08.31.07
Darwin’s angel
Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion
THIS BOOK IS A PIECE of sheer heaven. It kicks Richard Dawkins’s self-aggrandising polemic, The God Delusion, into touch with featherlight footwork and is deliciously wise, witty and intellectually sharp into the bargain.
John Cornwell’s mouthpiece is a likeable seraph, who follows the dictum of G. K. Chesterton that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly”. Cornwell clearly believes, as I do, that angels are not wispy, winged beings in ethereal nightgowns, but something far more subtle and profound: archetypal images that dramatise the invisible realities. As such, they can act as symbols for the formless elements of physics; but also for the creative imagination.