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

The marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin was an embodiment of the modern tension between science and religion. Though the Darwins had a famously successful marriage, they also famously disagreed about the existence of God and God’s role in the world. Barely a month after their wedding in 1839, Emma wrote Charles a letter expressing...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