Of all the controversial propositions by Charles Darwin, none was more intriguing yet threatening to his fellow Victorians than the idea that humans are just fancy animals, not a special creation in God’s image.
Darwin emphasized the similarities between humans and other animals in The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). He demonstrated clearly and convincingly that humans are mammals, evolved from other mammals. There is hardly a feature of the human mammal that cannot be found in other primates, at least in some primitive form, and even in other animals. Darwin wanted to establish the likelihood that all human features could be explained as having their origin in ancestral species from which humans had evolved.
Darwin was on solid scientific ground regarding human anatomy and physiology. But he chose to skate onto thinner ice by asserting that even language and morality were derived from primitive precursors in ancestral species—not bestowed by divine favor. Even religious belief was dismissed as an artifact of the structure and physiology of the human brain rather than a connection to a supernatural dimension of reality. The human, in his view, was a trumped-up ape.
His private notebooks, more than his early books and letters, show his deep interest in human society and psychology from the beginning of his intellectual journey. But his fascination with people as highly evolved animals did not fully surface in his publications until years after the success of On the Origin of Species in 1859. In that breakthrough work, Darwin was careful to avoid directly challenging the self-image of his intellectual peers or his society’s views on the nature of human nature.
By 1871, however, the year of publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin had notably greater confidence in his theory of evolution by natural selection than he had in the early editions of Origin. Within the decade following first publication of Origin, the process of natural selection as a theory was increasingly accepted by the majority of younger naturalists and seemed likely to be accepted by more and more naturalists and others in the years to come. He felt he could treat evolution by natural selection as almost a given.
Emboldened, Darwin dared to include humans in his materialist, reductionist program, consciously parting company with most of his intellectual peers, including his close scientific friends Charles Lyell, Asa Gray, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who were otherwise very supportive of Darwinian theory. They balked at their friend’s reductionist approach to understanding the human mind, because it categorically excluded any spiritual dimension of humanity—not just from scientific explanations but from the realm of possibility.
Darwin was determined that his grand explanation of all things biological must apply completely to humans as well as non-humans. Why?
A Charming Idiosyncrasy
Most fundamental for understanding Charles Darwin, what his wife Emma and his children knew and loved so well, was his deep sympathy for animals and even plants. This was a life-long, idiosyncratic way of looking at the natural world. Each individual of each species was in itself fascinating, as a personality, a story, a way of life within a local community of species. It was an ingrained habit of mind that spilled out in casual conversation with family and guests as well as in his style of writing.
Charles would never have said “They’re people, too!” as an unselfconscious pet lover might say, but he acted and even wrote as though he thought it. This was not a habit developed as a shy, fearful, lonely child who found friendship and solidarity with animals and grew into a misanthropic adult. Charles was equally fascinated by people, and he was socially adept and popular. He just didn’t see people as being all that different from the “higher” animals (the quotation marks would be his). He viscerally resented his society’s arrogant presumption that humans have nothing in common with even the animals most like humans in social behaviors and apparent emotions. Much of his life’s work was oriented toward showing that people are animals, too.
As with most everything about Charles, this manner of thinking was not contrived. It reflected two deep features of his personality: a profound distaste for the notion that humans stand apart and above the rest of Creation and a profound affinity with the rest of Creation.
Charles was rightly teased by his family for being anthropomorphic, looking at animals and even plants as little humanoids and at people as though they were fancy animals. For him, seeing the similarities more than the differences did not degrade people to the level of animals; rather, it elevated animals closer to the level of regard we have for ourselves. It came to him very naturally; it was an integral part of who he was.
Emphasizing the similarities above the differences enabled him to speculate usefully in both directions. He addressed questions about animals with analogies and metaphors drawn from his own and other people’s experiences, behaviors, and motivations. And he performed the same service for questions about humans based on what he learned from animals. Insights from observation and introspection informed his speculations, which framed his observations, leading to his theories.
Charles was very aware, of course, that his idiosyncratic viewpoint was either a clanging gong or a breath of fresh air for fellow Victorians, depending on their attitudes toward the intellectual status quo. Some were delighted, others appalled. British society at large thought the way Charles talked and wrote about humans and animals was peculiar. For those without appreciation of self-deprecating humor, it was outright insulting.
Charles was known to intentionally exploit the shock value of his perspective, such as when he suggested a link between religious devotion and “the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings.” Amusing for some, liberating for others, and offensive to many, Charles’s distinctive perspective on our animal origins seemed to forbid the exceptional power of human intuition and reason to enable some of us—not all—to “see” beyond the observable facts of the universe.
The Nature of Human Nature
Charles wrote of the human species as an animal subject to the laws of evolution through the action of variation and natural selection. He used a good deal of ink in the beginning chapters Descent of Man to show that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from the other animals, especially when compared to the apes. This difference only in degree includes mental capacities, though he admitted freely that the difference in degree is big indeed. He even extended his argument to the moral sense in humans, showing that animals like apes and dogs seem to exhibit primordial signs of a moral sense of what they should do in contrast to what they actually do.
Descent of Man is a logical extension of Charles’s evolutionary theory into the intellectual discussions of Victorians about the nature of human nature. It was fashionable to seek “grand theory” that explains everything everywhere about human nature, society and history—usually as an alternative to traditional Christian explanations but also in competition with other secular theories arising in and before the nineteenth century in the Enlightenment and Romantic movements.
Renaissance and Enlightenment humanists had elevated “Man” to a pedestal from which he could challenge the Christian notion that we are all “sinners” depending on the grace of God for all that we do that is true, good, and beautiful.
Instead of seeing the hand of God in the achievements of human history, the humanists were deeply impressed by humans as autonomous agents of civilization—what they had done and could do and were likely to do even more of in the future, independent of God and in spite of constraints imposed by the institutional “church.” By the nineteenth century, this humanist attitude permeated European society and culture, even among Christian intellectuals. It manifested as “arrogance,” in Charles’s opinion, regarding the superiority of the human species above all other species, our special status as the species set apart, created in the image of God.
For nineteenth-century Europeans, because of their technologically and intellectually advanced civilization and its success in dominating non-Europeans, the assumption of human superiority morphed into assumption of the superiority of European humans. This pernicious shift led to a corrupted use of science (“scientific racism”) to justify treatment of non-Europeans as inherently inferior, incapable of attaining “civilization” on their own.
While Charles and Emma joined with most Europeans in extolling the superiority of their civilization, they rejected the corrupted science that marshalled supposed evidence to support a priori conclusions about the various human races. Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore convincingly argued in Darwin’s Sacred Cause that one of the most fundamental motivations for Charles’s theory of human evolution was his hatred of slavery, leading to a nearly life-long intellectual effort to refute the proponents of scientific racism.
The Romantic Movement emerged in the late eighteenth century mostly in reaction to the Enlightenment exaltation of human reason and the civilization it had produced. As the movement flourished in the early nineteenth century, the Romantics pursued many themes, but the most prominent among them was the doubt they raised about the merits of civilization. Influential writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson promoted the ahistorical notion of the “noble savage,” uncorrupted by the many vices of civilization. In this view, the human being in a state of pre-civilized nature was happier and more virtuous, more noble than the denizens of
Europe’s rational civilization.
In a way, this was a modernized version of the Fall of Adam and Eve and their eviction from the Garden of Eden, except it was not a snake and forbidden fruit that did them in but European civilization with its cold-blooded hyper-rationality. Some Romantics saw “civilized” humanity in general as a blight on pristine nature, essentially an anti-humanist attitude that has deeply influenced many in the modern environmental movement.
No doubt Charles felt emboldened, if only unconsciously, by the Romantic push-back against humanist arrogance. It was in the air of his early nineteenth-century intellectual environment. Given his high regard for animals and plants, he took some pleasure in taking the whole human species down a peg from its exalted status.
Anti-Christian Radicals
Darwin’s argument, despite its very different motivations, resonated in Victorian England with an explicitly anti-Christian, even atheistic line of thinking. This intellectual confluence had profound impact on subsequent generations of intellectuals and on the general reading public for whom these intellectuals wrote.
This line of thinking was developing long before Darwin’s publications in the mid-nineteenth century. It became prominent in the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment and Revolution and in the nineteenth-century aftermath in Europe as an integral component of the rebellion of intellectuals against the cultural, social, and political dominance of Christianity, or more specifically, Christian institutions. Various forms of the Christian church had dominated European society and culture since the last centuries of the Roman Empire, and the church was the foundation and defender of the traditional social order dating back to the feudal period.
In the nineteenth century, the privileged position of the Church of England in government and society remained real; rural England was still organized in Anglican parishes with a church, a vicar, and a vicarage as the presumed center of social and cultural life. The trainers of Anglican clergymen were the oldest and most prestigious universities at Oxford and Cambridge, which were still restricted to young men assenting to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.
But the Establishment Church had become weak in vitality and sincerity of faith. In the nineteenth-century English novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and others, the local vicar was more often mocked than honored; think of Mr. Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Elton in Emma.
Even so, membership in the Church of England continued strong, if only because so many people were born to it. With limited awareness of alternatives, with example and teaching by supportive parents, those born to a faith quite naturally grow into it, becoming comfortable with its vocabulary, its stories, and its worldview—which might otherwise seem quite odd or inscrutable, even repugnant, to outsiders. Moreover, the benefits of a secure faith have been well documented. True religious community (not the totalitarian cult) is generally good for its members and for the whole society.
Even as intellectual life was becoming increasingly secular, the Church of England continued to provide the fruits of secure faith to a large portion of the population. The church was a socially stabilizing force, frustrating the radicals calling for overthrow of the social order. In tribute to its effectiveness (Marx’s opiate of the masses), radical activists typically sought to undermine the church, because they thought it stood in the way of revolutionary “progress.”
The more radical elements hated not only the Church of England but any and all religious commitment. If they could cast serious doubt on God’s existence, the credibility of religion and the legitimacy of religious institutions would be destroyed. Hence the association of “atheism” with social disintegration and upheaval, as in revolutionary France. In the era of England’s conservative reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, to be an avowed atheist was tantamount to subverting social stability, thereby threatening national security.
Seeking all-important respectability in this reactionary society, Charles’s father Dr. Robert Darwin was quite happy to send his sons off to Cambridge with certificates of Anglican baptism, even though their mother was a Wedgwood Unitarian and Dr. Darwin himself was a “freethinker” like his father, the famous Dr. Erasmus Darwin. The early nineteenth-century Darwins and Wedgwoods regarded accommodation with the Church of England as essential to their gaining and maintaining status as landed gentry.
For Charles, upon his return to England in 1836 from his round-the-world voyage, these fearful attitudes of his social class created a deep personal anxiety about his career ambition to explore and develop his emerging ideas about evolution of species.
Evolution, at that time more often known as “transmutation of species,” was one of the ideological weapons deployed by social change radicals against the Church of England and the social order for which the church provided sacred justification. Though not an orthodox Christian belief, the Church of England insisted that species, each one specially created by God, would not, could not change. Radical advocates of social change sought to show that species, including the human species, can and do change, making transformation (transmutation) of humans and their societies not only possible but inevitable. Transmutation (evolution) became one more ideological bomb to throw at the church to clear the way for their utopian ambition.
More threatening still was the idea that humans are just fancy animals, not a special creation in God’s image. If humans evolved from animals that had evolved from simpler forms arisen from the primordial ooze through spontaneous generation, then the radicals of that era could argue that the human species has been no more favored by God than any other species. And if humans are not God’s chosen species, not in a special relationship, the historical role of the church as arbiter between God and humanity would be meaningless. We would have no master but ourselves.
A Unique Species
There is no disputing the similarities Charles emphasized, his observations of nonhuman precursors of many traits once thought to be unique to the human species. Even birds use tools, and even insects have complex communication systems and build elaborate structures. Individual apes and parrots have been taught to “speak” simple language. New discoveries of unexpected capabilities in non-human animals are reported with regularity. Many modern writers have made considerable money elaborating the implications of all these similarities, establishing over and over that we humans are not as special as we like to think we are. All this reflects the same irritation that humanist arrogance evoked in Charles, the desire to take our species down a peg.
Almost anything is good that mitigates human arrogance, abounding as it does among intellectuals and their followers. Certainly, the arrogance of Victorian Britain was insufferable in many respects. The push-back was and is understandable, perhaps overdue, but the pushback itself has often been equally insufferable. The pendulum swing needs to be dampened by recognition of the reality of the human species. It is indeed special, truly unique, both in its capacity for good and its capacity for evil. There is no other species that comes close. What other species has shown even the potential to come close to human achievements?
Never mind the soaring splendor of high culture—the pinnacles of architecture (e.g., the Gothic cathedrals), engineering (e.g., the Apollo landings on the moon), painting and sculpture (e.g., Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and David), music (e.g., Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles), science and mathematics (e.g., Einstein’s theory of general relativity).
Never mind the staggeringly systematic slaughter in the twentieth century of more than 100 million fellow human beings by regimes parading under banners extolling the “common good,” and that’s not counting the staggering casualties of modern, technologically advanced warfare.
Never mind that our species practiced slavery for millennia, as do ants, then gave it up because of an abstract idea that all humans are children of an unseen god. And hundreds of thousands losing their lives in pursuit of this change of attitude and practice, as in the American Civil War. Ants will never do that.
Never mind that our species has dedicated huge areas of land for conservation of other species and has rescued other species on the verge of extinction through captive breeding and release (e.g., California Condors), through banning DDT (that might have saved hundreds of thousands of African lives from malaria) so that Bald Eagles, Peregrine Falcons, and other raptors could return to our skies, through managing hundreds of square miles of northern Michigan to preserve breeding habitat for Kirtland’s Warbler.
Put all these aside and just consider the mundane features of our civilized lives: the houses we live in, the cars we drive, the airplanes we fly, the electricity grid, the water and sewage systems, the internet, our smartphones and laptops. Truly, truly astounding! What other species has ever come close?
The gap is so profound that it seems quite natural to at least consider the possibility that there is something super-natural about human beings. Which should open the mind to the possibility that there are influences operating on our species that are not operating on other species, influences we cannot directly perceive, much less fully comprehend with our science.
But Charles’s pre-occupation, as for many of his time, was with closing the perceived gap between humans and other species, not with appreciating it. There were enough people already doing the appreciating.
God’s Chosen Species?
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.
Primary in the Abrahamic perspective is the assumption that God’s purpose in creating the universe has been to produce a species capable of reciprocating God’s love. Reconciliation of the evolutionary and Abrahamic perspectives would acknowledge that it makes sense that God would choose to create a universe in which the regular application of physical “laws” would drive a progressive process from the chaos of the Big Bang to pockets of ever-increasing order (evolution of galaxies, stars, planets, and life forms), all with the purpose of creating a species capable of exercising free will to reciprocate God’s love.
But what of the evil and suffering stalking our world? Human-caused evil can be “explained” by the argument that God had to allow the human species free will to choose to do good or evil in order to enable a truly loving response to God’s love. But this free-will argument does not explain the toll of non-human animal pain and suffering in the evolutionary process—all those victims of natural selection long before the advent of the human species.
By logically working from the data of natural history, Charles Darwin demonstrated that biological evolution in fact had occurred. By asserting that this evolution was driven by purposeless natural selection, he rejected the progressivism of chaos-to-order applied to biological evolution. Not in so many words, Charles was making the case that if a benevolent God was involved in creating the world we know today, God would have brought it into existence ready-made, without the intermediate steps of a long evolutionary process, thereby sparing all those non-human animals the agony of a process so full of suffering for those who could feel the pain. But the science showed this was not the case. The earth, at least, was not ready-made; science seemed to reveal intermediate steps in an evolutionary process from chaos to order.
Does this scientific conclusion logically and necessarily lead to doubt about God’s benevolence or even God’s existence? Must the conviction that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving be inconsistent with God choosing to create a universe in which the regular application of physical “laws” would drive a progressive process from chaos to pockets of ever-increasing order?
Theologians contend that God cannot do that which is not logically possible to do. Perhaps then God did not have the option to create the whole of the current universe in a single instant without intermediate steps in an evolutionary process. If this is conceivably true, then God’s choice of features of the universe necessary for creating the human species could also have been the regrettable but necessary cause of pain and suffering among non-human animals from which the human species eventually came to be. All that evil and suffering would not be logically inconsistent with the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God.
Perhaps Charles would have found this argument unconvincing. He was unusually sensitive to pain experienced by others, both human and non-human. This sensitivity might have led Charles to overestimate the toll of non-human animal pain and suffering, strengthening his conviction that it could not be the work of a benevolent Creator?
If existence itself is better than non-existence, then the good far outweighs the bad in God’s creation of the universe and all within it, and the bad is only there as collateral damage caused by necessary preconditions for creating the good. That being the case, a Christian, Jew, or Muslim need not give up his or her religious worldview because of evil stalking the world, whether perpetuated by humans or natural causes and even if causing pain to some innocent people and non-human animals.
But without the special status of our one species, the rest of the Abrahamic worldview is difficult to understand, much less defend. Though the work of Charles Darwin and subsequent evolutionary theorists has enduring explanatory power for understanding the natural world, it provides no grounds for rejecting the Abrahamic notion that we humans are God’s Chosen Species. The theory of evolution through natural selection is logically inconsistent with neither the scientific evidence, nor the Abrahamic assumption of God’s purpose.
Like all logical arguments, this one is persuasive only if we accept the starting assumptions. In the Abrahamic worldview, the starting assumption of God’s purpose is valid. For those who reject the Abrahamic worldview, it is invalid. This stand-off cannot be resolved by rational argument. There is no way to objectively judge the validity or invalidity of any assumption regarding God’s existence, much less God’s intentions in creating the universe and all within it. To accept or reject is a statement of faith (trust) in one’s worldview. Some can conceive of a reality beyond the reach of scientific verification; others cannot. Common ground is found in humility regarding our ability to truly comprehend reality.