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 against independent or special creation of each species by a creator.
Applying his ground-breaking insights to his arsenal of natural history facts, Charles showed over and over again that the facts are explicable “on my theory” and inexplicable “on the theory of independent creation.”
It has been suggested that Charles set up a lopsided contest between his theory and an invented, weak alternative—special creation—specifically to favor a materialist, anti-Christian view of the natural world. If God was at all involved in the creation of species, it had to be through “special creation” directly by God of each species present on earth, never to change thereafter. By showing that his theory could explain far more of the known biological world than could special creation, Darwin could knock God out of the picture.
A convenient strawman conjured up by Charles himself? On the contrary, Charles was responding to the consensus of fellow naturalists, as well as the general educated public. “Special creation” was widely regarded as an essential belief of Christianity.
A.N. Wilson in God’s Funeral pointed out that special creation was never an essential Christian belief. “[Darwin] was not a trained theologian; and he was mistaken in supposing that the immutability of species—that is, the idea that God created all the species ready-made and that they can never evolve or change or become extinct or evolve into one another—is, or ever was, a part of Christian doctrine.”[1]
It was not Charles’s mistake alone. It was a mistake of the English-speaking world, thanks to the reverence accorded to John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (first published in 1667), which depicted Creation very much as a collection of acts of special creation of each immutable species of organism on Earth.
Citing how popular this poem had been for well over a century, Wilson wrote: “It was very easy for English gentlemen, particularly those of Darwin’s level of education, to believe that Milton’s poem had the status of official Christian doctrine, but as a matter of fact it did not and does not. Indeed, in terms of Christian orthodoxy, Milton was wrong.”[2]
Reflecting the special reverence given Paradise Lost in English higher education, Charles included this book among the few he brought to his cramped quarters on H.M.S. Beagle. He even carried the book with him on some of his land journeys by horse into the interior of South America. Quite naturally and accurately, Charles thought special creation the culturally dominant theory of how living species came to be and continued to be—along with the era’s literalist reading of Genesis I and II.
During the 1831-36 voyage, however, Charles Darwin was reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (published in three volumes in 1830, 1832, and 1833). And Darwin was making his own observations and collections, which led him to see the woeful inability of special creation to explain the natural world. Another theory was needed. But he feared that this theory would contradict the orthodox Christian view of nature.
When Charles published his theory of evolution by natural selection, he clearly posed an alternative vastly superior to special creation and the literal Bible in its explanatory power. Very large numbers of intellectuals, including Charles, and most of the reading public and especially those holding grudges against the Church of England and the whole structure of English society, saw the theory of evolution as knocking the legs out from under Christianity and even the existence of God.
It was not Christianity, much less belief in God, that was threatened by Origin “but eighteenth-century Deism, with its picture of a World Architect rather than a Creator.”[3] Deism and natural theology both were destroyed as viable intellectual or religious systems of thought. To the extent these systems were confused by the dominant culture with orthodox Christianity and God, people thought the whole of the Christian tradition and concepts of God was taken down with them.
What Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin actually did was correct a minor seventeenth-century misinterpretation of Christianity. The works of Lyell and Darwin did not address, much less refute, traditional Christian orthodoxy. Instead, they refuted human conceptions of God and of how God acts in the natural and human world that were distinctly deviant from orthodox Christianity.
[1] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 190.
[2] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 191.
[3] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 191.