Dieu créa l’homme à son image (…) Dieu regarda tout ce qu’il avait fait, et il constata que c’était très bon. (…) C’est ainsi que furent terminés le ciel et la terre et toute leur armée. Le septième jour, Dieu mit un terme à son travail de création. (…) Dieu bénit le septième jour et en fit un jour saint, parce que ce jour-là il se reposa de toute son activité, de tout ce qu’il avait créé. Genèse 1-2
Le sabbat a été fait pour l’homme et non pas l’homme pour le sabbat. Jésus
Dieu dit à Noé: “La fin de tous les hommes est décidée devant moi, car ils ont rempli la terre de violence. (…) J’exterminerai ainsi de la surface du sol tous les êtres que j’ai créés.” Genèse 6-7
Il fait lever son soleil sur les méchants et sur les bons, et il fait pleuvoir sur les justes et sur les injustes. Jésus
Ses disciples lui firent cette question: Rabbi, qui a péché, cet homme ou ses parents, pour qu’il soit né aveugle? Jésus répondit: Ce n’est pas que lui ou ses parents aient péché. Jean 9: 2-3
Une femme oublie-t-elle son nourrisson? De montrer sa tendresse au fils de son ventre? Même si celles-là oubliaient, moi je ne t’oublierai pas. Esdras 49: 15
Longtemps, il fut une journée remplie d’obligations sociales (messes, fêtes et réunions familiales). Parallèlement à l’urbanisation et à la déchristianisation de la société française, le septième jour, libéré de ces contraintes, est entré dans l’ère du temps libre. Paul Yonnet
C’est bien la preuve que le dimanche est inscrit de manière indélébile dans notre psyché. Nous sommes imprégnés par l’idée qu’il s’agit d’un moment particulier. Jour du Seigneur pour les chrétiens ou jour de la famille dans l’idéal laïque, il charrie bons et mauvais souvenirs, nostalgie des repas dominicaux ou haine de la parentèle. Serge Hefez (psychiatre)
Notre monde est de plus en plus imprégné par cette vérité évangélique de l’innocence des victimes. L’attention qu’on porte aux victimes a commencé au Moyen Age, avec l’invention de l’hôpital. L’Hôtel-Dieu, comme on disait, accueillait toutes les victimes, indépendamment de leur origine. Les sociétés primitives n’étaient pas inhumaines, mais elles n’avaient d’attention que pour leurs membres. Le monde moderne a inventé la “victime inconnue”, comme on dirait aujourd’hui le “soldat inconnu”. Le christianisme peut maintenant continuer à s’étendre même sans la loi, car ses grandes percées intellectuelles et morales, notre souci des victimes et notre attention à ne pas nous fabriquer de boucs émissaires, ont fait de nous des chrétiens qui s’ignorent. René Girard
L’inauguration majestueuse de l’ère “post-chrétienne” est une plaisanterie. Nous sommes dans un ultra-christianisme caricatural qui essaie d’échapper à l’orbite judéo-chrétienne en “radicalisant” le souci des victimes dans un sens antichrétien. (…) Le mouvement antichrétien le plus puissant est celui qui réassume et “radicalise” le souci des victimes pour le paganiser. (…) Comme les Eglises chrétiennes ont pris conscience tardivement de leurs manquements à la charité, de leur connivence avec l’ordre établi, dans le monde d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, elles sont particulièrement vulnérables au chantage permanent auquel le néopaganisme contemporain les soumet. René Girard
En ce qui concerne l’aspect théologique de la question, il est toujours pénible pour moi. Je suis déconcerté. Je n’avais aucune intention d’écrire en faveur de l’athéisme mais, où que je regarde autour de nous, j’avoue qu’il m’est impossible de voir aussi clairement que d’autres, et comme je le voudrais bien, la preuve d’un dessein et d’une bienveillance. Il me semble qu’il y a trop de misère dans le monde. Je ne peux pas me persuader qu’un dieu bienveillant et tout-puissant aurait créé exprès les ichneumonidés dans l’intention qu’ils se nourrissent du corps vivant de chenilles ou le chat pour qu’il jouât avec les souris… D’un autre côté, en revanche, je ne peux pas me contenter de voir cet univers magnifique et surtout la nature de l’homme et conclure que tout cela n’est que le résultat de forces brutes. Je suis disposé à regarder toute chose comme provenant de lois faites à dessein, mais dont les détails, soit bons soit mauvais, auraient été abandonnés à ce que nous pouvons appeler le hasard. Charles Darwin
La supposition que l’œil ait été formé par l’évolution me semble au plus haut point absurde. Darwin
(…) l’extrême difficulté ou plutôt l’impossibilité de concevoir cet univers immense et magnifique, y compris l’homme avec sa capacité de regarder au loin dans le passé et dans le futur, comme le résultat d’un hasard ou d’une nécessité aveugle. Quand je réfléchis ainsi, je me sens obligé d’imaginer une Cause première douée d’un esprit intelligent, analogue à un certain degré à celui de l’homme ; et je mérite d’être appelé théiste. Darwin
Il est intéressant de contempler un rivage luxuriant, tapissé de nombreuses plantes appartenant à de nombreuses espèces abritant des oiseaux qui chantent dans les buissons, des insectes variés qui voltigent çà et là, des vers qui rampent dans la terre humide, si l’on songe que ces formes si admirablement construites, si différemment conformées, et dépendantes les unes des autres d’une manière si complexe, ont toutes été produites par des lois qui agissent autour de nous. (…) N’y a-t-il pas une véritable grandeur dans cette manière d’envisager la vie, avec ses puissances diverses attribuées primitivement par le Créateur à un petit nombre de formes, ou même à une seule ? Darwin (dernières lignes de L’Origine des espèces)
Si intentionnellement, nous en arrivions à négliger les faibles et les sans défenses, cela ne pourrait être que pour un bénéfice incertain, au prix d’un crime actuel accablant . Nous devons donc accepter les effets, sans aucun doute néfaste, de la survie et de la propagation des faibles. (…) Bien que la lutte pour l’existence ait été et est toujours importante, il y a, en ce qui concerne les parties les plus hautes de la nature humaine d’autres forces à l’oeuvre plus importante. En effet les qualités morales progressent, de manière directe ou indirecte, beaucoup plus à travers les effets des coutumes, de la raison, de l’instruction, de la religion, etc., qu’à travers la sélection naturelle. Darwin (1871)
Des dix enfants qu’il eut de sa cousine germaine Emma, née Wedgwood, Darwin en a vu mourir trois : sa seconde fille et troisième enfant, Mary Eleanor, la cadette d’Annie, était morte à trois semaines le 16 octobre 1842, d’une tuberculose et de l’ignorance médicale. Près de seize ans plus tard, au moment même où se préparait la première communication de la théorie sélective au public de la Linnean Society of London, un petit garçon âgé de dix-huit mois, Charles Waring, mourut de la scarlatine le 28 juin 1858. Il était en outre probablement atteint du « syndrome de Down » – du nom du médecin John Langdon Down (triste coïncidence homonymique avec le lieu de résidence des Darwin), qui n’identifia qu’en 1866, sous les termes d’idiotie mongoloïde, cette pathologie appartenant à la classe des idioties congénitales. Sans doute Darwin n’avait-il pas oublié que sa propre mère, née Susannah Wedgwood, elle-même issue de consanguins, s’était éteinte à l’âge de cinquante-deux ans, sans que la médecine, si présente et si puissamment injonctive dans la lignée de son époux, ait pu seulement retarder sa fin. La conscience aiguë d’un risque lié à la reproduction entre proches apparentés était telle chez Darwin qu’il ne cessa d’en appeler à des enquêtes officielles sur ses éventuelles conséquences. Son deuxième fils, George Howard, fut à ce sujet l’auteur d’une investigation statistique précise portant sur les familles de 4822 aliénés, et ses conclusions furent plutôt rassurantes, la proportion d’unions consanguines y excédant de peu ce qu’elle était dans la population normale. Darwin se rangea à l’opinion de ceux qui estimaient que la consanguinité n’était pas en elle-même une cause directe de déficits sanitaires, mais augmentait les chances de leur convergence aggravée dans la descendance en annulant du même coup toute possibilité – due, incontestablement cette fois, à la diversité des souches et au croisement hétérogène – d’enrichissement des qualités biologique et de rajeunissement dans les lignées, l’homme tombant à cet égard sous la même règle de mélange nécessaire qu’il a appliquée, pour renouveler leur vigueur, aux animaux domestiques, et qu’il a négligé, par préjugé et présomption, de s’appliquer à lui-même. Patrick Tort
Pour Darwin, la science adulte est nécessairement athée dès lors et tant qu’elle est la science. Qu’il ait soigneusement évité de proclamer un athéisme personnel ne doit pas dissimuler l’athéité nécessaire du rationalisme moniste qui gouverne son appréhension du monde vivant et la totalité de son œuvre. Dans ses Carnets, il revendiquait en effet déjà le matérialisme comme voie unique d’exploration causale des processus immanents, c’est-à-dire comme condition fondamentale de toute intelligibilité dans les sciences de la nature, s’étendant naturellement à l’explication de la complexité humaine. Alors que le christianisme s’arrogeait le privilège exclusif de dire la vérité « sur l’Homme et sur son histoire », c’est la théorie darwinienne qui, à partir de 1871 et à travers un renversement qu’aucune Église ne pourra complètement admettre, s’est donné le droit d’analyser la religion elle-même comme un fait évolutif et un objet parmi d’autres pour une anthropologie désormais installée sur ses bases naturelles. Note de l’éditeur (Darwin et la Religion. La conversion matérialiste, Patrick Tort, 2011)
Charles Darwin, connu pour être un croyant devenu progressivement agnostique a en fait vécu une véritable “conversion matérialiste”. (…) Face à la société, toutefois, il ne se déclarera jamais ouvertement athéiste (“au sens”, dit-il, “de celui qui nie l’existence de Dieu”), évitant ainsi de sortir du champ de la science et de mettre sa théorie en péril dans un univers où l’enseignement de l’histoire naturelle et de la géologie est encore dominé par les membres du clergé anglican – lesquels cependant, pour la plupart, ne s’y tromperont pas. Son choix affiché de l’agnosticisme – notion parodiquement inventée en 1869 par la facétieuse ironie de Huxley payant son droit d’entrée à la Société de métaphysique en greffant avec malice une désinence de doctrine sur le simple refus de prétendre connaître ce qui dépasse l’expérience – ne saurait cependant exprimer une conviction. Charles Conte
Toutefois, si sa théorie de l’évolution est en effet, c’est l’une de ses conséquences, l’antidote sans doute le plus radical contre la religion, Darwin reconnaissait tout de même à cette dernière… une fonction dans l’évolution. Elle devenait donc un objet d’étude parmi d’autres pour l’anthropologie sociale. (…) à rebours des conclusions tirées par Herbert Spencer et d’autres à partir de sa propre théorie – et consistant à dire que la sélection naturelle règne en maîtresse sanglante sur la société humaine comme dans l’ensemble du monde vivant (et qu’il faudrait donc la relayer dans cette œuvre…) –, Darwin innova encore en déterminant que les instincts sociaux et altruistes furent eux-mêmes sélectionnés comme des avantages adaptatifs au sein du monde animal. Mais, surtout, il affirma que ces dispositions morales, souvent portées chez l’Homme dans un premier temps par les religions, tendent à contrecarrer les effets habituels de la sélection naturelle elle-même : celle-ci aurait donc sélectionné sa contradiction, résultat que Tort appelle « l’effet réversif de l’évolution ». La loi de fer de la survie du plus apte cède ainsi tendanciellement la place, chez l’Homme, à la préservation des plus faibles quel qu’en soit le coût. Yann Buxcel
Quand la “loi de fer de la survie du plus apte” cède la place à la “préservation des plus faibles” …
En ces temps étranges où, entre la défense syndicale du Jour du seigneur et l’appel écolo à la création de nouveaux jours fériés juif et musulman et après le mariage polygame (pardon: le “concubinage multiple”) et le “mariage homosexuel”, on verra peut-être un jour prôner le droit au ”mariage inter-espèce” …
Pendant que, face à un Dieu et une religion qui n’en finissent pas de mourir, nos astronomes n’en reviennent toujours pas de la désespérante étroitesse des conditions d’habitabilité de notre planète …
Retour, avec le récent livre du directeur de l’Institut Charles Darwin International Patrick Tort et contre les tentatives de sa récupération religieuse (jusque sur son lit de mort!), sur la longue marche de Darwin pour se libérer du joug tyrannique de la religion.
Où l’on découvre, derrière la nécessité tactique d’avancer masqué pour sauver sa théorie, la véritable ”conversion matérialiste“ du père fondateur de l’évolutionnisme moderne.
Mais aussi, chez ce fervent partisan des lois d’assistance aux pauvres contre les dérives de ses émules “darwinistes sociaux“, la réintégration, jusque dans sa théorie, de la propre contradiction de celle-ci.
A savoir les dispositions morales (pardon: les ”instincts sociaux et altruistes”) portés jusque là, et avant leur nécessaire dépérissement pour cause d’archaïsme superstitieux, par les religions.
Se voyant ainsi promues, d’entraves aux “effets habituels de la sélection naturelle”, à “avantages adaptatifs au sein du monde animal”.
La “loi de fer de la survie du plus apte” cèdant ainsi la place, comme le verront bien Nietzsche ou Hitler, à la “préservation des plus faibles quel qu’en soit le coût” …
Darwin et la Religion – Patrick Tort
Yann Buxcel
Librairie Basta
Patrick Tort, avec la collaboration de Solange Willefert
Darwin et la Religion. La conversion matérialiste
Paris, Ellipses, 2011, 549 pages.
Ce livre est une mise au point érudite et exhaustive sur un sujet où régnait jusqu’ici une certaine ambiguïté, voire une ambiguïté certaine (et entretenue ?) : quelle était la position de l’inventeur de la théorie de l’évolution par variation / sélection à propos de la religion ? Cette question peut désormais être considérée comme résolue.
La réponse que donne Patrick Tort, directeur de l’Institut Charles Darwin International, directeur de la publication des Œuvres complètes de Darwin aux éditions Slatkine, auteur à la bibliographie conséquente et lauréat de nombreux prix, s’appuie sur un ensemble impressionnant d’éléments à la fois biographiques et théoriques. En effet, il faut dire conjointement que, d’une part, comme l’indique le sous-titre de l’ouvrage, l’évolution de Darwin par rapport à la religion consiste bien en une conversion personnelle, et que, d’autre part, celle-ci a tout à voir avec la mise au point progressive de sa théorie.
Il faut tout le savoir encyclopédique de Patrick Tort pour restituer les débats scientifiques de l’époque et entrer véritablement au cœur de la théorie afin de faire comprendre la révolution darwinienne – et le pourquoi de la haine qu’elle a toujours suscitée chez ses détracteurs théologiens.
Darwin lui-même, comme le montre l’ouvrage d’une façon convaincante, s’il ne fut pas agnostique (position jugée inconsistante) mais bien athée, n’a pourtant jamais cherché à provoquer cette fureur, préférant « feinter » avec ses contemporains sur cette question plutôt que les attaquer de front. L’auteur décortique les usages rhétoriques qui en découlent tout au long d’une analyse de texte portant sur l’œuvre entière. Au final, il se révèle cependant certain que Darwin acquit et conserva jusqu’à la fin de sa vie une incrédulité totale (« total disbelief », comme il l’écrivit lui-même en 1876).
Peut-être déjà incliné au scepticisme par son héritage familial (il se trouve notamment que son grand-père Erasmus Darwin, qui était un savant, fut un auteur transformiste précoce, c’est-à-dire qu’il pensait déjà avec raison et contre la doxa de l’époque, que les espèces n’étaient pas fixes mais se modifiaient), Charles, qui dans ses jeunes années était sincèrement croyant et qui se destinait d’abord à la vie tranquille de pasteur de campagne, remettra radicalement en question le dogme, et ce à partir des observations naturalistes effectuées lors de son tour du monde sur le Beagle, observations qui « induisaient principalement une interprétation de la nature, physique et vivante, en termes de processus immanents, complexes et de longue durée » (p. 243), et qui sont évoquées dans son Journal de bord (à paraître chez Slatkine en septembre 2011, dans une édition scientifique illustrée préparée par Patrick Tort). Cette remise en question personnelle sera non seulement radicale mais également irréversible, et la meilleure raison à cela est que Darwin a mis au point, en science et pour le bénéfice de l’humanité entière, rien de moins que la théorie à la fois la plus matérialiste et la plus cohérente qui soit sur un ensemble de questions – l’origine des espèces vivantes et la place de l’humanité dans le monde animal – parmi les plus cruciales pour le dogme religieux auquel il croyait lui-même initialement. Ce qui fait l’intérêt universel de ce livre traitant d’une question qui, à première vue, peut sembler de pure érudition, voire de détail.
Toutefois, si sa théorie de l’évolution est en effet, c’est l’une de ses conséquences, l’antidote sans doute le plus radical contre la religion, Darwin reconnaissait tout de même à cette dernière… une fonction dans l’évolution. Elle devenait donc un objet d’étude parmi d’autres pour l’anthropologie sociale. « C’est ainsi que la religion, qui a toujours prétendu dire la vérité de la nature, devra devenir un objet pour une branche de l’histoire de la nature » (p. 51).
Il a lui-même, dans son second ouvrage majeur, La Filiation de l’Homme et la Sélection liée au sexe, exposé ses conceptions sur l’Homme. Il faut d’abord souligner qu’à rebours des conclusions tirées par Herbert Spencer et d’autres à partir de sa propre théorie – et consistant à dire que la sélection naturelle règne en maîtresse sanglante sur la société humaine comme dans l’ensemble du monde vivant (et qu’il faudrait donc la relayer dans cette œuvre…) –, Darwin innova encore en déterminant que les instincts sociaux et altruistes furent eux-mêmes sélectionnés comme des avantages adaptatifs au sein du monde animal. Mais, surtout, il affirma que ces dispositions morales, souvent portées chez l’Homme dans un premier temps par les religions, tendent à contrecarrer les effets habituels de la sélection naturelle elle-même : celle-ci aurait donc sélectionné sa contradiction, résultat que Tort appelle « l’effet réversif de l’évolution ». La loi de fer de la survie du plus apte cède ainsi tendanciellement la place, chez l’Homme, à la préservation des plus faibles quel qu’en soit le coût.
Mais cet effet « rend compte chez Darwin, indissociablement, de l’évolution conjointe du rationnel et de l’éthique » (p. 197) : la religion est appelée, de par sa nature superstitieuse liée aux périodes archaïques de l’évolution des cultures, à dépérir.
Là encore, les éléments biographiques et théoriques se répondent d’une façon cohérente, puisque Darwin a été en son temps, contrairement à ceux qu’on a fort improprement appelés les « darwinistes sociaux », partisan des lois d’assistance aux pauvres. On peut, en suivant ce fil, noter, par exemple, que le mouvement ouvrier et d’autres mouvements progressistes incarnent en quelque sorte, par les conquêtes sociales qu’ils ont réalisées pour tous et toutes, le point le plus avancé de l’évolution humaine. La conclusion, également politique, de Patrick Tort revient quant à elle plutôt sur la nouvelle offensive du créationnisme et… les tentatives de « reconquête évangélique » de la théorie darwinienne elle-même.
La moitié des cinq cent cinquante pages de l’ouvrage est constituée de trois Annexes : le premier porte sur « Géologie et christianisme jusqu’à Darwin » ; la seconde contient des citations clé de Darwin sur la religion, mises en contexte par l’auteur ; la troisième est un texte d’E.B. Aveling, libre-penseur, athée et militant socialiste, sur « Les opinions religieuses de Charles Darwin », qui commence ainsi :
« Depuis la mort de notre grand professeur, les membres du clergé, qui l’avaient auparavant stigmatisé avec cette volubilité dont une longue pratique dans l’art de l’invective a fait d’eux les maîtres consommés, ont revendiqué l’illustre mort comme l’une de leurs brebis. Non contents d’inhumer dans l’Abbaye de Westminster l’homme qu’ils avaient tous injurié et calomnié, l’homme dont ils avaient tourné en dérision les grandes découvertes, ils ont eu l’audace de dire que l’enseignement de l’Évolution est en accord total avec celui de l’Église et de la Bible. »
L’ensemble de ce livre défend l’option inverse de celle de ces hommes d’Église et la question n’est, on espère l’avoir montré, pas de simple détail.
Pour finir sur une touche amusante, notons une ironie du hasard présente dans l’index en fin de volume: « Dieu » se trouve, le pauvre, coincé entre « Diderot » et « Dinosaure ».
Voir aussi:
Charles Conte
Mediapart
14 Mars 2011
Charles Darwin, connu pour être un croyant devenu progressivement agnostique a en fait vécu une véritable « conversion matérialiste ».
Un article de Patrick Tort. Patrick Tort est directeur de l’Institut Charles Darwin International. Il vient de publier “Darwin et la religion” aux Editions Ellipses.
Passé, ainsi qu’il le confie lui-même, de l’« orthodoxie » relative de la jeunesse à l’« incrédulité totale » de l’âge mûr, Darwin a lié cette « conversion » au progrès irréversible de sa connaissance scientifique de la nature. Rompant nécessairement, dès son choix du transformisme en 1837, avec l’obligation de croire aux énoncés de la théologie dogmatique, il rompra également avec les argumentations palliatives de la théologie naturelle « créationniste », de même, ultérieurement, qu’avec tout providentialisme soucieux de réinscrire le fait accepté de l’évolution dans la préméditation infaillible et secrète d’un « dessein » transcendant. Face à la société, toutefois, il ne se déclarera jamais ouvertement athéiste (« au sens », dit-il, « de celui qui nie l’existence de Dieu »), évitant ainsi de sortir du champ de la science et de mettre sa théorie en péril dans un univers où l’enseignement de l’histoire naturelle et de la géologie est encore dominé par les membres du clergé anglican – lesquels cependant, pour la plupart, ne s’y tromperont pas. Son choix affiché de l’agnosticisme – notion parodiquement inventée en 1869 par la facétieuse ironie de Huxley payant son droit d’entrée à la Société de métaphysique en greffant avec malice une désinence de doctrine sur le simple refus de prétendre connaître ce qui dépasse l’expérience – ne saurait cependant exprimer une conviction.
L’usage darwinien de ce postiche est socialement auto-protecteur en même temps qu’il est, plus profondément, un opérateur d’exclusion de la métaphysique et une transaction temporaire permettant l’institution positive de la science comme champ de vérité élaborant ses propres normes. L’idée d’un Dieu agissant directement sur le monde par la voie du miracle rendant toute science improbable, le rejet du miracle et le rejet du Dieu magicien sont une réciproque impliquée par toute démarche de connaissance objective affranchie des superstitions de l’enfance. Pour Darwin, la science adulte est nécessairement athée dès lors et tant qu’elle est la science. Qu’il ait soigneusement évité de proclamer un athéisme personnel ne doit pas dissimuler l’athéité nécessaire du rationalisme moniste qui gouverne son appréhension du monde vivant et la totalité de son œuvre. Dans ses Carnets, il revendiquait en effet déjà le matérialisme comme voie unique d’exploration causale des processus immanents, c’est-à-dire comme condition fondamentale de toute intelligibilité dans les sciences de la nature, s’étendant naturellement à l’explication de la complexité humaine.
Alors que le christianisme s’arrogeait le privilège exclusif de dire la vérité « sur l’Homme et sur son histoire », c’est la théorie darwinienne qui, à partir de 1871 et à travers un renversement qu’aucune Église ne pourra complètement admettre, s’est donné le droit d’analyser la religion elle-même comme un fait évolutif et un objet parmi d’autres pour une anthropologie désormais installée sur ses bases naturelles.
Voir également:
Was Charles Darwin an Atheist?
Leading Darwin expert and founder of Darwin Online, John van Wyhe, challenges the popular assumption that Darwin’s theory of evolution corresponded with a loss of religious belief.
The religious views of Charles Darwin, the venerable Victorian naturalist and author of the Origin of Species (1859) never cease to interest modern readers. Bookshops and the internet are well-stocked with discussions of Darwin’s views and the implications of his theory of evolution for religion. Many religious writers today accuse Darwin of atheism. Some popular proponents of atheism also enlist Darwin to their cause. Even while Darwin was still alive there were widely varying descriptions of his religious opinions – which he kept mostly private. In 1880 the Austrian writer Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg visited Darwin at his home, Down House, in Kent. The coachman who drove Hesse-Wartegg from the train station at Orpington opined of the famous Mr. Darwin: “Ha es en enfidel, Sar- yes, an enfidel — an unbeliever! and the people say he never went to church!”. The passage quoted here was actually marked in Darwin’s copy of this German newspaper (the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt) – no doubt it amused Darwin as much as the German attempt to capture the Kentish accent through phonetic spelling.
Other commentators were more generous in their interpretations of Darwin’s religiosity. The modern myth of a timeless conflict of science and religion was far from the reality experienced by Victorian readers who first turned the pages of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man (1871). It is now widely forgotten that the scientific debate over the theory of evolution was over within twenty years of the publication of Origin of Species. Yet how could that be given that the Victorians were, by and large, far more religious than people generally are today and the scientific evidence for evolution was far less complete than it is now? The explanation is that for very many Victorians the choice was not between God and science, religion or evolution, but between different notions of how God designed nature. It was already widely accepted that fixed natural laws (or secondary laws) had been discovered that explained natural phenomena from astronomy and chemistry to physiology and geology. Darwin, it was believed, had simply discovered a new law of nature designed by God. And it seems this was how Darwin himself viewed at least part of the religious implications of his evolutionary theory. This also makes it all the more understandable that Darwin was buried by the nation in Westminster Abbey in 1882.
“A Venerable Orang-outang”, a caricature of Charles Darwin as an ape published in The Hornet, a satirical magazine
A few of Darwin’s private letters referring to religion were published near the end of his life and more after his death. These have been very widely quoted in the voluminous discussions of Darwin’s religious views. Searching for other material which might have bearing on the question of his religious views, I turned to Darwin Online, an online repository of Darwin’s corpus where it is possible to search the works by key term. Putting in terms like ‘atheist’ and ‘atheism’ I found what seems to be a previously unknown discussion of this question by Darwin himself. The passage occurs in Darwin’s lengthy 1879 “Preliminary notice” to the English translation of Ernst Krause’s biography of Darwin’s freethinking paternal grandfather, the poet and physician Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). Darwin addressed the question of whether his grandfather was an atheist:
Dr. Darwin has been frequently called an atheist, whereas in every one of his works distinct expressions may be found showing that he fully believed in God as the Creator of the universe. For instance, in the ‘Temple of Nature,’ published posthumously, he writes: “Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe, and consonant to the dignity of the creator of all things.” He concludes one chapter in ‘Zoonomia’ with the words of the Psalmist: “The heavens declare the Glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.”
He published an ode on the folly of atheism, with the motto “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” of which the first verse is as follows:—
1.
Dull atheist, could a giddy dance
Of atoms lawless hurl’d
Construct so wonderful, so wise,
So harmonised a world?
It is curious that this passage has not been noticed before. If Charles Darwin argued that his grandfather’s frequent published “expressions” about a creator meant he was not an atheist, it is possible to put Darwin’s own writings to the same test. By searching his published writings on Darwin Online for “creator” one can quickly see the life-long use that Darwin made of this language
The first occurrence is in his first book, Journal of Researches (first edition of 1839, based on his Beagle diary) now known universally as The Voyage of the Beagle referring to an excursion in Australia:
A little time before this I had been lying on a sunny bank, and was reflecting on the strange character of the animals of this country as compared with the rest of the world. An unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason might exclaim, “Two distinct Creators must have been at work; their object, however, has been the same, and certainly the end in each case is complete.”
The term does not appear in Darwin’s published writings again until the first edition of Origin of Species (1859) and the many different editions and rewordings that followed until 1872.
Darwin next used the term in his following book on the pollination adaptations of orchids in 1862:
This treatise affords me also an opportunity of attempting to show that the study of organic beings may be as interesting to an observer who is fully convinced that the structure of each is due to secondary laws, as to one who views every trifling detail of structure as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator.
This shows Darwin’s position very clearly. Even more informative are the concluding paragraphs of *Variation of Animals and Plants (1868), one of his clearest and most powerful expressions of his theory of natural selection:
Some authors have declared that natural selection explains nothing, unless the precise cause of each slight individual difference be made clear. Now, if it were explained to a savage utterly ignorant of the art of building, how the edifice had been raised stone upon stone, and why wedge-formed fragments were used for the arches, flat stones for the roof, &c.; and if the use of each part and of the whole building were pointed out, it would be unreasonable if he declared that nothing had been made clear to him, because the precise cause of the shape of each fragment could not be given. But this is a nearly parallel case with the objection that selection explains nothing, because we know not the cause of each individual difference in the structure of each being. The shape of the fragments of stone at the base of our precipice may be called accidental, but this is not strictly correct; for the shape of each depends on a long sequence of events, all obeying natural laws; on the nature of the rock, on the lines of deposition or cleavage, on the form of the mountain which depends on its upheaval and subsequent denudation, and lastly on the storm or earthquake which threw down the fragments. But in regard to the use to which the fragments may be put, their shape may be strictly said to be accidental. And here we are led to face a great difficulty, in alluding to which I am aware that I am travelling beyond my proper province. An omniscient Creator must have foreseen every consequence which results from the laws imposed by Him. But can it be reasonably maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered, if we use the words in any ordinary sense, that certain fragments of rock should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice? If the various laws which have determined the shape of each fragment were not predetermined for the builder’s sake, can it with any greater probability be maintained that He specially ordained for the sake of the breeder each of the innumerable variations in our domestic animals and plants;— many of these variations being of no service to man, and not beneficial, far more often injurious, to the creatures themselves? Did He ordain that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man’s brutal sport? But if we give up the principle in one case,—if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order that the greyhound, for instance, that perfect image of symmetry and vigour, might be formed,—no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided. However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines,” like a stream “along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, the plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as that redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination.
Then in 1871 Darwin addressed the subject of religion in the Descent of Man:
Belief in God—Religion.—There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea. The question is of course wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe; and this has been answered in the affirmative by the highest intellects that have ever lived.
And in the conclusion to the second volume Darwin wrote:
He who believes in the advancement of man from some lowly-organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shewn, possess no clear belief of this kind; but arguments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period in the development of the individual, from the first trace of the minute germinal vesicle to the child either before or after birth, man becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the period in the gradually ascending organic scale cannot possibly be determined.
Darwin himself was not entirely consistent in the language he used to describe his beliefs. And of course his views changed over the course of his life. Starting in 1876 he began writing a private autobiography for his children and grandchildren. In it he mentioned the change in his religious views. A gradual scepticism towards Christianity and the authenticity of the Bible gradually crept over him during the late 1830s – leaving him not a Christian, but no atheist either; rather a sort of theist. To be a ‘theist’ in Darwin’s day was to believe that a supernatural deity had created nature or the univerise but did not intervene in the course of history. Darwin used the term in one famous passage in the autobiography:
… the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker.
At other times he used the term ‘agnostic’ – a word coined and made fashionable by the naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley. In an 1879 letter, written around the same time as the autobiography and first published in Life and Letters, he writes:
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
Given the paucity of evidence, and the ambiguity of the statements that do remain, we will probably never be able to completely refine our definition or understanding of Darwin’s religious views. But that is not to say that there are some things that cannot be known. One point is abundantly clear, all the surviving evidence contradicts the assertion that Darwin was an atheist.
——————————————————————————–
John van Wyhe is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. He has published four books on Darwin, including the illustrated biography: Darwin (Andre Deutsch 2008). He is also founder and director of Darwin Online.
Voir de même:
Religious critics of evolution are wrong about its flaws. But are they right that it threatens belief in a loving God?
Shankar Vedantam
February 5, 2006
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . .Isaiah 11:6
What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature. Charles Darwin
Ricky Nguyen and Mariama Lowe never really believed in evolution to begin with. But as they took their seats in Room CC-121 at Northern Virginia Community College on November 2, they fully expected to hear what students usually hear in any Biology 101 class: that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was true.
As professor Caroline Crocker took the lectern, Nguyen sat in the back of the class of 60 students, Lowe in the front. Crocker, who wore a light brown sweater and slacks, flashed a slide showing a cartoon of a cheerful monkey eating a banana. An arrow led from the monkey to a photograph of an exceptionally unattractive man sitting in his underwear on a couch. Above the arrow was a question mark.
Crocker was about to establish a small beachhead for an insurgency that ultimately aims to topple Darwin’s view that humans and apes are distant cousins. The lecture she was to deliver had caused her to lose a job at a previous university, she told me earlier, and she was taking a risk by delivering it again. As a nontenured professor, she had little institutional protection. But this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.
It took a while for Nguyen, Lowe and the other students to realize what they were hearing. Some took notes; others doodled distractedly. Crocker brought up a new slide. She told the students there were two kinds of evolution: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution is easily seen in any microbiology lab. Grow bacteria in a petri dish; destroy half with penicillin; and allow the remainder to repopulate the dish. The new generation of bacteria, descendants of survivors, will better withstand the drug the next time. That’s because they are likely to have the chance mutations that allow some bacteria to defend themselves against penicillin. Over multiple cycles, increasingly resistant strains can become impervious to the drug, and the mutations can become standard issue throughout the bacterial population. A new, resistant strain of bacteria would have evolved. While such small changes are well established, Crocker said, they are quite different from macroevolution. No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory.
The students leaned forward. They were starting to realize that this was unconventional material for a biology class. Many scientists, Crocker added, believe that complex life reveals the hand of an intelligent designer. The theory of intelligent design holds that while the evolutionary forces of random genetic mutation and natural selection may shape species on a small scale, they cannot account for the kind of large-scale differences between, say, chimpanzees and humans. Only some form of intelligence — most people read that phrase as “God” — could have accounted for the origin of life from nonliving matter, or the existence of complex structures within cells and organisms that rely on many parts functioning together. While many advocates of the theory of intelligent design, including Crocker, are religious, some are not. What unites these advocates is not religion but the belief that supernatural forces are active in everyday life. Science, they say, fails to see the true nature of the world when it refuses to admit anything other than material evidence. Crocker believes that biological systems cannot grow more complex on their own any more than a novel, through chance typographical errors, can turn into a different book, with a different story. How could anyone think that new books get written because of typos in old books?
Ripples of excitement spread through the class. Crocker took the students on a tour of experiments that she said were supposed to prove evolution. In the 1950s, she said, scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey ran electricity through a soup of chemicals to show how chemicals on the early Earth could assemble themselves into the building blocks of life.
“Anyone read about it?” she asked.
“It’s in our book,” a student said.
Crocker said that subsequent research had shown that chemicals used in the experiment did not exist on Earth 4 billion years ago. “The experiment is irrelevant, but you still find it in your books,” she said.
She cited another experiment, involving researcher Bernard Kettlewell, who produced pictures of variously colored peppered moths on tree trunks to show that when the moths were not well camouflaged, they were more likely to be eaten by birds — a process of natural selection that influenced the color of the moths. “This comes from your book — it is not actually true,” Crocker said. “The experiment was falsified. He glued his moths to the trees.”
Gasps and giggles burst out. Why was the experiment still in the textbook? Crocker said the authors’ answer was, “because it makes the point . . . The problem with evolution is that it is all supposition — this evolved into this — but there is no evidence.”
The students sat stunned. But Crocker was not done. From this ill-conceived theory, she concluded, much harm had arisen. Nazi Germany had taken Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, the credo that only the fittest survive, and followed it to its extreme conclusions — anti-Semitism, eugenics and death camps. “What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science, that some genes and some people should be killed,” Crocker said quietly. “My grandfather had a genetic problem and was put in the hospital and killed.”
Nguyen was among the first students to speak. “With so many things disproving evolution and evolution having no proof, why is it still taught?” he asked.
“Right now, in our society, we have an underlying philosophy of naturalism, that there is a material explanation for everything,” Crocker replied. “Evolution came with that philosophy.”
Carolyn Flitcroft, a student in one of the front rows, said: “So far, we have only learned that evolution is true. This is the first time I have ever heard it isn’t.”
“I lost my job at George Mason University for teaching the problems with evolution,” said Crocker, a charge that the university denies. “Lots of scientists question evolution, but they would lose their jobs if they spoke out.”
As more students began to speak, many expressed what were clearly long-held doubts about evolution. Nguyen said later that Crocker had merely provided evidence for what he had always suspected.
When Lowe finally spoke, it seemed as if the lecture had lifted a load from her shoulders. “I believe in creationism, I believe in intelligent design,” she declared to the class. Humans have souls, which make them different from other animals, she told me later. To believe in evolution meant that “after you are dead, you are done.” Without the accountability of Judgment Day and Hell, why would people follow the Ten Commandments?
A woman in the back of the class raised her hand. Her voice shook with emotion. “If science is the pursuit of truth, why is evolution not questioned?”
“I’ve heard scientists say people won’t understand, so they should be told only one side,” Crocker replied.
There was a long moment of silence. Finally the student said, “Isn’t that lying to the public?”
Crocker declined to answer the question, but someone else grimly observed, “Won’t be the first time.”
I went up to this last student after the class. She initially agreed to be identified, but moments later, remembering what Crocker had said about the scientific establishment’s intolerance of dissent, she begged me not to publish her name. The fear on her face was palpable. She wanted to be a veterinarian and was convinced that dream would be smashed if powerful scientists learned she had dared to question evolution.
Before the class, Crocker had told me that she was going to teach “the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.” Afterward, I asked her whether she was going to discuss the evidence for evolution in another class. She said no.
“There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution,” Crocker said. Besides, she added, she saw her role as trying to balance the “ad nauseum” pro-evolution accounts that students had long been force-fed.
Late last fall, Crocker debated Alan Leshner, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The audience was a group of seventh-grade students at Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School in Falls Church. Leshner will not debate opponents of evolution in person, and he will not debate them in a science class, because the science association believes that such events convey a false sense to the public that there really exists a scientific controversy over evolution. As a result, Leshner and Crocker spoke to a debating class on consecutive weeks.
The theory of evolution, Leshner announced to the students, was as firmly established as the theory of gravity. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be disproved, just that no one had ever done so — or even raised any significant doubts. Leshner grabbed a set of papers and books. If the theory of gravitation still held true, it predicted with very high probability that the bundle would fall. He let go, and the papers and books landed with a thud.
“Whew!” he quipped. “That’s a relief.”
Evolutionary theory, Leshner explained, does the same thing. It explains and makes predictions about the living world that hold up. Even though Darwin’s theory predated — by a century — the discovery of DNA and a scientific understanding of the role of genes in heredity, the more science learns, the more the living world looks exactly like what would be expected if evolution were true. All living things are built from the same genetic toolbox, and species that evolution predicts are closely related share more genetic material than those that evolution says are far apart. Humans and chimps, for example, share 96 percent of their DNA sequence. Intelligent design’s argument that evolution cannot explain the origin of astoundingly complex biological systems such as the flagellum of bacteria — the microscopic, whiplike propulsion system with multiple interdependent parts — is indistinguishable, Leshner said, from the bland assertion that science has not explained everything. Unexplained, however, is not the same as unexplainable. When ID advocates see something unexplained, they point to the supernatural. But science, by definition, looks only for natural explanations, Leshner said.
“For all I know, there was an intelligent designer, but science can’t answer the question,” Leshner told the students.
Crocker’s arguments are part of a familiar litany of half-truths and errors, said Alan Gishlick, a research affiliate at the National Center for Science Education. The Miller-Urey experiment was not intended to be evidence for evolution but part of a research program into how biological mechanisms might arise from nonbiological chemical reactions. As for gluing moths to trees, Gishlick said, researcher Kettlewell affixed the moths to trees to determine how birds spot moths of different hues. The photos were illustrations and never meant to be depictions of real life.
“They put us in a position that we have to defend things that don’t need defending, and then they come back and say, Why are you defending things that we know are wrong?” Gishlick told me, his voice rising.
While critics of evolution point to gaps in the fossil record — asking, for instance, why no fossils of intermediary species exist between land mammals and sea mammals — new discoveries regularly fill those holes. By 1994, observed Brown University biologist Ken Miller, scientists unearthed fossils of animals near the Indian subcontinent that had front and hind limbs capable of walking on land and flippering through water.
Why have such examples failed to convince doubters? Over many months of interviews about intelligent design, I gradually came to realize that evolution’s advocates and critics are mostly talking about different things. While the controversy over intelligent design is superficially about scientific facts, the real debate is more emotional. Evolution cuts to the heart of the belief that humans have a special place in creation. If all things in the living world exist solely because of evolutionary competition and natural selection, what room is left for the idea that humans are made in God’s image or for any morality beyond the naked requirements of survival? Beneath all the complex arguments of intelligent design advocates, Georgetown theologian John Haught agreed, “there lies a deeply human and passionately religious concern about whether the universe resides in the bosom of a loving, caring God or is instead perched over an abyss of ultimate meaninglessness.”
If intelligent design advocates have generally been blind to the overwhelming evidence for evolution, scientists have generally been deaf to concerns about evolution’s implications.
At a news conference last year to mark the start of a trial in Dover, Pa., where parents had sued a school board for trying to introduce intelligent design into curricula, Leshner’s science association and Gishlick’s science education center repeatedly argued that evolution has no moral implications. They insisted that science and religion could coexist easily and pointed out that many scientists who accept evolution are religious.
Many religious conservatives believe the assertion that science and religion occupy separate, non-conflicting spheres is a smokescreen, a convenient way for religious liberals to brush conflict under the carpet. That may be why Leshner’s diplomatic views are rarely mentioned by critics of evolution. And it is also why a 64-year-old biologist in England has come to occupy an outsize role in one of America’s oldest culture wars. No matter the forum, location or theme, any debate about intelligent design or evolution will sooner or later invoke the name of Richard Dawkins.
“Anyone who chooses not to believe in evolution is ignorant, stupid or insane,” said Dawkins, professor of public understanding of science at Oxford University.
Dawkins was sitting in his Victorian Gothic home in North Oxford. The house boasts high ceilings and beautiful views of the garden, and, from this sanctuary, Dawkins has penned some of the world’s best-known prose in praise of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Among religious people, Dawkins is known primarily not for his science but for his militant views on evolution’s implications, especially as they pertain to religion in general and Christianity in particular. What beneficent creator, Darwin himself asked after his voyage of discovery to the Galapagos Islands in South America, would permit the sort of suffering so widespread in nature? “The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical,” agreed the American philosopher David Hull, writing in the scientific journal Nature. “He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.”
Dawkins first shot to fame with his bestselling book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1975, which laid out the idea that animals — humans included — are essentially survival machines for genes. Individual animals die, and whole species may go extinct, but an unbroken genetic line connects every living thing on Earth. In the three decades since he wrote that book, Dawkins has seen his ideas become textbook orthodoxy, even as the notion of selfish genes has grown controversial among nonscientists. Even his wife, the biologist noted, once said, “Selfish genes are Frankensteins, and all life their monster.”
It occurred to me as I listened to Dawkins that there is a parallel between the public’s fear of selfish genes and the blockbuster science fiction movie “The Matrix,” where highly sophisticated robots take over the world: Humans in the movie do not realize they are circumscribed by unseen rules and artificial parameters; they believe they are free, when in fact they are serving the robots. Genes, Dawkins asserted, behave much like these robots, with some differences. While the robots are malevolent and manipulative, genes lack conscious intention. The “selfishness” of genes is only a metaphor. Nor are genes purely deterministic. Behavior, especially at the level of humans, is complex, and leaves much room for learning and culture. Humans can also outsmart their genetic commanders — contraceptives, for example, have disentangled the genetic lure of sexual pleasure from the genetic goal of procreation. Still, one implication of neo-Darwinian ideas is that even when people believe they are acting autonomously, they may really only be obeying the distant tugs of genes.
Dawkins’s refusal to blunt the sharp implications of evolutionary theory places him at ground zero in debates about evolution. For doubters of Darwin, Dawkins has become the poster boy of how evolutionary ideas lead — inevitably, many religious people believe — to atheism. I asked Dawkins about his propensity to rub religious people the wrong way.
“I honestly think it comes from being clear,” he said. “Some people can’t bear clarity . . . to say someone is ignorant is not insulting. I’m ignorant of baseball, and I wouldn’t be insulted if someone said, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about.’ Anyone who thinks the world is 10,000 years old doesn’t know anything about the world.”
Dawkins told me that the idea that science and religion occupy separate spheres doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Every miracle in the Bible, from the Virgin Birth to the Resurrection, tramples on what Dawkins calls the scientific grass. “Politically, it’s expedient to pretend there is no conflict,” he told me. “What I care about is what’s true, not what’s politically expedient.”
And evolutionary science has a great deal to say about ethics and morality, Dawkins said. Being “pro-life in debates on abortion or stem cell research always means pro-human life, for no sensibly articulated reason,” he once wrote. The fact that humans think of themselves as altogether distinct from other animals — and the biblical notion that humans have dominion over other animals — is a sort of racism, Dawkins said. Evolution shows that fox hunters and bullfighters are tormenting their own distant cousins, which is why the biologist sends money to anti-bullfighting groups in Spain, and why he notes with pride that fox hunting was banned on the family farm. “The melancholy fact,” Dawkins wrote in an essay called “Gaps in the Mind,” “is that, at present, society’s moral attitudes rest almost entirely on the . . . speciesist imperative.”
Darwinian ideas about natural selection are also freighted with moral import because they show that nature, while spectacularly beautiful and ingenious, requires prodigious amounts of ruthlessness and suffering to achieve its ends. The grace of the cheetah, the beauty of a butterfly’s wings and the complexity of the human brain were all achieved by the same general process that allows bacteria to evolve into a resistant strain — they required the death of those less quick, less strong and less smart.
“The sheer amount of suffering in the world that is the direct result of natural selection is beyond contemplation,” Dawkins told me. He recently published a collection of essays called A Devil’s Chaplain, drawing on a phrase Darwin employed to describe the indifferent cruelty of nature, where wasps paralyze caterpillars segment by segment so their larvae may feed on living meat: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.” But in response to his wife’s suggestion that Frankenstein-like selfish genes have created living monsters, Dawkins believes that, alone on Earth, human beings can rebel against the mechanistic indifference of nature. Understanding the pitiless ways of natural selection is precisely what can make humans moral, Dawkins said. It is human agency, human rationality and human law that can create a world more compassionate than nature, not a religious view that falsely sees the universe as fundamentally good and benevolent. That is why, Dawkins said, he donates to disaster relief efforts — work that is “un-Darwinian” — and why he is a stickler for human laws, even the unimportant ones: When riding his bicycle, he stops at red lights even when there are no traffic and police officers present.
“I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining how things are, but I am an even more passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics,” said Dawkins, who comes close to describing himself as a pacifist. “Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.”
Moral implications have attended Darwin’s theory from the beginning. The arrow that points to the past, to the origin of human beings, also points in the other direction — to human purpose and meaning.
“Moral concerns are exactly what most people who are concerned about Darwinism in the classroom are concerned about,” said Russell Moore, dean of the theology school at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. “They may not articulate it in the same way, but most Americans fear a world in which everything is reduced to biology.”
David Masci, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, who helped conduct a recent poll that found only about 1 in 4 Americans believes that humans came about through evolution alone, said that many Christians are disturbed by the Darwinian notion that human beings, far from being the point of creation, are essentially an accident: “But for a different mutation here or there, or if an asteroid had not hit the Earth 65 million years ago, none of who we are would have happened.”
Some religious scientists have argued that evolution is consistent with a God who sets the world in motion and then leaves it to function according to fixed laws, or that the evolution of intelligent life reveals a divine plan for the emergence of creatures capable of recognizing God. However, those ideas of a distant designer are at odds with the notion of a loving God who regularly intervenes in the world to lift the burdens of the faithful. “There are a lot of forms of Christianity that are not compatible with Darwinism,” said Richard Weikart, a professor of history at California State University in Stanislaus and the author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.
Weikart, who is also a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, the chief proponent of intelligent design in the United States, said Darwinism advanced the cause not of immorality, but amorality. As evidence, he pointed to the work of evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists who have applied Darwin’s ideas to human behavior and society and who have concluded that the same processes of natural selection that gave rise to eyes, hands and legs also produce emotions and behavior — even morality. Reduced to the Darwinian arithmetic of natural selection, emotions are neither good nor bad but merely appendages, such as wings or hands, selfishly designed by genes for their own survival. The distant tugs of genes may give rise to altruism, love and compassion, not just to selfishness and hatred, but that means human assertions about good and evil are just that, notions that humans impose on an indifferent universe, instead of absolute law. It would be as if human beings invented God, rather than the other way around.
“It may be difficult,” Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, “but we ought to admire the savage instinctive hatred of the queen-bee, which urges her to destroy the young queens, her daughters, as soon as they are born, or to perish herself in the combat; for undoubtedly this is for the good of the community; and maternal love or maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable principles of natural selection.”
If humans descended from animals, Weikart argued, no one could assert that humans ought to behave in qualitatively different ways from animals. And whatever Dawkins may say about humans choosing to turn their back on survival-of-the-fittest mentality, Weikart said, evolutionary ideas make the opposite more likely. “Eugenics would have had a difficult time getting off the ground without Darwinism,” he said.
Evolutionists abhor that assertion, but social Darwinism goes right back to Darwin himself. In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that it was “highly injurious to the race of man” that civilized nations care for and keep alive “the imbecile, the maimed and the sick.” And while natural selection ascribes no particular value to any trait or race — fitness is merely how well an organism adapts to its environment — the naturalist reflected the prejudices of his time, 19th-century colonial Britain, when he quoted others who worried that the “careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman” and the “inferior” Celt usually multiply faster than the “frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious” Scot and the Saxon. Darwin believed society would be aided by “the weak in body and mind refraining from marriage.”
In fairness, Darwin mostly refrained from extrapolating natural selection to human society. And he abhorred slavery at a time when many justified it as the natural order of things. Yet, it is unquestionably true that Darwinian ideas have been easily appropriated by advocates with axes to grind. In his own day, Darwin’s research was eagerly seized upon by Thomas Henry Huxley, who used evolutionary ideas to cudgel religion.
“Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules,” Huxley declared in an 1860 essay about The Origin of Species. “And history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter have been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated.”
In the caverns of the University of Cambridge, among darkened library stacks, Alison Pearn opened a small box. Inside were red, leather-bound notebooks, 3 inches by 6 inches, held shut with a metal clasp. The notebooks belonged to Darwin, and the ones we were examining reflected his notes on how evolutionary processes may explain the development of emotions. Lacking the tools of modern neuroscience, the naturalist studied animals, got nieces to monitor pets and even asked the parents of newborns to report to him on their crying babies.
On adjoining shelves that form the basis of the Darwin Correspondence Project, a massive effort by Pearn and her colleagues to collate the private letters and musings of evolution’s prime theorist, yellowing sheets bore diary entries from Darwin’s travels to South America on the HMS Beagle. Pearn delicately lifted pages of the notebooks with both hands; pens and ink of any sort were forbidden in the library area. As I examined the notebooks, I saw that Darwin’s handwriting was spidery and bore idiosyncratic little ticks above his W’s.
The origin of the moral conflicts over evolution goes back to those notebooks. They help explain why Darwin held his tongue for 20 years between his voyage and his publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Realizing the religious and moral implications of his work, Darwin told a friend, was “like confessing a murder.”
“The Origin of Species for people was a bombshell,” said Darwin biographer James Moore. “It went off like a terrorist attack on the intellectual establishment.”
Moore is a philosopher of science at the University of Cambridge, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and a co-author of Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. I spoke with him at Cambridge last year, on the sidelines of a fellowship I was attending organized by the university and the John Templeton Foundation, which seeks to build bridges between science and religion. The foundation is critical of intelligent design for discounting abundant scientific evidence but has offered forums for advocates and critics of the theory to debate one another.
Darwin himself studied at Cambridge, where he showed the same curiosity about the natural world that would mark the rest of his life. For instance, no pursuit at Cambridge, Darwin noted in his brief autobiography, gave him more pleasure than collecting beetles. On one occasion, having peeled back the bark on a tree, Darwin spotted two rare beetles. Eagerly he scooped them up in either hand. At that very moment, he spied a third beetle, which he could not bear to lose. “I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth,” Darwin wrote. “Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”
Like many educated men of his time, Darwin planned to become an Anglican clergyman. When an opportunity arose to become a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, he set out expecting “to see God’s magnificence manifested in nature,” Moore said. Throughout the voyage, there is evidence Darwin held closely to his faith, to the point that he was teased for being such a keen believer, said Thomas Dixon, a historian at Lancaster University in England. That faith endured as Darwin was writing The Origin of Species, and it was eventually shaken less by his scientific findings than by a personal tragedy that caused Darwin to reject the existence of a Christian God who was loving and good.
At one point in Darwin’s voyage to South America, Moore told me, the naturalist stopped in Brazil, where his blood ran cold to see slaves in manacles being tortured by Catholic traders. Darwin was enraged as a Christian, but also as a scientist, because he recognized that the slave trade relied on the false notion that slaves were a different, inferior and exploitable species. Upon his return to England, Darwin extended the idea to the way people treated animals, an early precursor to Dawkins’s argument about speciesism. “To say man is the pinnacle of creation and all things were created for him . . . Darwin says that is the same arrogance we see in the slave master,” said Moore. Quoting Darwin, he added that it is “more humble and I believe true to see man created from animals — because that makes us netted together in the web of life.”
Assembling and collating the staggering range of observations he made during his travels about plants, insects and animals, and drawing insights from geology and embryology, Darwin set about his argument. He realized it was going to be controversial, but far from being anti-religious, Moore said, Darwin saw evolution as evidence of an orderly, Christian God. While his findings contradicted literal interpretations of the Bible and the special place that human beings have in creation, Darwin believed he was showing something even more grand — that God’s hand was present in all living things.
“He is not degrading man,” Moore told me. “He is bringing up the rest of creation.”
But Darwin’s religious worldview was shaken after the death of a beloved daughter in 1851, when he was unable to reconcile the death to God’s will. Moore said Darwin determined that “yes, there is a God; yes, he governs by law, but the tragic consequence of these laws is that the very old and very young go out of existence . . .
“It was the personally providential Christian god that he gives up,” Moore said. “He [still] believes in the power of God, but this is not the Lord and father of Jesus Christ.”
Darwin’s dilemma reverberates to this day: The basic tenet of all religions is that everything will work out in the end, said John Green, who studies religion and science at the University of Akron. In an indifferent universe, however, “everything is not going to turn out okay in the end.”
While Dawkins believes that Darwin referred to “the Creator” in his book merely to assuage religious critics, Moore and Alison Pearn said it was a true reflection of Darwin’s beliefs.
“Darwin stared deeply into the naked face of nature without a God, and I don’t believe he could accept what he saw — that there was just this natural machine,” said Moore. The machine, Darwin eventually concluded, was the way God brought complex life into existence. This idea of a distant designer who sets creation in motion and then does not interfere with it is embraced today by many religious scientists.
“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin insisted in the conclusion to The Origin of Species. From simple beginnings “breathed by the Creator” the naturalist wrote, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
Eighteen Christians filed into the chapel of Truro Church in Fairfax. It was a sunny fall morning, and the group had shown up to listen to a different kind of sermon: Paul Julienne was giving a lecture on science and faith. Julienne is a physicist for the federal government and a believer.
“When people argue that science proves there is no God, they are taking a step beyond the science,” said Julienne. “If I have a criticism of intelligent design, it is that . . . natural theology is not the way one comes to understand God. God loves us. We’re not accidents. There is purpose. You don’t have to snap at Darwin at the heels.”
Julienne reflects two curious facets of the debate over intelligent design. The first is that while physicists were the original source of science’s conflict with the church, Christians by and large seem to have made their peace with physicists. Passages in Genesis about Earth’s central location in the universe are contradicted by astronomy, but battles between science and Christianity today are almost entirely over biology. In part, said Richard Potts, a biologist who studies human origins at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, this is because evolution requires a comprehension of enormous amounts of time; by contrast, telescopes have made Earth’s peripheral location in the cosmos obvious. But there is another reason. With the advent of quantum mechanics, physicists have come to believe that there are things about the universe that are not only unknown but unknowable. Biologists, by contrast, are far more likely to be reductionists, who believe all phenomena are explainable.
Julienne’s criticism of intelligent design echoes the concern of many people who are worried not about the consequences of intelligent design to science but about its consequences to faith. Brown University’s Ken Miller, a devout Catholic, noted in his book Finding Darwin’s God: “If a lack of scientific explanation is proof of God’s existence, the counterlogic is unimpeachable: A successful scientific explanation is an argument against God. That’s why this reasoning, ultimately, is much more dangerous to religion than it is to science.”
Why have intelligent design advocates sought to conduct the debate on scientific grounds — seeking to undermine the validity of evolutionary theory, while studiously avoiding mention of God or morality? In part, several historians said, this reflects the growing hegemony of science in a society where arguments need to be seen as scientific for them to carry weight.
Ronald Numbers, a professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied Darwinism and creationism, contends that a focus on evolution was also the only way to get creationists to set aside their own disagreements. Different groups, he told me, disagree over whether the world was literally created in seven days, as described in Genesis, whether those seven days were a metaphorical way to refer to seven epochs, or whether there were large, undocumented gaps of time between the days.
“There are three camps just within the creationists,” said Numbers. “The intelligent design people say, let’s set aside these quibbles, and let’s focus on evolution. They want to create a big tent with all the anti-evolutionists.”
While creationism in general has moved ever closer to scientific language in its various incarnations over the past century, Lancaster University historian Thomas Dixon noted that the modern debate over intelligent design — largely an American phenomenon — is really about neither science nor religion, but the American constitution, which has kept religion out of schools. The intelligent design movement, he said, is simply a reaction to this prohibition, which does not exist in Britain.
Given that so many scientists and religious people believe the theory does disservice to both science and religion, Dixon said, “a solution to this may be to have schools teach religion. Let them teach Christianity and everything else. It may be a complete and utter revolution in American history, but I’m saying it’s a good idea.”
Sitting in the pews of the church the morning I heard Paul Julienne was Caroline Crocker, the biology professor whom I had watched teach a few days earlier. I asked Crocker what she made of Julienne’s assertions about intelligent design.
“I agree it makes for weak theology,” she said.
But Crocker was reluctant to say much more. In fact, she seemed reluctant to be speaking to a reporter at all. She asked if I had seen the e-mail she had sent me the previous day; I had not. In it, she described the attacks targeted at her career as a result of her views on evolution. Losing the faculty position at GMU had left Crocker worried about how she could support a son at school in England. Family members were asking why she was sticking her neck out. Crocker and her husband, Richard, who is associate rector at Truro, believe she has become the victim of scientific authoritarianism. It is one thing to believe his wife is wrong, Richard Crocker told me, and quite another to deprive her of her right to speak.
GMU spokesman Daniel Walsch denied that the school had fired Crocker. She was a part-time faculty member, he said, and was let go at the end of her contract period for reasons unrelated to her views on intelligent design. “We wholeheartedly support academic freedom,” he said. But teachers also have a responsibility to stick to subjects they were hired to teach, he added, and intelligent design belonged in a religion class, not biology. Does academic freedom “literally give you the right to talk about anything, whether it has anything to do with the subject matter or not? The answer is no.”
Crocker said she came to her views on evolution not because of her religious faith but while working on a PhD in biology, when she learned about the complexity of the cell and the immune system. When I asked her what she made of the extraordinary genetic relatedness of living things, Crocker said she saw it as consistent with the hand of a creator, who uses the same palette of DNA to build protozoa, pandas and people.
The sense that the scientific establishment is intolerant of dissent has become common wisdom among intelligent design advocates. Many are convinced the fight should be left to tenured professors, such as biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the author of the anti-evolution tome Darwin’s Black Box, and to professionals at the Discovery Institute.
“She is really brave for it, but I felt bad that her contract wasn’t renewed,” said Irene Fanous Kamel, a student who took Crocker’s class at GMU and whose orthodox Coptic Christian family hails from Egypt. Kamel, who recently presented her own sympathetic views on intelligent design at a seminar, said she heard exasperated sighs from professors. In private, however, many students said they agreed with her. Kamel said she “would be very surprised to find another teacher talk about ID in class, unless they have tenure. It’s not welcome.”
An unintended consequence of the scientific establishment’s exasperation with evolution’s critics is that supporters of intelligent design such as Crocker and Kamel are increasingly limiting their conversations to fellow sympathizers. Among themselves, these advocates believe the wheel has turned full circle: If Galileo and Copernicus were the scientific rebels who were once punished by the dogma and authority of the church, these advocates now believe that they are being punished by the dogma and authority of science.
“Just like they say you can’t discriminate against black people, or against gays, maybe they will say you can’t discriminate against Darwin-doubters,” Crocker told me.
The personal flavor of the fight over intelligent design has been exacerbated by the political contours of the debate in the United States, where many backers of evolution fear the Christian right is seeking to impose its views on a secular nation, while religious people feel they are held in contempt by intellectuals. In an increasingly partisan atmosphere, advocates have begun to treat opponents — and not just ideas — as fair game.
Nancey Murphy, a religious scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said she faced a campaign to get her fired because she expressed the view that intelligent design was not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”
Murphy, who believes in evolution, said she had to fight to keep her job after one of the founding members of the intelligent design movement, legal theorist Phillip Johnson, called a trustee at the seminary and tried to get her fired.
“His tactic has always been to fight dirty when anyone attacks his ideas,” she said. “For a long time afterward, I would tell reporters I don’t want to comment, and I don’t want you to say I don’t want to comment. I’m tired of being careful.”
Johnson denied he had tried to get Murphy fired. He said that he had spoken with a former trustee of the seminary who was himself upset with Murphy but that he was not responsible for any action taken against her. “It’s the Darwinists who hold the power in academia and who threaten the professional status and livelihoods of anyone who disagrees,” Johnson said. “They feel to teach anything but their orthodoxy is an act of professional treason.”
The odd thing is that while religious people are striving to sound like scientists, some scientists are starting to sound like religious advocates, Cambridge cosmologist John Barrow warned. “In doing science, one should be careful about wanting your theory to be true,” he said. “This is a big difference between science and religion. If you have a religious theory, you have to want the theory to be true.”
And it was exactly the kind of fight that Darwin abhorred, said Alison Pearn, the historian at the Darwin Correspondence Project. Although the naturalist’s extraordinary scholarship entitled him to strong views, Pearn said Darwin always reached out to people with different opinions. In his books, he strove mightily to represent the best arguments against his own theory, a fair-mindedness that has sometimes been abused by critics who selectively use quotes to suggest the naturalist himself had doubts. Pearn said Darwin welcomed debate because he believed that, eventually, the better ideas would win.
“The question is whether other people must be made to believe what you believe,” she said. If Darwin were alive today, she added, “Dawkins would have been goading him to say something, and he would have found a way to politely get out of it.”
A wealth of studies in recent years have suggested the benefits of faith and religious community for mental and physical health — potential markers, in Darwinian terms, of evolutionary success. Given that traditional people tend to have larger families, and that the doubters of natural selection are more likely than not to be religious traditionalists, I asked Dawkins whether natural selection may favor those who don’t believe in it.
Dawkins said he thought the scientific evidence on the benefits of religion was equivocal. Still, he said: “That’s an interesting suggestion that natural selection may favor those who do not believe in natural selection. It might be true.”
Religious scientists and philosophers who believe Darwin is right on evolution are striving to reconcile the implications of evolution with their faith. Theologian John Haught argued that a loving God can be reconciled with the suffering inherent in evolution because divine love implies freedom, and freedom implies the possibility of suffering. John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge physicist and clergyman, wrote that the world’s suffering is redeemed when God suffers along with creation: “. . . the Christian God is the Crucified God, not just a compassionate spectator of the travail of creation, but also truly ‘a fellow sufferer who understands.’”
While evolutionary ideas may coexist better with Eastern religious traditions that do not emphasize the active, involved God of Christianity, there are still obstacles. When asked about Buddhist views on evolution at a recent meeting in Washington, the Dalai Lama said the theory failed to account for the idea of karma, the ledger of reward and punishment carried over from life to life.
Peter Lipton, a University of Cambridge historian and philosopher, said the only way he has found to reconcile the factual evidence for evolution with religious faith is to think of religious texts as novels, texts in which believers can emotionally immerse themselves, while still knowing, at another level, that the truth claims being made are not literally true.
Russell Stannard, a religious physicist and the British director of the fellowship where Lipton spoke to a group of journalists, bristled at the idea. “I can’t see how a Christian can approach the New Testament as a novel,” he said. “Whether there is a Resurrection or not is not the stuff of novels — it is supposed to be historical fact.”
“Maybe I am asking less of religion than you are,” Lipton replied. “Think of all the worldly benefits you derive from religion — they are benefits that might or might not be divinely caused. I get those benefits; I don’t think they are divinely caused.”
I asked Lipton whether he was trying to have his cake and eat it, too. He admitted he was: “Here I am in a synagogue on a Saturday morning, and I say the prayers and say all these things to God and engage with God, and yet I don’t believe God exists. As I am saying that prayer, I recognize it as being a statement to God. I understand it literally, and it has meaning because of the human sentiments it expresses. I am standing saying this prayer that my ancestors said, with feeling and intention, those things are moving to me. What I am saying is, maybe that is enough.”
Shankar Vedantam writes about science and human behavior for The Post.
Voir enfin:
Carl Zimmer
August 11, 2005
It’s bad enough to see basic scientific misinformation about evolution getting tossed around these days. USA Today apparently has no qualms about publishing an op-ed by a state senator from Utah (who wants to have students be taught about something called “divine design”) claiming there is no empirical evidence in the fossil evidence that humans evolved from apes. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with the twenty or so species of hominids that existed over the past six million years. Perhaps just file them away under “divine false starts.”
But history takes a hit as well as science. Creationists try whenever they can to claim that Darwin was directly responsible for Hitler. The reality is that Hitler and some other like-minded thinkers in the early twentieth century had a warped view of evolution that bore little resemblance to what Darwin wrote, and even less to what biologists today understand about evolution. The fact that someone claims that a scientific theory justifies a political ideology does not support or weaken the scientific theory. It’s irrelevant. Nazis also embraced Newton’s theory of gravity, which they used to rain V-2 rockets on England. Does that mean Newton was a Nazi, or that his theory is therefore wrong?
Creationists are by no means the only people who are getting history wrong these days. Yesterday in Slate, Jacob Weisberg wrote an essay in which he claimed that evolution and religion are incompatible. He claims to find support for his argument in Darwin’s own life.
That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries.
I get the feeling that Weisberg has yet to read either of the two excellent modern biographies of Darwin, one by Janet Browne and the other by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. I hope he does soon. Darwin’s life as he actually lived it does not boil down to the sort of shorthands that people like Weisberg toss around.
Darwin wrestled with his spirituality for most of his adult life. When he boarded the Beagle at age 22 and began his voyage around the world, he was a devout Anglican and a parson in the making. As he studied the slow work of geology in South America, he began to doubt the literal truth of the Old Testament. And as he matured as a scientist on the journey, he grew skeptical of miracles. Nevertheless, Darwin still attended the weekly services held on the Beagle. On shore he sought churches whenever he could find them. While in South Africa, Darwin and FitzRoy wrote a letter together in which they praised the role of Christian missions in the Pacific. When Darwin returned to England, he was no longer a parson in the making, but he certainly was no atheist.
In the notebooks Darwin began keeping on his return, he explored every implication of evolution by natural selection, no matter how heretical. If eyes and wings could evolve without help from a designer, then why couldn’t behavior? And wasn’t religion just another type of behavior? All societies had some type of religion, and their similarities were often striking. Perhaps religion had evolved in our ancestors. As a definition of religion, Darwin jotted down, “Belief allied to instinct.”
Yet these were little more than thought experiments, a few speculations that distracted Darwin every now and then from his main work: of discovering how evolution could produce the natural world. Darwin did experience an intense spiritual crisis during those years, but science was not the cause.
At age 39, Darwin watched his father Robert slowly die over the course of months. His father had confided his private doubts about religion to Darwin, and he wondered what those doubts would mean to Robert in the afterlife. At the time Darwin happened to be reading a book by Coleridge called Friend and Aids to Reflection, about the nature of Christianity. Nonbelievers, Coleridge declared, should be left to suffer the wrath of God.
Robert Darwin died in November, 1848. Throughout Charles’s life, his father had shown him unfailing love, financial support, and practical advice. And now was Darwin supposed to believe that his father was going to be cast into eternal suffering in hell? If that were so, then many other nonbelievers, including Darwin’s brother Erasmus and many of his best friends, would follow him as well. If that was the essence of Christianity, Darwin wondered why anyone would want such a cruel doctrine to be true.
Shortly after his father’s death, Darwin’s health turned for the worse. He vomited frequently and his bowels filled with gas. He turned to hydropathy, a Victorian medical fashion in which a patient is given cold showers, steam baths, and wrappings in wet sheets. He would be scrubbed until he looked “very like a lobster,” he wrote to his wife Emma. His health improved, and his sprits rose even more when Emma discovered that she was pregnant again. In November 1850 she gave birth to their eighth child, Leonard. But within a few months death would return to Down House.
In 1849 three of the Darwin girls, Henrietta, Elizabeth, and Anne suffered bouts of scarlet fever. While Henrietta and Elizabeth recovered, nine-year old Anne remained weak. She was Darwin’s favorite, always throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him. Through 1850 Anne’s health still did not rebound. She would vomit sometimes, making Darwin worry that “she inherits I fear with grief, my wretched digestion.” The heredity that Darwin saw shaping all of nature was now claiming his own daughter.
In the spring 1851 Anne came down with the flu, and Darwin decided to take her to Malvern, the town where he had gotten his own water-cure. He left her there with the family nurse and his doctor. But soon after, she developed a fever and Darwin rushed back to Malvern alone. Emma could not come because she was pregnant again and just a few weeks away from giving birth to a ninth child.
When Darwin arrived in Anne’s room in Malvern, he collapsed on a couch. The sight of his ill daughter was awful enough, but the camphor and ammonia in the air reminded him of his nightmarish medical school days in Edinburgh, when he watched children operated on without anesthesia. For a week–Easter week, no less–he watched her fail, vomiting green fluids. He wrote agonizing letters to Emma. “Sometimes Dr. G. exclaims she will get through the struggle; then, I see, he doubts.–Oh my own it is very bitter indeed.”
Anne died on April 23, 1851. “God bless her,” Charles wrote to Emma. “We must be more & more to each other my dear wife.”
When Darwin’s father had died, he had felt a numb absence. Now, when he came back to Down House, he mourned in a different way: with a bitter, rageful, Job-like grief. “We have lost the joy of our household, and the solace of our old age,” he wrote. He called Anne a “little angel,” but the words gave him no comfort. He could no longer believe that Anne’s soul was in heaven, that her soul had survived beyond her unjustifiable death.
It was then, 13 years after Darwin discovered natural selection, that he gave up Christianity. Many years later, when he put together an autobiographical essay for his grandchildren, he wrote, “I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.”
Darwin did not trumpet his agnosticism. Only by poring over his private autobiography and his letters have scholars been able to piece together the nature of his faith after Anne’s death. Darwin wrote a letter of endorsement, for example, to an American magazine called the Index, which championed what it called “Free Religion,” a humanistic spirituality in which the magazine claimed “lies the only hope of the spiritual perfection of the individual and the spiritual unity of the race.”
Yet when the Index asked Darwin to write a paper for them, he declined. “I do not feel that I have thought deeply enough [about religion] to justify any publicity,” he wrote to them. He knew that he was no longer a traditional Christian, but he had not sorted out his spiritual views. In an 1860 letter to Asa Gray—a Harvard botanist, the leading promoter of Darwin in America, and an evangelical Christian–he wrote, “I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”
In private Darwin complained about social Darwinism, which was being used to justify laissez-faire capitalism. In a letter to the geologist Charles Lyell, he wrote sarcastically, “I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather a good quib, showing that I have proved ‘might is right’ and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is also right.” But Darwin decided not to write his own spiritual manifesto. He was too private a man for that.
Despite his silence, Darwin was often pestered in his later years for his thoughts on religion. “Half the fools throughout Europe write to ask me the stupidest questions,” he groused. The inquiring letters not only tracked him down to Down House but reached deep into his most private anguish. To strangers, his responses were much briefer than the one he had sent to Gray. To one correspondent, he simply said that when he had written the Origin of Species, his own beliefs were as strong as a prelate’s. To another, he wrote that a person could undoubtedly be “an ardent theist and an evolutionist,” and pointed to Asa Gray as an example.
Yet to the end of his life, Darwin never published anything about religion. Other scientists might declare that evolution and Christianity were perfectly in harmony, and others such as Thomas Huxley might taunt bishops with agnosticism. But Darwin would not be drawn out. What he actually believed or didn’t, he said, was of “no consequence to any one but myself.”
Darwin and and his wife Emma rarely spoke about his faith after Anne’s death, but he came to rely on her more with every passing year, both to nurse him through his illnesses and to keep his spirits up. At age 71, a few weeks before his death, he looked over the letter she had written to him just after they married. At the time she was beginning to become worried about his faith and urged him to remember what Jesus had done for him. On the bottom he wrote, “When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed & cryed over this.”
It is a disservice to Darwin, and to history, to turn his tortured, complex life into a talking point in a culture war.
(Much of this post is adapted from the last chapter of my book, Evolution.)
Theological Insights from Charles Darwin
Denis O. Lamoureux
Regrettably, both secularists and numerous evangelical Christians have painted a dark
and sinister picture of the religious implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological
evolution. This has led to a cultural myth that sees him as one of the modern apostles
of unbelief. However, the primary historical literature reveals that Darwin was thinking
theologically throughout his career and that his reflections were sophisticated. In particular,
he dealt with the religious themes of intelligent design in nature, the problem of pain, and
Divine sovereignty over the world. Theological insights from Charles Darwin are valuable
in understanding the challenges that biological evolution presents to religion.
In his acclaimed best-seller The Blind
Watchmaker (1986), the inimitable Richard
Dawkins writes: “I could not imagine
being an atheist before 1859, when Darwin’s
Origin of Species was published. … Darwin
made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist.”1 Today, secularists and many
evangelical Christians agree with Dawkins
in suggesting that the father of the theory
of biological evolution is a chief apostle of
modern atheism.2 However, is this actually
the case? Or is the association of Darwin
with unbelief a popular cultural myth that
has been thoughtlessly propagated throughout
society today?
This paper reviews the central religious
beliefs of Charles Darwin and presents evidence
from the primary historical literature
that deals with his theological reflections on
evolutionary theory. To the surprise of many,
Darwin not only contributed to science a
brilliant theoretical outline for biological
origins, but his thoughts regarding the religious
implications of evolution are profound
and provide valuable insights to theology.
The Early Years
(1809–1831)
Charles Darwin was born 12 February 1809
and raised in a comfortable British setting
surrounded by a variety of religious and
philosophical beliefs.3 His physician father
Robert was a “free thinker on religious
matters” and at best a “nominal” Anglican.4
Darwin’s mother Susannah came from a
devout Unitarian family and attended church
with her children. Sadly, she died when
Charles was only eight years old. Thereafter,
his older sisters assisted in raising him and
brought him to Anglican services.5 Darwin
received an education from an Anglican day
school, and in his autobiography refers to
religious beliefs that are typical of a child.
He writes:
I remember in the early part of my
school life [1818–1825] that I often had
to run very quickly to be in time, and
from being a fleet runner was generally
successful; but when in doubt I prayed
earnestly to God to help me, and I well
remember that I attributed my success
to prayers and not to my quick running,
and marveled how generally I
was aided.6
As a teenager, Darwin read his grandfather
Erasmus’ Zoonomia, or the Laws of
Organic Life (1794–1796), which presented a
deistic God creating life through an evolutionary
process.7 He notes that the book had
little effect on him at that time, but believes
2 Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
Article
Theological Insights from Charles Darwin
Is the
association of
Darwin with
unbelief a
popular
cultural myth
that has been
thoughtlessly
propagated
throughout
society today?
Charles Darwin
Denis O. Lamoureux is an assistant professor of science and religion at
St. Joseph’s College, University of Alberta. His appointment is the first Canadian
tenure-track position in this discipline. He holds three earned doctoral degrees—
dentistry, theology, and biology. Lamoureux asserts that if the limits of both
evangelical Christianity and evolutionary biology are respected, then their
relationship is not only complementary, but also necessary. He is a member of
the executive council of the Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation, and
a Fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation. Recently retired from dentistry,
Lamoureux continues to suffer from the idolatrous practice this profession
encourages as he boasts a single digit handicap!
Denis O. Lamoureux
that its positive light on evolution opened the way for serious
consideration of this view of biological origins.
After a failed attempt at studying medicine in Edinburgh,
Darwin entered Christ College, Cambridge in 1828
to study theology. His intention was not so much religious
as practical—his father insisted. Dr. Darwin recognized
that his son lacked direction and this way he would at the
least receive an education befitting a proper young British
gentleman. There is little evidence to suggest Charles had
a passionate faith at that point in his life, though he recalls:
“I did not then in the least doubt the strict literal truth of
every word in the Bible.”8 Darwin completed the divinity
program in 1831, but decided not to be ordained as a minister.
Yet, Cambridge gave him a purpose. He fell in love
with science. His views on origins were typical of the early
nineteenth century. He accepted that the earth was old,
though catastrophic flood events still played a part in geology
for understanding various surface features (e.g., gravel
beds, erratic rocks, etc.). Darwin was also a progressive
creationist,9 believing in the immutability (unchangeability)
of species, and maintaining that God intervened to
create life at different points in geological history.
Darwin’s view of nature was steeped
in the categories of British naturalisttheologian
William Paley.
More specifically, Darwin’s view of nature was steeped
in the categories of British naturalist-theologian William
Paley. His Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology
(1802) were required reading at Cambridge in the
early 1800s, and Darwin claimed that studying these
works were the only valuable part of his education. Well
known for the watchmaker argument,10 Paley held that
the universe features: (1) Intelligent Design11—the beauty,
complexity and functionality of nature ultimately reflect
the mind of the Creator; (2) Perfect Adaption—each and
every detail found in the world fits perfectly in its place;
and (3) Beneficence—the creation is very good. Looking
back on his career, Darwin recognizes in 1871:
I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s
premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed
and convinced by the long line of argumentation …
I was not able to annul the influence of my former
belief, then almost universal, that each species had
been purposely created; and this led to my tacit
assumption that every detail of structure, excepting
rudiments, was of some special, though unrecognized,
service.12
It is important to emphasize that Paley’s understanding
of design is both static and conflated to the notion of perfect
adaptability. That is, each and every detail in the world
had some specifically designed purpose, with the exception
being rudimentary structures such as mammary
glands in males. Consequently, there was no room for
mal-adapted structures or creatures, especially evolving
ones, in God’s good and perfectly ordered creation.
The HMS Beagle Voyage
(1831–1836)
Darwin boarded HMS Beagle with these assumptions
about nature on 27 December 1831. He also came with
Christian beliefs and recalls:
Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and
I remember being heartily laughed at by several of
the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting
the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some
moral point. I suppose it was the novelty of the
argument that amused them.13
More significantly for the development of his science,
Darwin embarked with the first volume of Charles Lyell’s
newly published Principles of Geology (1830–1833), which
set down the foundations of modern geology. Soon after
arriving in South America, his field experience of the
region led him to embrace fully uniformitarian geology.
Darwin boasts: “I am proud to remember that the first
place, namely, St. Jago, in the Cape Verde Archipelago,
which I geologised, convinced me of the infinite superiority
of Lyell’s view over those advocated in any other work
known to me.”14
Uniformitarianism did not extend to Darwin’s biology,
however. Late in the voyage, he was still an anti-evolutionist,
arguing in a perfect Paleyan fashion, that evolution
was “a supposition in contradiction to the fitness which
the Author of Nature has now established.”15 Nine months
before returning to England, Darwin remained a progressive
creationist. He writes: “The one hand has surely
worked throughout the universe. A Geologist perhaps
would suggest that the periods of Creation have been
distinct & remote the one from the other; that the Creator
rested in his labor.”16
In the last entry of the Beagle Diary, Darwin’s acceptance
of intelligent design is obvious:
Amongst the scenes which are deeply impressed on
my mind, none exceed in sublimity the [Brazilian]
primeval forests …[for they] are temples filled with
the varied productions of the God of Nature. No
Volume 56, Number 1, March 2004 3
Denis O. Lamoureux
one can stand unmoved in these solitudes,
without feeling that there is
more in man than the mere breath of
his body.17
Throughout the famed trip, Darwin
believed in a Creator. Not only did nature
profoundly impact him by reflecting design,
but this God intervened to create life at
different points in geological history.
First Period of Religious
Reflection (1836–1839)
HMS Beagle docked in Falmouth, England,
on 2 October 1836 after a five-year voyage
around the world. During the next few years
Darwin entered his first period of intense
theological reflection. As he recalls: “I was
led to think much about religion.”18 This was
also the time that he formulated his theory
of biological evolution. To be sure, evolutionary
theory has significant religious
implications, and Darwin recognized them.
In this period he rejected whatever Christian
faith he had. Regarding the Old Testament,
he reveals:
I had gradually come by this time, to
see that the Old Testament from its
manifestly false history of the world,
with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow
as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing
to God the feelings of a revengeful
tyrant, was no more to be trusted than
the sacred books of the Hindoos, or any
barbarian.19
With a growing appreciation for the regularity
of natural processes, Darwin also dismissed
the New Testament and its record of
miracles. In a positivistic fashion, he argues:
The more we know of the fixed laws of
nature the more incredible do miracles
become … the men at that time [first
century] were ignorant and credulous
to a degree almost incomprehensible
by us.”20
Concluding this period, Darwin confesses:
“I came to disbelieve in Christianity as a
divine revelation.”21
Though Darwin rejected the personal
God of Christianity, he remained a firm
believer in a Creator. More specifically, he
renounced theism and espoused deism.22
During the late 1830s, Darwin outlined a
theory on the origin of life, including
humanity, that did not require the dramatic
Divine interventions of progressive creation,
and he based his model entirely on providential
natural laws.23 That is, he envisioned
God creating living organisms indirectly
through physical processes. Excerpts from
his scientific notebooks reveal this distinction
in God’s activity:
Astronomers might formerly have said
that God ordered each planet to move
in its particular destiny—In the same
manner God orders each animal with
certain form in certain country. But
how much more simple & sublime
power [to] let attraction act according
to certain law; such are inevitable consequences;
let animals be created, then
by the fixed laws of generation.…Man
in his arrogance thinks himself a great
work worthy of the interposition of a
deity, more humble& I believe truer to
consider him created from animals.24
Darwin at this time also began formulating
the foundations of evolutionary psychology,
and he cast his theory within a
theological framework. For example, he
argues that a “philosopher” (i.e., natural
philosopher, or better “scientist”) errs if he
“says the innate knowledge of creator <is>
has been/implanted in us (?individually or
in race?) by a separate act of God, & not as
a necessary integrant part of his most magnificent
laws, which we profane in thinking
not capable to produce every effect of every
kind which surrounds us.”25 According to
Darwin, not recognizing God’s “sublime
power” and the “inevitable consequences”
of the “magnificent laws” of evolution was
to “profane” the Creator. Clearly, evolutionary
theory, as first formulated, was not
atheistic.
On the Origin of Species
(1859)
During the late 1830s, Darwin scratched out
in his scientific notebooks a deistic theory of
evolution. But it would take twenty years
before he made this view of origins public,
and a dozen more years after that before
Victorian England would read that humanity
was also created through evolution.26
In November 1859, On the Origin of Species
was released, and all 1,250 copies were
quickly sold. It included seven unapologetic
and positive references to the “Creator.”27
4 Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
Article
Theological Insights from Charles Darwin
According to
Darwin, not
recognizing
God’s “sublime
power” and the
“inevitable
consequences”
of the
“magnificent
laws” of
evolution was
to “profane”
the Creator.
Clearly,
evolutionary
theory, as first
formulated,
was not
atheistic.
Charles Darwin
Staunchly opposed to the science-of-the-day (progressive
creation), Darwin defends:
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully
satisfied with the view that each species has been
independently created. To my mind it accords better
with what we know of the laws impressed on matter
by the Creator, that the production and extinction of
the past and present inhabitants of the world should
have been due to secondary causes like those determining
the birth and death of the individual.28
Darwin’s rejection of interventionism and his acceptance
of providentialism in this passage is clear.29 God
creates life, both in the womb and on the earth, through
natural laws that he ordained. In other words, Darwin’s
view of evolution in the famed 1859 work was teleological.
30 This natural process had a goal or final outcome.
That is, it had a plan and a purpose rooted in the Creator.
Darwin did not embrace today’s popular understanding
of evolution (atheistic/dysteleological) of a process run
merely by chance and irrational necessity.
Darwin did not embrace today’s popular
understanding of evolution (atheistic/
dysteleological) of a process run merely
by chance and irrational necessity.
God’s part in the evolutionary process is further seen
in the well-known final sentence of the Origin of Species:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a few
forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has
gone on cycling according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful
and most wonderful have been, and are being,
evolved.31
This passage in the second edition of the Origin in 1860, and
right up until the sixth and final edition in 1872, is even
more specific. It includes the phrase “originally breathed
by the Creator.”32 Interestingly, Darwin somehow fails to
recognize his own interventionism in the origin of the first
few forms or form of life.33 But the evolutionary laws were
definitely God’s laws, and there is even a hint of their
revelatory character in that the world created by evolution
has a “grandeur” since life is “most beautiful and most
wonderful.” Therefore, it is a regrettable myth indoctrinated
throughout modern society and evangelicalism that
Darwin’s Origin is associated with atheism. Those who
have actually read the famed book know that such a belief
betrays the historical evidence.34
Second Period of Religious Reflection
(1860–1861)
Soon after the publication of the Origin of Species, Darwin
entered a second period of intense theological reflection.
His professional colleagues raised important issues, and
he dealt directly with the religious themes of intelligent
design, the problem of pain, and Divine sovereignty.
Regarding design, Darwin had a series of exchanges
with Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who was one of the first
Christians in America to promote evolution.35 In an 1860
letter to Gray, the clash between Paleyan categories and
evolutionary theory began. Darwin writes:
With respect to the theological view of the question.
This is always painful to me. I ambewildered. I had no
intention to write atheistically. But I own I cannot see as
plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence
of design and beneficence on all sides of us. …
On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to
view this wonderful universe, and especially the
nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the
result of brute force. … I grieve to say that I cannot
honestly go as far as you do about Design. I am
conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle.
I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result
of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing
as the result of Design.…Again, I say I am, and shall
ever remain, in a hopeless muddle.36
Most importantly, Darwin is clearly not an atheist at this
point in his career. Of course, “evidence of design…on all
sides of us” and “each separate thing as the result of Design”
was William Paley still speaking through him. His muddle,
pain, and bewilderment over the issue of design can be
understood in the light of these categories ingrained in his
mind during his Cambridge education.
On the one hand, Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined
Paley’s static perfection and adaption in each and
every corner of the universe. For that matter, the dynamic
evolutionary process was by definition incommensurable
with the perfectly designed Paleyan world. As Darwin
later wrote: “The old argument of design in Nature, as
given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive,
fails, now that the law of natural selection has been
discovered.”37 Yet on the other hand, Darwin continued
to experience the impact of nature’s beauty, complexity,
and functionality as a scientist; and he sensed what most
people perceive—there is some sort of teleological reality
behind the world, like a God or Supreme Force.38 In other
words, Darwin was trapped between his Paleyan under-
Volume 56, Number 1, March 2004 5
Denis O. Lamoureux
standing of intelligent design and his experience
of design in nature.39 Of course,
hindsight is 20-20, and one wonders why
Darwin did not consider seriously a view of
intelligent design not suffocated by Paley’s
strict categories of design in each and every
detail of the world.40
Darwin also dealt with the greatest challenge
to theism—the problem of pain. Concisely
stated, why would an all-loving and
all-powerful personal God allow suffering in
the world? In the same 1860 letter to Gray,
he complains:
But I own I cannot see as plainly as
others do, and as I should wish to do,
evidence of design and beneficence on
all sides of us. There seems to me too
much misery in the world. I cannot
persuade myself that a beneficent and
omnipotent God would have designedly
created the Ichneumonidae with
the express intention of their feeding
within the bodies of Caterpillars, or
that a cat should play with mice.41
Once more, a Paleyan category of nature is
evident. Beneficence is everywhere throughout
nature. Most feel the weight of Darwin’s
complaint.Whywould the theistic Godallow
a wasp (Ichneumonidae) to lay its eggs in a caterpillar,
and as these develop slowly, permit
them to eat away the host’s internal organs
until its death?
In an earlier letter to J. D. Hooker, Darwin
was even more explicit regarding the lack of
beneficence in the living world. He writes:
“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write
on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low &
horridly cruel works of nature!”42 At a personal
level, Darwin was also intimately
familiar with pain. Shortly after his HMS
Beagle voyage, he contracted a medical condition
that saw him suffer bouts of nausea,
vomiting, dizziness, chest pains and palpitations
for the rest of his life.43 Moreover,
many modern Darwin scholars speculate the
suffering and eventual death of his beloved
10-year-old daughter Annie in 1851 deeply
traumatized the famed British naturalist.44
Indeed, nature was not at all like what Paley
had envisioned, and it was only late in life
that Darwin came to terms with the pain
suffered by living creatures.
Finally, Darwin wrestled with the question
of Divine sovereignty over the world
during his second intense period of theological
reflection. In an 1861 letter to Charles
Lyell, he writes:
The view that each variation has been
providentially arranged seems to me
to make Natural Selection entirely
superfluous, and indeed take the
whole case of the appearance of new
species out of the range of science. …
It seems to me that variations in the
domestic and wild conditions are due
to unknown causes, and are without
purpose, and in so far accidental; and
that they become purposeful only
when they are selected by man for his
pleasure, or by what we call Natural
Selection in the struggle for life, and
under changing conditions. I do not
wish to say that God did not foresee
everything which would ensue; but
here comes very nearly the same sort of
wretched imbroglio as between freewill
and preordained necessity.45
Paley’s perfect adaptability again appears in
Darwin’s thinking. But more significantly, a
non-teleological element is clearly developing
in his understanding of evolution at this
time. He is considering that biological variations
“are without purpose, and in so far
accidental.” However, Darwin does not embrace
an entirely dysteleological world view.
He continues to believe in the existence of
God, and he advances a sophisticated theological
understanding of Divine sovereignty.
The Creator’s foresight ultimately reigns over
the evolutionary process.46
Variation of Plants and
Animals (1868) and
Descent of Man (1871)
Many of the theological notions that Darwin
expressed in private correspondence during
the second period of intense religious reflection
later became public in his more important
scientific books. In the closing pages of
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under
Domestication (1868), he is still being influenced
by Paleyan notions of nature, but
comes to an uneasy resolution by employing
his Divine foresight argument. The last sentences
of this scientific work conclude:
6 Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
Article
Theological Insights from Charles Darwin
[At this time,
Darwin] is
considering
that biological
variations “are
without
purpose, and in
so far
accidental.”
However,
Darwin does
not embrace an
entirely
dysteleological
world view.
He continues
to believe in
the existence of
God, and he
advances a
sophisticated
theological
understanding
of Divine
sovereignty.
Charles Darwin
If we assume that each particular variation was from
the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity
of organization, which leads to many injurious
deviations of structure, as well as the redundant
power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a
struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the
natural selection or survival of the fittest, must
appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other
hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains
everything and foresees everything. Thus we are
brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is
that of free will and predestination.47
Clearly, Darwin still believed in the existence of a
“Creator” who was both “omnipotent” and “omniscient.”
However, he recognized those features in his evolutionary
theory which seemed to point away from a world created
by God—“injurious deviations,” “redundant reproduction,”
“natural selection,” and “survival of the fittest.”
Astutely, Darwin found that the mystery of Divine sovereignty
mitigated the challenge of pain in nature.48
Unquestionably, Darwin saw the
evolution of humans as neither
atheistic nor dysteleological.
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin finally revealed to
Victorian England that humanity was of part of his evolutionary
theory. As noted previously, human evolution was
an integral part of his science from the earliest notebooks
in the late 1830s. Darwin hinted at it in the famed Origin of
Species with his only remark on the subject:
In the distant future I see open fields for far more
important researches. Psychology will be based on a
new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of
each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light
will be thrown on the origin ofmanand his history.49
The Descent ofManoffered a theory of evolutionary psychology,
which included the evolution of religious belief.50
Anticipating criticism from religious individuals, Darwin
defends:
I amaware that the conclusion arrived at in this work
will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but
he who denounces them is bound to shew why it
is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a
distinct species by descent from some lower form,
through the laws of variation and natural selection,
than to explain the birth of the individual through
the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of
the species and of the individual are equally parts of
that grand sequence of events, which our minds
refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.51
Unquestionably, Darwin saw the evolution of humans
as neither atheistic nor dysteleological. For that matter,
this passage could be interpreted as an intelligent design
argument. The embryological and evolutionary processes
reflect a “grand” picture of nature, pointing ultimately
to their Creator.
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
(1876)
Darwin’s mature theological views appear in his Autobiography
(1876) in a section entitled “Religious Belief.” He
deals directly with the classic arguments both for and
against God’s existence, and examines these in the light
of evolutionary theory. Beginning with the problem of
suffering, Darwin argues:
A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a
God who could create the universe, is to our finite
minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our
understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not
unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the
suffering of millions of lower animals throughout
almost endless time? This very old argument from
the existence of suffering against the existence of an
intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one.52
But interestingly, Darwin is quick to answer this complaint.
In coming to terms with suffering, he defends:
According to myjudgment happiness decidedly prevails…
all sentient beings have been formed so as to
enjoy, as a general rule, happiness … most sentient
beings [experience] an excess of happiness over misery,
although many occasionally suffer much.53
For Darwin, this is not the beneficence-dripping cosmos of
Paley, but it is a good world. In particular, life would never
have evolved if creatures suffered most of the time. The bite
of the Ichneumonidae from Darwin’s second period of theological
reflection seems to have lost its sting if evolution
is viewed from a higher or global perspective. According to
Darwin, the problem of pain is not an argument against
God’s existence.
The Autobiography then turns to two arguments for
God’s existence, and the centrality of intelligent design in
each is evident. In the first, Darwin admits to once having
what he terms a “religious sentiment.” He writes:
At the present day the most usual argument for the
existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the
deep inward conviction and feelings which are
experienced by most persons … Formerly I was led
by feelings such as those just referred to…[and these
Volume 56, Number 1, March 2004 7
Denis O. Lamoureux
led] to the firm conviction of the existence
of God, and of the immortality of
the soul. In my Journal I wrote that
whilst standing in the midst of the
grandeur of a Brazilian forest, “it is not
possible to give an adequate idea of the
higher feelings of wonder, admiration,
and devotion which fill and elevate the
mind.” I well remember my conviction
that there is more in man than mere
breath of his body.54
However, Darwin writes-off these experiences
as being merely psychological. He
claims:
But now the grandest scenes would
not cause any such convictions and
feelings to rise in my mind. It may
be truly said that I am like a man
who has become color-blind, and the
universal belief bymenof the existence
of redness makes my present loss of
perception of not the least value as
evidence.55
From Darwin’s perspective, “religious sentiment”
is not an argument for God’s existence.
In the Autobiography’s second argument
for the existence of God, a more substantive
use of the intelligent design argument is presented.
Darwin writes:
Another source of conviction in the
existence of God, connected with the
reason and not with the feelings,
impresses me as having much more
weight. This follows from the extreme
difficulty or rather impossibility of
conceiving this immense and wondrous
universe, including man with
his capacity of looking backwards and
far into futurity, as a result of blind
chance or necessity. When thus reflecting
I feel compelled to look to a First
Cause having an intelligent mind in
some degree analogous to that of man;
and I deserve to be called a Theist.56
Sensitive Darwin scholars note the present
tense of the verb “feel” in the final sentence
of this passage.57 That is, in 1876, late in his
life, Darwin is pressed to look for a “First
Cause with a intelligent mind,” and he even
argues that being identified as a “Theist” is
justifiable.58
But like the previous two arguments,
Darwin has a rebuttal. He claims that though
this belief in intelligent design was “strong”
at the time he wrote the Origin of Species, it
“has very gradually with many fluctuations
become weaker.”59 In particular, he is deeply
troubled with this line of reasoning because
a “horrid doubt” arises, and he complains:
Can the mind of man, which has, as I
fully believe, been developed from a
mind as low as that possessed by the
lowest animal, be trusted when it
draws such grand conclusions?60
According to Darwin, intelligent design in
nature appears to be a powerful and rational
argument for God’s existence, but in final
analysis, it is not trustworthy.
The conclusion Darwin draws in “Religious
Belief” from the Autobiography is that
arguments either for or against the existence
of God are inconclusive. He then confesses:
“I cannot pretend to throw light on such
abstruse problems. The mystery of the
beginning of all things is insoluble by us;
and I for one must be content to remain an
Agnostic.”61
The Final Years
(1876–1882)
Darwin’s agnosticism and fluctuating theological
beliefs also appear during the last
years of his life. In a letter addressed to
James Fordyce in 1879 regarding his beliefs,
he writes:
What my own [religious] views may
be is a question of no consequence to
any one but myself. But, as you asked,
I may state that my judgment often
fluctuates.…Inmy most extreme fluctuations
I have never been an Atheist in
the sense of denying the existence of a
God. I think that generally (and more
and more as I grow older), but not
always, that an Agnostic would be the
more correct description of my state of
mind.62
It is important to note that this letter was
written only a few years before Darwin’s
death in 1882, and he is stating quite explicitly
that he has “never been an Atheist in
the sense of denying the existence of God.”
Therefore, Darwin throughout his professional
career never did embrace an atheistic
or dysteleological view of biological evolution.
Moreover, it follows from this passage
that if he has “never been an Atheist” and
8 Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
Article
Theological Insights from Charles Darwin
The conclusion
Darwin
draws in
“Religious
Belief”
from the
Autobiography
is that
arguments
either for
or against
the existence
of God
are
inconclusive.
Charles Darwin
“generally, but not always” an agnostic, then there must
have been times when he was a “theist,” as he had
acknowledged in his Autobiography.
Finally, in the last year of Darwin’s life, the Duke of
Argyll raised with him the issue of intelligent design in
nature. Writing about this conversation, he recalls:
I said to Dr. Darwin, with reference to some of his
own remarkable works on the “Fertilization of
Orchids” and upon “The Earthworms,” and various
other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances
for certain purposes in nature—I said it was
impossible to look at these without seeing that they
were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall
never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me
very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me
with overwhelming force; but at other times,” and he
shook his head vaguely, adding, “it seems to go
away.”63
This is an especially fascinating passage. Only six years
earlier in his Autobiography, Darwin claimed to have
become “color-blind” to the revelatory message in nature,
and that “the grandest scenes would not cause any such
convictions and feelings to rise in [his] mind.” Undoubtedly,
the impact of “the expression of mind” in nature
served as a source fueling Darwin’s “not always” belief
in a God.
Conclusion and Application
The historical record clearly reveals that Charles Darwin
was never an atheist. Throughout his career, the father of
modern evolutionary theory gave serious consideration to
the religious implications of his science. For that matter,
he often integrated these beliefs within his evolutionary
theory as seen in his scientific notebooks, private correspondence,
and professional publications. In particular,
Darwin offers valuable theological insights worth consideration
regarding intelligent design reflected in nature,
the problem of pain, and Divine sovereignty over the
world. Moreover, this brief historical review of Darwin’s
central religious beliefs raises some interesting questions
for us today.
First, what are we to make of Darwin’s many references
to the experience of intelligent design in nature? Should
these be written-off merely as his being socially conditioned
during England’s religious nineteenth century?
Maybe this very common experience is only the stimulation
of a set of brain cells, which evolve by chance to
provide humanity aesthetic pleasure for the survival of the
species. Or was Darwin responding to and affirming the
reality of a nonverbal revelation that an Intelligent Mind
has inscribed deeply into the fabric of nature (Ps. 19:1–4;
Rom. 1:18–23)?
Second, should intelligent design in nature be real, does
it necessarily undermine evolutionary theory? As noted,
the notion of design was never far from Darwin’s mind
throughout his career, yet he gave to science an excellent
outline of biological origins. Regrettably, the most vocal
support for design today comes from the Intelligent
Design (ID) Movement, which promotes a distinctly antievolutionary
view of origins.64 Could it be that so-called
“ID Theory” is merely an updated version of the longdiscredited
design categories of William Paley? It is clear
that Darwin’s understanding of design was hampered and
frustrated by the Paleyan interpretation. Is this also the
case today with ID’s purported “scientific” model of design
rapidly infiltrating throughout society and evangelicalism?
More incisively, is ID Theory a stumbling block, in the fullest
Pauline sense (2 Cor. 6:2–3), between competent evolutionary
biologists and the God who life created through a
design-reflecting evolutionary process?
The time has come to let the historical
record speak in order to move beyond the
ill-informed myths of Charles Darwin’s
religious beliefs and the misunderstood
theological implications of the theory of
biological evolution.
Finally, what should be taught about Charles Darwin
in our public schools? Tragically, a modern cultural myth
has demonized the famed British naturalist along with his
scientific theory. As fundamentalist Christian and leading
anti-evolutionist Henry M. Morris harshly judges: “Satan
himself is the originator of the concept of evolution.”65 But
proselytizing atheists like Richard Dawkins are every bit
as guilty in fueling Darwin’s purported atheism with their
often venomous and tired polemic.66 The time has come to
let the historical record speak in order to move beyond the
ill-informed myths of Charles Darwin’s religious beliefs
and the misunderstood theological implications of the theory
of biological evolution. With our children’s education
at stake, who can argue against such a proposal?
Acknowledgments
Jennifer Shaw and Eugene Malo
Volume 56, Number 1, March 2004 9
Denis O. Lamoureux
Notes
1Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin Books,
1991), 5–6.
2It is important to note the difference between the popular and
academic approaches to Darwin within evangelical circles. The former
conflates his theory of evolution with unbelief. The latter
recognizes that a modus vivendi exists between evangelicalism and
Darwin’s science. See David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten
Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary
Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987); and James R. Moore,
The Post-Darwinian Controversies.AStudy of the Protestant Struggle to
Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900.
(Cambridge: University Press, 1979).
3For complete historical reviews of Darwin, see Adrian Desmond
and James R. Moore, Darwin (New York: Warner Books, 1991);
Peter Bowler, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (Cambridge:
University Press, 1990); and Michael Ruse, The Darwinian
Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, 2d ed. (Chicago: University
Press, 1999).
4Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis
Darwin, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1888), II:178. Hereafter
cited as LLD.
5Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882,
ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 22. Hereafter cited as
ACD.
6ACD, 25.
7ACD, 49.
8ACD, 57.
9The term “creationist” carries a variety of nuances and requires
qualification. Young Earth Creation is the popular understanding of
the creationist position. It rejects all the modern sciences dealing
with origins and suggests that the world was created in six literal
days less than 10,000 years ago and that all of geological stratification
was the result of Noah’s global flood. Progressive Creation
(or Old Earth Creation) accepts the standard geological dating of
the earth (4.6 billion years), but rejects biological evolution and
maintains that God created life in stages over the eons of time. Evolutionary
Creation (or Theistic Evolution) asserts that the personal
Godof the Bible created the universe and life through ordained and
sustained evolutionary processes. Deistic Evolution (also Theistic
Evolution) has an impersonal God begin the evolutionary process,
but he never enters the universe thereafter. Dysteleological Evolution
(or Atheistic Evolution) is the popular understanding of the evolutionist
position. It rejects the existence of God and believes that
the world evolved entirely by chance and irrational necessity.
For an introduction to the origins debate and these categories, see
my audio lecture, “Beyond the ‘Evolution’ vs. ‘Creation’ Debate,”
at: www.ualberta.ca/~dlamoure/beyond.html. Also see my
paper on evolutionary creation at www.ualberta.ca/~dlamoure/
3EvoCr.htm.
10Concisely stated, Paley argued that if a watch is found in a field,
then it is logical to suggest the existence of a watchmaker. So too
with nature. Complexity, contrivance, and design in the world
point to a Creator with a purpose. See William Paley, Natural
Theology in Robert Lynam, ed., The Works of William Paley, 6 vols.
(Edinburgh: Baynes and Son, 1825), IV:1–12.
11The notion of “intelligent design” has gained much attention in
recent years due to the Intelligent Design Movement. However, it
is important to distinguish this modern interpretation of design
from the traditional position. For intelligent design theorists like
Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski, design is
associated with biological structures (termed “irreducibly complex”
and “complex specified information”) that purportedly
could not evolve by natural processes. However, the traditional
understanding of design focuses on the beauty, complexity, and
functionality of nature, and it does not deal with the mechanisms
through which these features arose. The historical view of design
simply acknowledges that the world powerfully impacts everyone
toward the belief that it reflects the mind of an Intelligent Being.
12ACD, 59; and Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in
Relation to Sex, new ed., rev.&aug. (New York: D. Appleton, 1886),
61. My italics.
13ACD, 85.
14ACD, 101.
15Quoted in Sandra Herbert, “The Place of Man,” Journal of the
History of Biology (1997): 233, note 50. Darwin manuscripts, vol. 42,
University of Cambridge Library (Feb 1835).
16Charles Darwin, Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, ed. Nora
Barlow, vol. 1 in The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and
R. B. Freeman, 29 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1986), I:348
(18 Jan 1836).
17Diary, I:388 (24 Sep 1836).
18ACD, 85.
19Ibid.
20ACD, 86.
21Ibid.
22Theism refers to belief in an all-loving and all-powerful personal
God. This Divine Being is personally involved in the lives of people
and answers their prayers in miraculous ways. On the other hand,
deism states that God is impersonal and never enters the universe,
having nothing to do with humanity. It is significant to note that
40% of first-rate American scientists today are theists. See Edward
J. Larson and Larry Witham, “Scientists Are Still Keeping the
Faith,” Nature 386 (3 Apr 1997): 435–6.
23A theological distinction needs to be made regarding Divine
action. Interventionism is dramatic supernatural activity. For
example, prior to Copernician astronomy, many believed that God
or angels moved planets off their normal west-to-east courses,
causing them to make short east-to-west loops known as “retrograde
motion.” Darwin refers to this type of Divine action in the
next passage. Providentialism is God’s subtle activity. An example
would be the Creator employing natural laws to create life, both
individually in the womb and collectively through evolution. This
is the type of Divine activity Darwin envisioned during the years
he formulated his evolutionary theory, and it was clearly included
in his famed Origin of Species. In light of this categorical distinction,
a well-known comment by Darwin can be better understood. One
of the first people he revealed his evolutionary views to was J. D.
Hooker. In an 1844 letter, Darwin writes: “I am almost convinced
(quite contrary to the opinion I started with [i.e., progressive
creation]) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable”
(Darwin to Hooker [11 Jan 1844] in Francis Darwin, ed., More
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. [London: John Murray,
1888], I:40–1. Hereafter cited as MLL). Also found in Frederick
Burkhardt and Sidney Smith, eds., The Correspondence of Charles
Darwin, 11 vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 1987 [1985–1999]),
III:2. Hereafter cited as CCD. Some skeptics argue that this is evidence
for Darwin’s atheism in that God is the murdered victim.
However, an appreciation of the categories of Divine action challenges
this interpretation. Darwin’s intention in this letter was to
confess to his slaying the interventionistic God of progressive creation,
which at that time was accepted by the scientific community.
As this paper will reveal, Darwin never embraced atheism. Rather,
during most of his career, he believed in a deistic God who created
life through a providential evolutionary process.
24Charles Darwin, “B Notebook (Feb 1837 to Jan 1838),” in Gavin de
Beer, ed., “Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species,”
Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) II (1960): 101, 106.
Note that excerpts from the notebooks are exactly that—rough
notes that are not grammatically sound or stylistically proper.
In this paper they will be presented as they appeared originally
with words occasionally added in brackets [ ] to smooth a passage.
25Charles Darwin, “M Notebook (Jul 1838–Oct 1838),” in Howard E.
Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity
Together with Darwin’s Early and Unpublished Notebooks, trans. and
ed. Paul H. Barrett (New York: Dutton& Co., 1974), 292, #136.
26For the sake of brevity, I will not examine numerous theological
passages that Darwin composed in the years between his early
notebooks (late 1830s) and the Origin of Species (1859). During this
10 Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
Article
Theological Insights from Charles Darwin
period he began with unpublished and private synopses of his
theory in the “Sketch” (1842; 35 pages) and the “Essay” (1844; 213
pages). Later he started a major work, the “Big Species Book”
(1856–1858), known today as Natural Selection, but it was abbreviated
and became the Origin of Species. The religious beliefs
expressed in these works are outlined in the notebooks and then
repeated (sometimes almost verbatim) in the Origin. See Charles
Darwin, Foundations of the Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in
1842 and 1844, ed. Francis Darwin (Cambridge: University Press,
1909), xxviii, 51–2, 253–5; and Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s
Natural Selection; Being the Second Part of His Big Species Book Written
from 1856 to 1858, ed. R. C. Stauffer (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1975), 224–5.
27See Charles R. Darwin, On the Origin of Species. A Facsimile of the
First Edition, introduced by Ernst Mayr (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1964), 186, 188, 189, 413 (twice), 435, 488.
28Origin of Species, 488. In the “Big Species Book,” Darwin adds to the
original manuscript: “By nature, I mean the laws ordained by God
to govern the universe” (Natural Selection, 224).
29The William Whewell epigraph in the Origin of Species depicts
Darwin’s rejection of interventionism: “But with regard to the
material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive
that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of
Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment
of general laws.”
30The term “teleology” comes from the Greek word telos which has a
meaning of movement directed toward a goal, final outcome, or an
end accomplished. See Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon (Chicago:
Follett Publishers, 1954), 697; and W. F. Arndt and F. W.
Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other
Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University Press, 1979), 811.
31Origin of Species, 490.
32Morse Peckham, ed., ‘The Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin:
A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1959),
759.
33Even more interesting, Darwin’s modern critic Michael Behe
seems to be a reincarnation of the famed evolutionist! Similar to
the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin’s Black Box (1996) proposes
that the “irreducible structures” of the cell were put together “in
one fell swoop” in a “first cell” from which all life evolved. See
Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution(
New York: Free Press, 1996), 39, 227–8. Also seemyresponse
to a paper by Behe entitled “A Box or a Black Hole? A Response
to Michael J. Behe,” Canadian Catholic Review (July 1999): 67–73.
This paper is also found on my web page: www.ualberta.ca/
~dlamoure/3Behe.htm.
34Critics of this view claim that Darwin in the Origin of Species was
simply hiding his true beliefs in order to have his book accepted.
This was after all Victorian England.Aletter to J. D. Hooker is often
cited to defend this position. Darwin writes: “I have long regretted
that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of
creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly
unknown process” (Darwin to J. D. Hooker [29 Mar 1863] in LLD,
III:18; and CCD, XI:278). However, if this is the case, then Darwin’s
regret is short-lived. In the three editions of the Origin of Species
(1866, 1869, 1872) following this letter to Hooker, he made no effort
to remove the “Pentateuchal term of creation” from his work.
But more importantly, a review of Darwin’s personal scientific
notebooks, which were never intended to be public, reveal his
theological views are the same as those expressed in the Origin.
See endnote 26.
35See Asa Gray, Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology:
A Free Examination of Darwin’s Treatise on the Origin of Species
and of Its American Reviewers (London: Trubner & Co, 1861).
36Darwin to Gray (22 May 1860) LLD, II:311–2; CCD, VIII:224.
Darwin to Gray (26 Nov 1860) LLD, II:353–4; and CCD, VIII:496.
My italics.
37ACD, 87.
38For anyone in disagreement with this statement, I appeal to no one
less that the “evangelical” atheist Richard Dawkins who states:
The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant
efficiency of the apparent design. If anyone doesn’t agree that
this amount of complex design cries out for an explanation,
I give up. … Our world is dominated by feats of engineering
and works of art. We are entirely accustomed to the idea that
complex elegance is an indicator of premeditated, crafted
design. This is probably the most powerful reason for the
belief, held by the vast majority of people that have ever lived, in some
kind of supernatural deity (Blind Watchmaker, xiii, xvi.Myitalics).
Furthermore, a 1996 Princeton University study on the beliefs of
Americans reveals that 96% accept the existence of “a God or universal
spirit.” No author, “Religion Index Hits Ten-Year High,”
Emerging Trends: Journal of the Princeton Religion Research Center
(Mar 1996): 4. Also see Darwin’s affirmation of my view in quotes
56 and 63.
39This entrapment in Paleyan categories and the frustration it produced
for Darwin is further seen in a letter to J. D. Hooker nearly
ten years later. Darwin writes: “My theology is a simple muddle; I
cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can
see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind,
in the details. As for each variation that has ever occurred having
been preordained for a special end, I can no more believe in it than
that the spot on which each drop of rain falls has been specially
ordained” (Darwin to Hooker [12 Jul 1870] MLL, I:321. My italics).
40Darwin considered this view of design in his correspondence with
Asa Gray: “I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from
designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the
working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all
satisfies me” (LLD, II:311–2; CCD, VIII:224). Regrettably, Darwin
never develops the notion, nor does he defend why it never satisfied
him.
41Darwin to Gray (22 May 1860), LLD, II:311–2; CCD, VIII:224.
42Darwin to Hooker (13 Jul 1856), MLL, I:94; CCD, VI:178.
43For a concise review of Darwin’s medical condition and possible
diagnosis, see Lybi Ma, “On the Origin of Darwin’s Ills,” Discover
(September 1997): 27.
44See James R. Moore, “Of Love and Death: Why Darwin ‘Gave Up
Christianity’” in his edited, History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays
for John C. Greene (Cambridge: University Press, 1979), 195–229;
Randall Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and
Human Evolution (London: Fourth Estate 2001).
45Darwin to Lyell (2Aug1861)MLL, I:191–2;CCD, IX:226.Myitalics.
46For an excellent review of this theological approach, see Ernan
McMullin, “Cosmic Purpose and the Continency of Human Evolution,”
Theology Today 55, no. 3 (1998): 389–413.
47Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
(London: John Murray, 1888), II:428. My italics. Darwin
seems to have eventually abandoned his Divine sovereignty argument.
First evidence of this appears in a letter two years later to J. D.
Hooker where he writes: “Your conclusion that all speculation
about preordination is idle waste of time is the only wise one; but
how difficult not to speculate!” (Darwin to Hooker [12 Jul 1870],
MLL, I:321). Moreover, this argument does not appear in Darwin’s
mature theological position found in his Autobiography (1876).
48Neal Gillespie recognizes this intellection tension in Darwin’s
thinking.Hewrites: “Darwin’s materialism [was] compatible in his
mind with theism. … There were in effect, two Darwins: one had
caught the vision of a new method; the other still adhered to the
older view that the very possibility of there being such a thing as
science was necessarily linked to theism as the source of meaning
and rationality in nature.…He rejected the creationist doctrine of
divine intervention or superintendence because it was philosophically
incompatible with the tenets of an emerging positive science
…[but] Darwin’s own approach fell short of complete positivism.
Because of the theological elements in his thought, he continued to
speculate…on the possibility of life and was loath to abandon the
universe to the full meaninglessness that a complete positive view
of the cosmos entailed” (Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the
Problem of Creation [Chicago: University Press, 1979], 139, 146).
49Origin, 488.
Volume 56, Number 1, March 2004 11
Denis O. Lamoureux
50See section entitled “Belief in God–Religion” in Descent of Man,
93–6.
51Descent of Man, 613.
52ACD, 90.
53ACD, 88, 89–90.
54ACD, 90–1. Darwin is referring to the passage in his Beagle Dairy.
See quote 17. Darwin’s comment that this “religious sentiment” is
“experienced by most persons” compliments my argument in
endnote 38.
55ACD, 91. Darwin’s “color-blindness” seems to be somewhat temporary
or intermittent as quote 63 will reveal.
56ACD, 92–3.
57See Frank Burch Brown, “The Evolution of Darwin’s Theism,”
Journal of the History of Biology (1986), 28. Brown argues cogently
that Darwin’s statement should not be understood as simply a
reminiscence.
58The question arises as whether Darwin uses the term “theist” correctly
in this passage when in fact he means “deist.” In defense that
he does employ the term properly is the following assertion three
pages earlier in this section on “Religious Belief.” Darwin states:
“I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until
a considerably later period of my life” (ACD, 87. My italics).
59ACD, 93.
60ACD, 93. One must ask: “Is Darwin not using a mind‘evolved from
lower forms’ to make this argument?” Yes, there is a problem here
with self-referential incoherence.
61ACD, 94.
62Darwin to Fordyce (1879) LLD, I:304. Italics added.
63LLD, I:316.
64For central Intelligent Design Theoryworks, see Phillip E. Johnson,
Darwin on Trial (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 1991) and his Defeating Darwinism
by Opening Minds (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 1997); Michael J.
Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
(New York: Free Press, 1996); and William A. Dembski, Intelligent
Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downer’s Grove:
IVP, 1999). For my debate with Johnson, see Phillip E. Johnson and
Denis O. Lamoureux, Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux
Debate on Biological Origins (Vancouver: Regent College Press,
1999); a synopsis of my argument in this book can be see on my
web page: www.ualberta.ca/dlamoure/3Johnson.htm.
65Henry M. Morris, The Troubled Waters of Evolution (San Diego:
Creation Life Publishers, 1982), 75.
66Richard Dawkins openly admits: “I want to inspire the reader with
a vision of our own existence…I want to persuade the reader, not
just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it
is the only know theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery
of our existence” (Blind Watchmaker, xiv. Italics original). Clearly,
Dawkins is promoting a secularized form of religion.
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