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

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

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

Are science and religion incompatible? Intellectually? Or just socially and politically? Much of my book is an exploration of the origins of this “warfare” or “conflict” scenario that has become so widespread in modern thinking. Lawrence M. Principe, highly regarded historian of science and chemist at Johns Hopkins University, spoke for most present-day historians of...Read More

In what sense was Charles Darwin a genius? How was it that this simple, modest, and lovable gentleman created such a noise in the world? What had he done but connect observations with other observations in ways others had foreseen but never in such persuasive detail? “It’s dogged as does it,” Charles would say, convincingly...Read More