechanical means of production, this changed. In the section on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in The Disappearance of God, J. Hillis Miller writes that ‘[H]aving created me and the rest of the world, [God] has apparently withdrawn from his handiwork, and lives somewhere above or beyond or outside, occupied with his own inscrutable activities. He is a God that hides himself. This is the religious situation in which many men of the nineteenth century find themselves ….’¹ One result of this was the emergence of conceptions of the Universe as a machine designed and set off by God, similar to a clock or watch. Perhaps the most famous expression of the universe as a watch was by William Paley in his book Natural Theology: Or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity.