The Option to Believe

I am the author, Chris Dunford. What are my qualifications for this audacious project? Perhaps no more or better than yours.

I have a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona in Tucson after a BS in animal behavior and ecology from Cornell University. I contributed many articles to the behavioral ecology research literature, but for three decades I made a living in the world of international development and non-profit management. This career, and my wife and son, have allowed me to observe many faces of the human condition as well as of the natural world, around the world.

If your curiosity insists, you may know me more deeply by reading another book I’ve authored, Life List – A Birder’s Spiritual Awakening (Novalis, 2006). Based on a visit to sub-arctic Canada years ago, it explores why nature means so much to me. In writing that book, I discovered the conflict and interdependence of science and religion.

It is Charles the person who holds my attention, not Darwin the prophet of modernity, not Darwin the symbol of Ultimate Truth, not Darwin an object of “religious” reverence. These caricatures are profound misrepresentations of who was Charles Darwin and what he himself stood for.

What did Charles Darwin stand for?

We cannot know what motivated him or what he believed without going back to the written record—his own books, journals and letters and the writings of his peers, family and biographers. What a daunting task that is!

I am not a trained historian or biographer, so I have had to depend on others to do the tedious work of extracting and summarizing what Charles and others actually revealed about the man. It is a voluminous record, yet very sketchy regarding his religious and philosophical positions. It requires a good deal of interpolation and interpretation, always subject to “observer bias.”

Even what Charles wrote is not the complete key to his train of thought. He had his own biases welling up from assumptions, of which even he was mostly unaware. As we all are, Charles was a child of his time and all that led up to that time. Therefore, to properly interpret what Charles was thinking and feeling, we must explore the history and philosophy and culture and society that influenced his thinking and feeling. A daunting task indeed!

Charles was born five years before Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.  Charles’s parents’ generation was traumatized by the French Revolution and the following surge of Napoleon’s armies across the Continent. The society in which he was an impressionable teenager, as all teenagers are, was the society of Jane Austen’s novels.  England was absorbing and adjusting to Enlightenment philosophy, its countercurrents, and its conflicts with orthodox Christianity, all of which overlay the disruption of the traditional social order by the emerging Industrial Revolution and its new classes of winners and losers.

Just think of the profound influence of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and Watergate on the assumptions of my generation. Charles could not have made full sense of our writings on any philosophical issue without knowing these great influences on our worldviews. Likewise, we cannot interpret Charles without knowing the context of his personal life, starting with his family and friends, especially his wife and first cousin and closest friend, Emma Wedgwood.

Well-educated and worldly, Emma was religious in a way Charles was not, but she was hardly orthodox. To understand Charles, we must understand Emma, too, and their successful, happy marriage and family life.

Why is this important? Charles Darwin has become a touchstone for our modern world.  Commentators in the Science-Religion Debate, with all its political implications and consequences, often use Darwin as their point of reference, either to support or refute assertions about matters at hand.

The Darwin name will be taken in vain regardless of how hard we try to set the record straight, but those of us who honor intellectual honesty and historical accuracy should have ready access to the real man and what were most likely his true views on the issues that are now so controversial. Surely this better understanding only improves the debate. We also owe this consideration to such a remarkable, decent, and likeable man.

Providing ready access to Charles, the real person, allows us to move the Science-Religion Debate beyond the shallow assertions on both sides and into deeper understanding of what science and religion are truly about and why it is so profoundly unwise to dismiss religion as irrelevant to modern humanity.

This book, Charles and Emma Darwin: The Option to Believe, need not be my last word on the topic. My intention is to continue providing commentary, via this website, on the issues raised by each of the book’s eight chapters. Your comments, advice, and corrections will help the process along. This daunting task cannot be done by one person alone.

By design, however, this website does not include an opportunity for public comments, because that opportunity is so often misused and abused these days. If you wish to share your thoughts with me, please use this email address: optiontobelieve@gmail.com