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” and inexplicable “on the theory of independent creation.”
Darwin built his evolutionary theory from three driving insights applied to an arsenal of natural history facts, which together broke new intellectual ground and have been shown to be durable and essentially accurate to our present day. He also structured his presentation and defense of his theory around “special creation” as a competing theory, a foil for his theory.
Darwin’s first insight was that species vary so much within that it is difficult to distinguish a species from a sub-species or “variety.” The more populous and widespread the species, the more likely there is considerable variation and many distinct varieties. Each variety is an incipient species. Darwin had seen this variation within species very clearly in his collections and classification work, especially with barnacles but many other groups as well. It is impressive how much he knew from personal observation and how deeply he knew the work of others. Clearly mid-nineteenth century naturalists already had a very sophisticated knowledge of natural history all over the world.
The second insight was to see the relevance of experience and knowledge gained from domestic animal and plant breeding to understanding how the diversity of wild species could have been created. Darwin drew a direct parallel between artificial and natural selection of distinctive features (size, color, etc.) to create and maintain distinctive breeds and varieties from one original wild species. Artificial selection by plant and animal breeders is driven by desire for plants and animals deemed more useful or attractive to humans. The variety of human wants and needs interacted with the available variety of wild species to create an astonishing diversity of domestic varieties from relatively few wild species. Since the diversity of wild species arose well before the human species with its particular wants and needs, Darwin needed to discover the driver of natural selection.
Darwin’s discovery, his third essential insight, came in part from reading Thomas Malthus’s book showing the geometric growth of human population in contrast to the arithmetic increase of food supply. This discrepancy leads to competition for food and other limited resources – competition that creates winners and losers, the latter dying or failing to have children, thereby reducing the population well below its potential to grow geometrically. Darwin saw the parallel with the observed tendency and capacity of each wild species to produce far more offspring than typically survive to reproductive age.
In contrast to the rosy comparison of nature to a peaceful English garden, Darwin saw a “struggle for existence” in the natural world, much like the human world of the nineteenth century. Given the natural variation of individuals within the species, some would have “traits” that give them an advantage in that “struggle” over others without those traits. Over time, the advantageous traits would become increasingly common and the disadvantageous traits less common within the population of individuals constituting that species. The species would evolve.
With these three biological insights, Charles Darwin built on the geological insights of Charles Lyell, showing how small, ordinary changes could transform whole landscapes. The earth was thought by geologists to be old enough to allow such a slow and gradual process to effect dramatic change over time. Why not a similarly gradual process for organic beings as well? Darwin proposed they changed very slowly through a series of small events of natural selection acting on the variation within species.
In contrast to this gradualist, evolutionary view, Darwin seemed to insist that 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. The contrast is stark; his theory could explain far more of the known biological world than could special creation. So much so that Darwin has been accused of aiming a priori to knock God out of the picture by setting up a lopsided contest between his theory and an invented, weak alternative – special creation – to favor a materialist, anti-Christian view of the natural world. Not at all. Darwin 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.
Ironically, special creation is not and never was a part of Christian doctrine, much less an essential Christian belief.
A.N. Wilson pointed out in God’s Funeral that this mistake was not Darwin’s 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 place of Paradise Lost in English higher education, Darwin 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, he 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.
During the voyage (1831-36), however, he was reading Lyell’s Principles of Geology (published in three volumes in 1830, 1832, and 1833) while 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 Darwin refrained for decades from going public with his evolutionary theory, because he mistakenly believed that his theory would contradict the Christian view of nature rather than just correct a minor seventeenth-century misinterpretation of Christianity. And he was very conscious of his English society’s association of evolutionary thinking with political radicals seeking to undermine the Church of England and the social order for which the church provided sacred justification.
When Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, he clearly posed an alternative vastly superior to special creation and the literal Bible in its explanatory power. Very large numbers of intellectuals and most of the reading public, 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 (God as the once-and-done, hands-off creator) and natural theology (God as the intelligent designer of every detail). Both were destroyed as viable intellectual or religious systems of thought. To the extent these systems were confused by Victorian 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 refute human conceptions of God and of how God acts in the natural and human world, conceptions that were distinctly deviant from orthodox Christianity. Contrary to the widespread public opinion that has persisted from the nineteenth century to present day, it seems the works of Lyell and Darwin did not address, much less refute, traditional Christian orthodoxy.
Of course, even traditional Christian orthodoxy is composed of human conceptions of God and God’s action in the world that are inevitably flawed facsimiles of that which humans can never truly understand. We can only make informed guesses. Those comprehending our human limitations, and the limitations of science, saw nothing in the theory of evolution that made atheism an intellectual necessity.
Since Saint Augustine, we’ve been warned repeatedly that our religious concepts are always subject to revision by new knowledge of the universe, earth’s nature, and the human species. Even with the latest and best knowledge, however, we always will be looking through a darkened lens. Augustine famously quipped in his Sermon 117, “If you understand it, it is not God.” In our very human failure to understand, the person with insufficient intellectual humility seems to find proof that God does not exist.
The mistake about special creation was embedded in a broader European misunderstanding of Christianity that had pernicious impact on Victorian intellectual and religious life.
The false notion that science and Christianity are inevitably at odds rose to prominence during the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment and Revolution. In the nineteenth-century aftermath in Europe, this idea became an integral component of the rebellion of intellectuals against the cultural, social, and political dominance of Christianity, or more specifically, Christian institutions.
Enlightenment writers had set the table for philosophically materialist belief systems solely based on observable nature or history or economics or humanity or all mixed together. The first half of the nineteenth century became an age of “-isms,” some of them serving the same comprehensive explanatory function as religion, others quite explicitly offered up as alternatives to Christianity. Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism, the Whigs’ Liberalism, Edmund Burke’s Conservatism, Robert Owen’s Socialism, Auguste Comte’s Positivism and his Religion of Humanity, Kant’s Idealism, Hegel’s Historicism, Marx’s Communism, to name only major ones, all arose or flourished in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries. In one form or another, all of them continue as major intellectual influences into the twenty-first century (the early nineteenth century lives on!). All were secular ideologies focused on humans in the here-and-now world. Some were purely materialist. Others included novel supernatural elements, notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s view of history as guided by a transcendent spirit.
Some intellectuals, including Thomas Carlyle, foresaw that Christianity would be replaced not by no religion but the false religion of all-embracing ideologies – oversimplified, impoverished distortions of European Christianity’s intellectual and spiritual tradition.
Distilling Carlyle’s viewpoint, A.N. Wilson noted:
Human beings are natural adorers. Religion is basic to human character. How it is directed, that is the question.[3] Faith was not something which could be gradually eliminated from the human scene. It was a vital component in the human make-up – personal and collective. If it was not directed towards the true God, it would be directed towards idols. Hence Carlyle’s view – as we can now see, a fatal though perfectly accurate one – that the human race, having discarded belief in the unseen God of Israel, would always look towards an Übermensch or Superman as its God-substitute.[4]
The -ism not yet listed, but certainly the most pervasive and durable, was scientism, another label for philosophical materialism applied to what we know and how we know it. To adherents of scientism, natural explanations of the natural world are the only explanations possible, because there exist no other phenomena than the material, the natural, the theoretically if not actually observable. Scientism is a philosophy; its core proposition is not a finding of science, nor is it logically provable. In fact, this proposition depends on the nonsense assertion that what science has never detected does not exist. The supernatural is outside the space-time framework of the observable universe, therefore undetectable by natural science. To agree that the supernatural is undetectable does not mean you believe it does not exist, unless you are an adherent of Scientism.
How did the nineteenth century ever get into such a muddle? A.N. Wilson asserted that “literalism and an idolatrous attitude to ‘science’ [were] characteristic of the Victorians who lost their faith, so too [was] their terrible, pitiable unhappiness, their sense of metaphysical isolation.”[5]
Wilson claimed that the works of David Hume and Edward Gibbon, published in the late 1770s, were the most important causes of the religious skepticism of nineteenth-century Britain and America. He attributed their influence in great part to their charming style. “Both authors were incapable of dullness. They were urbane, vigorous and, above all, funny. It required a generation devoid of humour, perhaps, to make them dangerous.”[6]
It seems the subtle but devastatingly effective style of these authors obscured their most significant and enduring messages for the Victorians.
Gibbon, by looking through the eyes of Britain’s “good society” at the sainted founders and practitioners of early and medieval Christianity, no doubt intended to portray them as anything but admirable people, much less as deep thinkers. At the same time, if we abstract these portraits from that eighteenth-century frame of reference, Gibbon actually showed us, intentionally or not, that being admirable or socially acceptable were never requirements for God’s favor.
What these saints had in common with each other was not intellectual capacity for rational analysis and consistency but an intuitive grasp of the implications of an astounding event in a historical time and place – the Resurrection. Their witness, directly or indirectly, of that event was the reason they believed so completely that what Jesus did and said was coming from an unseen but overwhelmingly loving and powerful God. Intellectual elites often fail to recognize that Christianity, for all its intellectual depth and reach, is aimed at salvation for society’s losers more than enlightenment for society’s winners. For many Victorian elites that recognition placed Christian faith beneath their dignity.
Hume’s cheerfully relentless and corrosive skepticism showed us that we cannot reason our way to a proof of God, much less rationally derive the attributes of God from what we see in the world around us. Hume, for those who read and understood him, knocked the legs from under the religious thinking of the Age of Reason, both deism outside Christianity and natural theology within Christianity, and its whole rational conception of God as a wise and good designer of Nature to be the best of all possible worlds.
This collapse of the dominant religious concept of the eighteenth century seemed to leave Christianity defenseless against the relentless nineteenth-century demands for science-quality evidence of the truth of Christian beliefs. Only the testimony of some Galilean fishermen and other rubes who actually witnessed Jesus and his miracles could be offered in evidence. And when Gibbon was done, who would believe the likes of them?
Hume and other Enlightenment minds, including Charles’s grandfather Dr. Erasmus Darwin, seemed undisturbed by this apparent collapse of the underpinning rationale of the European civilization that gave them their sustenance and sense of meaning. In the later, Victorian generations, most who understood these implications were deeply troubled. Those who mourned the loss of traditional Christian faith could not see their way out of Hume’s intellectual trap. They had inherited a firm confidence in reason and science as the arbiter of truth – not only about the nature of Nature but also about human nature and the nature of God. They regarded ancient scriptures as providing the totality of their belief system, and they insisted that these scriptures be literally true, if not in every word, then in their general description of events.
They desperately wanted to believe their religion, and they felt compelled to believe their science. Applying the same rationality to both religion and science, they often forced a choice on themselves and had to choose science when religion seemed to lead to different conclusions. Some welcomed the triumph of science over religion, because this fueled their campaign to free themselves from the constraints of the Old Order. Many others, especially in the late nineteenth century, notably Friedrich Nietzsche, knew better the value of what they were discarding, leaving them with, in Wilson’s words, “their terrible, pitiable unhappiness, their sense of metaphysical isolation.”
The tragedy of this cultural mistake is that it was so unnecessary. In effect, Western Europeans had built a strawman from traditional Christianity – actually several competing strawmen. Protestants insisted on the biblical canon as the sole source of the truth of Christianity, dictated by the Holy Ghost to the named authors. Not surprisingly, many of them insisted on the literal truth of scriptures intended to be understood metaphorically and were shocked that science disproved their literal truth. Higher Criticism of the Bible by German theologians showed that the inconsistencies of style of the sacred texts indicated multiple authors writing in different eras of time.
Traditionalists were stunned and defensive, freethinkers felt vindicated, and anti-Christian radicals found weaponry for their fight against the Old Order. Meanwhile the deist intellectuals and the Anglican natural theologians were brought up short by David Hume’s intense skepticism, which seemed amply confirmed by Darwin’s Origin.
What had David Hume done that Blaise Pascal and Pierre Bayle and others had not done a century earlier at the dawn of the Age of Reason? They, like Hume, warned that dependence solely on reason would not get them to a proof, much less an understanding of the immaterial, spiritual reality and God. At some point, even the most sophisticated line of reasoning must reach an impasse. To advance further requires an intuitive faith.
It could be faith that nothing exists beyond the limits of actual and potential human observation and analysis. Or it could be faith in the existence and effectiveness of something beyond the reach of reason, beyond our understanding, a faith in what we can only guess at with imagination and metaphor, insight and inspiration. In his famous wager, Pascal posed this as a choice one could make rationally, after considering potential pros and cons for one’s own future.
Hume posed it more as a trap, but not a trap he had set. The Age of Reason had set it for itself. Christianity, in its historical intellectual development, had given reason a place of honor alongside faith, thereby enabling and encouraging the rise of scientific thinking, which led to the Age of Reason – the Enlightenment. When the counterbalance of faith was eroded away by the Enlightenment, leaving only reason drawing from observable nature, Western Europeans set their own trap. Hume simply pointed out the implications of what they had done.
What had started long before with humanism and science, and more recently with the Enlightenment, became in the nineteenth century intensely destructive of the strawmen of contemporary Christianity. Like the Exodus Israelites in the desert wilderness for 40 years, the Europeans abandoned higher things and built literalist, deist, and natural theological distractions – idols to worship – which proved altogether too vulnerable to historical, philosophical, and scientific criticism and disproof.
The whole structure of belief seemed to collapse with these strawmen. Europeans and their colonial brethren mistakenly thought this collapse took with it the very underpinnings of religion, specifically their Christian religion, even the possibility of believing in the existence and providence of God. Their naïve dependence on pure reason and science led them to mistake their idols for the real thing, which lies beyond and inaccessible to direct human comprehension.
It is our animal nature to crave safety and comfort. These imperatives preoccupy the vast majority of us day-to-day. But it is our human nature to yearn for more, to embrace a calling to a grander, more expansive purpose than just gratifying basic needs. For almost two thousand years, this yearning within Europeans found guidance and structure in a religious worldview, which was Christianity. It provided the object of their natural need to adore, to honor, to thank, to obey, to serve a higher calling.
It is also part of our human nature to yearn for simplicity, clarity, and consistency in our understanding of the world; we have low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. But the person, the words, and the events from which Christianity arose were far from unambiguous and certain. There was always a severe tension between the human need to understand and the mystery of this calling from beyond the limit of human understanding.
To accommodate the collective need to understand, the “church” (from the apostles to the popes to the Protestant reformers) had to simplify and codify in order to convey fundamental truths and answer challenging questions. To the extent that even their best efforts distorted the truths and offered misleading answers, the failure to get it fully right is on them. These truths are no less true because of the very human failure to convey them accurately.
Not that these Christian “truths” are in fact true, only that the failure to convey them convincingly does not prove them false. The effort to transform what is inherently ambiguous and uncertain into the simple, the clear, and the consistent was bound to fall short. Conversely, to simply dismiss what is ambiguous and uncertain for human understanding is to fail to recognize both human limitations and the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of reality. This is a tragic mistake indeed.
Many in the twenty-first century fail to see the tragedy of this European mistake, but many others see clearly what becomes of a person, then a collective of persons when they no longer live within a religious worldview, having no concept of, much less respect for transcendent truths that give life meaning and purpose. Yet this wisdom is as old as the Old Testament’s Book of Wisdom. It foresees the emptiness of those who can see only the mundane drudgery and boredom of our lives or the too-frequent terror and suffering ending in death, and who have given up on any meaning and purpose in life except for their animal concern for safety and comfort.
Even though Darwin’s science offered no compelling reason to reject Christianity, many Victorians (and very many others since) found an easy excuse, a self-serving rationalization for their antipathy or disaffection toward Christianity and even religion in general.
The fundamental objection shared by Darwin with his materialist allies was probably not to design itself, everywhere evident in nature, even if apparently undirected and purposeless. More likely, then and to this day, the objection is to the identity of the probable designer, an indescribable, uncontrollable intelligence we cannot understand with the tools provided us by the Age of Reason.
It does not help that this intelligence is associated in our minds with the institutional religions that suffer all the faults of human enterprise. Historically and even in recent years and days, institutional religions have at times inadvertently, sometimes maliciously, provided cover for human beings to do the evil that some humans are determined to do. This human failing brings discredit to human institutions, religions included, but it denies neither the existence nor the ongoing role of God. It only makes this God all the more inscrutable and mysterious.
[1] Darwin, Charles, “Recollections,” in Barlow, Autobiography, 114.
[2] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 191.
[3] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 77.
[4] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 59.
[5] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 10.
[6] Wilson, God’s Funeral, 25.