At some level of consciousness, Victorians understood that the real threat to the Abrahamic religious worldview was not Charles’s evolutionary perspective on the natural world. It was the skepticism of the increasingly secular world about the importance, even more the unique status, of the human species in the story of the universe and its creation.Read More

Charles Darwin wrote that The Origin of Species was “one long argument” marshalling evidence not only for his theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection but also against independent or special creation of each species by a creator. He showed over and over again that the facts are explicable “on my theory”...Read More

Christianity played an enormously important role in Western European history, especially after 313, when Constantine officially allowed Christians to openly worship in the Roman Empire. Only a century later, the empire started to disintegrate under the pressure of wave after wave of invasion by “barbarians” from the north and the east of the Rhine and...Read More

Did Charles Darwin refute orthodox Christianity? Or just a minor seventeenth-century misinterpretation of Christianity? Charles Darwin structured On the Origin of Species around a foil, a competing theory. He wrote that his book was “one long argument” marshalling evidence not only for his theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection but also...Read More

Before the mid-nineteenth century, scientists were called “natural philosophers”—seeking to know the natural world. Natural philosophers of the High Middle Ages developed a practical guide for studying the causes of what they saw in the nature. As Christian intellectuals (almost always in holy orders), they did not doubt that God is the primary cause of...Read More