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 her fear that his ambition to explain everything with his science might distort his understanding of reality.
As revealed by the bumper battle of Darwin and Jesus fishes, many people regard Charles Darwin as a sort of patron saint of atheism, contrasting him with Emma as a traditional Bible Christian. These popular images only obscure what the Darwins really did believe and what were the historical, cultural, scientific, and personal reasons they disagreed about religion – which are pretty much the same reasons people disagree about religion today.
The Darwins
What is most remarkable about Charles’s religious views is that they remain opaque in the twenty-first century despite the enormous biographical effort expended on this one man for over 150 years. We do know that Charles found professional and personal comfort in a worldview constructed around science and especially his theory of evolution through natural selection. He stubbornly, even proudly, clung to belief in the total adequacy of this worldview.
Like many thoughtful Victorians, Charles was torn between longing for a true religion and demanding evidence of truth – evidence in this material world. Charles reported later in life that he had examined the claims of Christianity but rejected them because they lacked supporting evidence. Seeing no intellectually respectable religious alternative to Christianity, Charles still would not give himself to atheism. When pressed for his religious views, which was often in his later years of fame, Charles was circumspect in his responses, defaulting to “agnostic” as the best descriptor of his confused feelings on the matter. But he didn’t struggle as hard with this dilemma as other eminent Victorians so famously did. In the full picture of his life, it seemed the question of God was not all that important to him – except as it affected his marriage.
Charles and Emma shared a pair of grandparents, the Wedgwoods of fine china fame. They grew up together in the social milieu captured so well in Jane Austen’s novels, coming of age in the 1820s. Emma was the youngest and perhaps the prettiest of Charles’s Wedgwood cousins, vivacious, musically talented, cultured, and smart. They married in January 1839, just over three years after Charles’s return from his five-year, round-the-world voyage on H.M.S. Beagle. She was Charles’s best friend and nearly constant companion from their wedding day to his death at Down House in April 1882.
Though she was immersed in the same intellectual climate as Charles, Emma remained a lifelong believer in God, but we know even less about Emma’s particular religious views, except in reaction to Charles. His refusal to believe caused Emma quiet but persistent concern that they would be eternally separated in the afterlife. Charles deeply regretted causing her this silent pain, but his regret had no apparent effect on his religious views. We do know that Emma was a thoughtful, idiosyncratic Wedgwood-style Unitarian, not an orthodox Anglican or an evangelical, as some histories imply. She differed from Charles mainly in having the ethereal gift of faith.
Charles and Emma differed in their reaction to the rising tide of religious doubt in their social circle. This was a corrosive doubt rooted in great confidence in science and deep optimism about the social progress made possible by science (before it was shown by the war-torn and genocidal twentieth century how fragile is human progress and how deadly can be the products of science). “Truth” came to be what only science could demonstrate. Even religious apologists assumed they had to appeal to scientifically validated evidence to support their claims for religion. Little has changed in this respect over the past 150 years.
Charles and Emma managed their religious differences well enough to enjoy a truly wonderful marriage, but they did not converge over the decades. If anything, they grew further apart in their attitudes and beliefs as Charles almost imperceptibly walked away from Christianity then away from God. Emma’s faith was unorthodox in many ways, and it slowly diminished as she aged. But she was steadfast in resisting the fashionable Victorian rejection of the basics of belief in God, prayer, and an afterlife.
How did Charles and Emma manage this dissonance of belief in their married life? In classic English habit, they merely refrained from talking about it. Their famously successful marriage could have been so much more, if they had known and accepted what we can know from current understanding of history, science, and theology. Biographers have failed to fully recognize that Emma actually set the table for just such a reconciliation in a letter she wrote to Charles shortly after their wedding in January 1839.
Being an open book by nature, in the excitement after his marriage proposal, Charles shared his religious doubts with Emma, despite his father’s advice. Emma knew immediately they would not see eye-to-eye on those religious beliefs that meant the most to her. She was so counting on seeing her recently deceased sister Fanny again in the afterlife, and she wanted the man she loved to be with her as well. Charles not only disbelieved in the afterlife; he held other unorthodox views that Emma believed would block his entry to that heavenly hereafter. But Emma was inclined by the warm receptivity to diverse views fostered by Emma’s parents (Charles’s uncle and aunt) to expect that even religious differences could be worked with and might eventually diminish to insignificance.
Emma soon discovered, however, that Charles’s religious doubts had very deep roots. He stubbornly resisted being moved in any direction except away from Christianity, even in its most dilute form. Yet his inclinations were always toward gentlemanly attitudes and behaviors derived from centuries of traditional Christian teaching and belief. Emma knew that this equivocation, this ambivalence, was far from unique to Charles. He was a man of his family, his class, his culture, and his century.
By 1800, the Darwin and Wedgwood families were already living manifestations of a growing rejection of Christianity. While the Church of England was officially Protestant, it was at most a polite protest against the central beliefs and practices of ancient Roman Catholic Christianity. But the Darwins and Wedgwoods were not Anglicans, despite nineteenth-century appearances. They were not even trinitarian Christians.
Given their family and cultural histories and assumptions, it seems implausible that either Charles or Emma would ever have believed truly in the orthodox Christianity of the Church of England. Even if Charles had never set foot on the rolling deck of H.M.S Beagle and sailed off to a prestigious scientific career, even if instead he had realized his young ambition to be Cambridge-trained vicar/naturalist of a rural English parish, it seems highly unlikely he ever would have become, much less remained an orthodox Anglican. His family background and his contemporary English culture would have forbidden it.
This understanding contradicts our century’s dominant narrative that Charles’s scientific discoveries forced him to turn away from Christianity. We must look deeper and wider.
Emma’s 1839 letter to Charles
Sometime in February 1839, just days after their January 29 wedding, Emma attempted to persuade Charles to look outward from her religious vantage point – hoping that might turn on a tiny light of comprehension, if not agreement. Emma did not want to press too hard on his good nature, and she did not trust herself to say the right words to Charles, so she wrote him a letter, allowing him to think before responding, with the option to not respond at all, if he preferred. A woman, even of her education and social standing, even as wife to husband, had to be appropriately deferential to the man’s supposed superiority in matters of the intellect.
Taking all this into consideration, Emma’s letter was often too subtle or cautious for our modern brains to easily pick out her messages to Charles from the hesitant niceties of her language. In consequence, the letter has been dismissed by biographers as too incoherent and deferential to be of real interest. I disagree. Careful reading reveals that Emma’s argument is actually quite modern and astute.
The letter began by pointing out that honest religious doubt that stimulates serious inquiry for the sake of understanding is an honorable practice. Then she acknowledged Charles’s intense focus on scientific pursuits, organizing his own specimens and observations from the voyage for study and publication and having very little time or inclination to research and carefully ponder both sides of difficult religious questions.
Emma then carefully but pointedly speculated that Charles’s thinking on religious questions was heavily biased by his older brother Erasmus, who was an unabashed, non-Christian freethinker. Erasmus surrounded himself with equally avant-garde, freethinking friends, notably the daring and widely read authors Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Martineau. In the years between returning from the voyage and marrying Emma, Charles spent a great deal of time with Erasmus in London. Emma and Erasmus knew and liked each other very well, and she spent a fair bit of time with her brother-in-law’s circle of friends. Emma was familiar with the intellects and opinions to which Charles compared his own, as he sought respectability in the heady intellectual circles of London.
Emma repeated but sharpened her point that Charles’s professional preoccupations would certainly distract him from devoting adequate attention not only to the “difficulties” encountered in arguing for Christian belief but also the serious weaknesses in arguments against Christian belief and more generally any belief in God.
Having set the stage, Emma presented her key message: “May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, & which if true are likely to be above our comprehension.” Religious thinking requires a more open attitude toward what constitutes evidence sufficient to support belief.
Emma then cautioned against too lightly dismissing the Bible (“revelation”) without due respect for the possible consequences of getting it wrong. She warned against “ingratitude” to God for what God has done and is doing for us men and women and our salvation from the evils of our world. This was also a warning against the intellectual arrogance so prevalent in British culture and society.
Emma referred to a conversation in which Charles asserted that morality (“how one ought to act”) can be regarded as independent of religious faith. She boldly made the point that we need external guidance for right human behavior. If that guidance does not come from Christianity in Victorian Britain, where does it come from? And how long can we divorce the guidance of the Judeo-Christian God from our public consciousness of “how one ought to act” before that consciousness wanders into bad neighborhoods?
Finally, Emma intimated that Charles’s religious opinions were not simply a matter of personal prerogative with no significant effect on their marriage and larger family.
A rich commentary on Victorian society and intellectual culture, equally relevant to our own, could be constructed around Emma’s letter. But here I focus on Emma’s key sentence regarding the undue influence in religious thinking of “the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved.” Which has led to scientism.
Misuse of a Useful Tool
Charles drew on Baconian method as updated by the pioneering scientific philosopher-methodologists of the prior generation, John Herschel and William Whewell.[1] He knew both men personally. They built on a practical guide developed by natural philosophers of the High Middle Ages for studying the causes of what they saw in the natural world. Adelard of Bath is recognized as the originator of this guide in the 12th century.
The medieval natural philosophers did not doubt that God is the primary cause of everything; the debate was about how God operates in the natural world. Does God directly make happen each and every event in nature – every wind that blows, every wave that crashes? Or does God create “secondary causes” that are part of the natural world we can perceive, like air and water, as well as the rules that govern the capabilities and behavior of these secondary or natural causes?
Reflecting their Greek as well as Hebrew roots, Christian philosophers relied heavily on reason to guide their thinking on this question and concluded very early on that God operates through natural causes. With the exception of true miracles, when God was assumed to momentarily suspend the rules.
What Adelard was saying is that we can only resort to natural (secondary) causes to explain natural events. The medieval philosophers recognized that explanation hits a dead end when we cite supernatural causes, because we cannot know what such causes really are (that’s what makes them supernatural, literally beyond our world of experience, like God).
Given this truly practical and liberating intellectual convention, natural philosophers could focus on productively exploring the natural world and the rules that govern its operation without getting into highly rational but ultimately irresolvable theological arguments about what created nature and its rules or why or how. This is methodological naturalism. It is an intellectual tool.
A useful tool is always subject to misuse. Natural philosophers, now called “scientists,” must resist a tendency to become so focused on nature that it becomes for them all there is – really believing that nothing exists outside the natural world. Failing to resist this temptation allows methodological naturalism to morph into philosophical naturalism – also known as materialism, in which the supernatural is categorically excluded from existence.
In the nineteenth century, this philosophical position became, for many, “scientific materialism” or “scientism” or “atheism.” These are not intellectual tools but worldviews, comprehensive understandings of existence. Note that they would be ruled out of order by Adelard and the long tradition of natural philosophy, because they make assertions about the supernatural. To say the supernatural does or does not exist is a theological speculation, regarding which certainty can come only through faith, not reason. By this logic, both theism and atheism are ruled out of order as “science.”
For intellectuals solidly committed to the Christian worldview, methodological materialism remained a conceptual “rule of the road,” enabling safe conduct of scientific inquiry. In contrast, for those like Charles who had lost faith in the truth of Christianity or even a notion of spiritual enchantment of nature, materialism slipped easily from method into mantra – nothing exists but the material/natural world, what is available to our senses, even if only when aided by instruments and mathematics. This is philosophical materialism.
As would many others of his time, Charles took his materialism further, into reductionism. He sought to simplify understanding of complex phenomena by breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces and treating complexity as merely the aggregate of millions of pieces cobbled together to form something like a jigsaw puzzle. To a reductionist like Charles, humanity could be reduced to biology, which could be explained as elaborate chemistry, which could be further reduced to the physics of interacting atoms. The purist reductionist dismisses higher-order (even if natural) causes of complexity as unnecessary to understand the universe and all within. While this approach provides a very useful start for understanding complex phenomena, we know now how further research has always revealed far greater and higher order complexity than can be explained through reductionism.
In the nineteenth century, scientists contended that Newton’s physics offered a complete understanding of mass and motion in the universe, then in the twentieth century they discovered the relativistic nature of physics at the cosmological level and the probabilistic nature of physics at the sub-atomic level of reality. Nineteenth-century scientists learned that living creatures are aggregates of cells, but they had only an inkling of how remarkably complex are the biochemistry and microstructure inside each cell, much less the interactions of cells. Early twentieth-century psychologists were tempted to explain animal and even human behavior as simply composed of innate and learned responses to external and internal stimuli. Sociologists like Karl Marx attempted to explain human society and history solely in terms of class structure and economic motivations. The nineteenth century was a hotbed of over-simplification by over-confident scientists and philosophers unaware of just how complex reality is in fact. They offer a cautionary tale for twenty-first-century scientists and philosophers.
Unnecessary Freight
Oversimplified and over-reaching as it was and continues to be, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolutionary change in species by means of natural selection has offered remarkably durable explanatory power for over 150 years. But Charles freighted his presentation and defense of the theory with some unnecessary features that reflected Victorian culture and Charles’s personality rather than his enduring scientific observations and insights. When seen as logical and necessary implications of evolutionary biology, these features mislead many of us to think science is incompatible with Christianity.
Two characteristics of Charles Darwin’s mind stand out in his notebooks and major published works. First was total rejection of all attempts to reconcile his materialistic explanations with alternatives that invoked supernatural influences. Charles was deeply resentful of any attempts to insert divine participation into his evolutionary scheme. To him, the value of the theory by means of natural selection seem to depend on showing that evolution operated with total independence of God – no involvement at any stage or in any way.
Was this because Charles believed there was no God that could be involved? Charles never revealed such atheistic belief in anything he had said to the family or in his letters and certainly not in his books. Perhaps he had an ideological commitment to deism, which asserts that God created the universe and the laws by which it functions but plays no continuing role in the functioning of those laws in the universe? Highly plausible, given what Charles had said and written.
But Charles was even more committed to science, to the careful consideration of alternative explanations of nature. Why would he reject out of hand any and all suggestions of a role for God? Was this because he feared that giving legitimacy to such divine explanations would invite mischief and misdirection by the Old Guard of Anglican dons at Oxford and Cambridge, generating crack-pot, half-baked versions of evolutionary theory? Did he so embrace the ambitions and efforts of his close friend and advocate Thomas Huxley and the X Club to unseat the Old Guard that he was determined, no matter what, to knock away the religious props of their grip on science? Or was Charles just so disgusted with the fuzziness of religious thinking, the invocation of an unknowable spiritual world that leads to no real explanation at all, that he insisted on excluding all such talk from the profession of science?
These questions can be addressed only by reference to the society in which Charles lived and worked and how he reacted to that society. Evolutionary biology in itself offers no answers.
The second characteristic of his mind was intimately related to the first. Charles insisted his theory of evolution by means of natural selection was comprehensive. It had to explain everything about the history of life on earth, from bacteria to human beings, from the origin of life to the present day and into the future. It is fair to say that Charles was caught up in the nineteenth century’s quest for Grand Theory. In his notebooks and major published works, Charles aspired to do for biology what Newton had done for physics and astronomy and Lyell had done for geology – create a comprehensive explanation of everything.
This was not just a Grand Theory of Everything Biological, it was his Grand Theory. Charles felt compelled to vigorously defend his theory against even minor questions about its adequacy, as though the validity and value of the theory depended on it explaining every example from the natural world.
By including humans in his materialist, reductionist program, Charles consciously parted company with most of his intellectual peers, including his close scientific friends Charles Lyell, Asa Gray, and Alfred Russel Wallace. Even more, and this is what really disappointed Emma, his reductionist approach to understanding human beings, even the human mind, categorically excluded any spiritual dimension of humanity – not just from scientific explanations but from the realm of possibility. Charles was most sick from emotional distress when good friends begged to differ with some of his sweeping exclusion of divine possibilities, particularly when Lyell could not bring himself to fully endorse Charles’s theory as he applied it to the human species.
Twenty-first Century Perspectives
There is something maddeningly dismissive in Charles’s lack of genuine response to Emma’s 1839 letter. But not maddening enough to damage her devotion to him. She loved the whole Charles Darwin, of which his religious views were but a small part in her estimation. She did not insist that he change; she only wished he would.
For her part, Emma would not yield either. In a letter to Miss F.P. Cobbe in 1871, Emma admitted that she was “a traitor in the camp” in that she agreed with Cobbe’s concern that Charles excluded spiritual influence on the human “moral sense,” at least in his theorizing on human evolution in Descent of Man, published earlier that year. She went on to state: “I think the course of all modern thought is ‘desolating’ as removing God further off.” Emma seemed to rationalize Charles’s religious position as a product of “modern thought” rather than a result of his own careful consideration.
Each of us bears responsibility for how we respond to the “modern thought” of our cultural moment. Whether due mainly to external social and cultural influences or to his own personal history and thinking process, Charles was more adamant against Christianity than even most of his scientific peers. Even so, regarding Charles as a willing victim of his cultural moment opens up the possibility that his response to the Question of God might have been different in a different cultural moment.
What if Charles had been exposed to reasoning illuminated by our twenty-first-century scientific and theological understandings? After all, scientific understanding of the natural world, ranging in scale from the whole universe to sub-atomic structure and behavior, and all the physics, chemistry, and biology in between, is so much more detailed and nuanced now than in the nineteenth century. Charles and his scientific peers conceived the natural world in terms of laws and mechanisms generating fully predictable outcomes, but now we describe natural phenomena in terms of contingent probabilities leading to variable outcomes. The universe and its component parts behave more like unpredictable organisms than like predictable machines.
Spurred on by St. Augustine’s admonition that Christians must not embarrass their faith by their ignorance of current knowledge of the world, most theologians over the past 150 years have labored to absorb scientific knowledge, including the evolutionary perspective, into Christian understanding of God and how God might work within the natural world.
In the light of current understanding, would Charles have come to a different conclusion about God and even about Christianity? We cannot know, in part because Charles’s intellect had a stubborn streak emanating from more than his reasoning from evidence and reasonable theorizing. Even being a twenty-first-century scientist is no guarantee of such openness. Outside their exceedingly narrow specialties, a shocking percentage of contemporary intellectuals are, in effect, imprisoned by thinking dating from the nineteenth century. Marxism is only the most striking example of that century’s dangerously rigid, simplistic, and misguided intellectual arrogance bleeding into our current thinking.
But in his time, Charles was an unconventional thinker, always eager for new evidence and new ideas. Perhaps Emma could have persuaded him of the worth of her religious viewpoint if she could have brought twenty-first-century perspectives to bear on Charles’s thinking.
[1] See Snyder, Philosophical Breakfast Club.