The Faith of Charles Darwin

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), February 6, 2005, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

The hype has already begun! Plans for the big celebration are being discussed, and no doubt Hallmark and American Greetings are working on special cards for this grand day. I’m speaking of “Darwin Day” which is set for February 12, 2009, the 200^th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and, by tidy coincidence, the 150^th anniversary of the publication of his great work, The Origin of Species.

While we Unitarian Universalists might look forward to honoring this important man of science, we know that there are others in the religious community who will see this day as a time to protest against Darwin’s theories and the fact that they are being taught to school children — thus weakening their faith in the teachings of the Bible.

The battle between Charles Darwin and his religions detractors has been going on for generations. Darwin knew that his ideas were very radical and that he would face harsh critics who would not limit their attack to his ideas. They would, and did attack his character and his “godless” theories with all the force they could muster. He feared the misery what these attacks would cause his beloved wife Emma and his family. He worried that his reputation as a scientist would be damaged and his ideas ridiculed. Some biographers believe that these fears and worries were the motive for Darwin’s decisions to delay the publication of his theories for twenty years. Some speculate that if another scientist by the name of Alfred Wallace had not been on the verge of publishing his own work on evolution, Darwin’s Origin of Species, might not have been published until after his death. But the battle between science and religion was not confined to the public arena or the ivory tower.

Recent biographers have had access to information that was not included in Darwin’s autobiography. These new sources reveal that Charles Darwin struggled in his own mind and heart with the theological implications of his discoveries and theories. For much of his adult life, he tried to reconcile his scientific views with his Christian faith. Many people think of Darwin as a convinced atheist, but the truth is that Darwin was uncertain about the question of God’s existence right until his death.

I have to wonder about the workings of a mind that could develop a theory that explained the development of species through a “desperate” struggle for survival and yet held onto the image of a personal god; an image that endured throughout Darwin’s life. Why was this most unscientific notion of a divine creator so deeply ingrained in Darwin’s psyche, that he could not let go of it?

Why did Darwin need God?

Certainly his family and the society he lived in affected his views on religion. Charles was born into an upper middle-class family in the village of Shrewsbury.

His mother, Susannah, was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, whose name is best known today through the pottery and china that comes from the firm he founded. Josiah was a committed liberal Christian, a Unitarian who believed that Jesus was a great human teacher, not divine; that God was a unity, not a trinity. Charles’s father, Robert, was a highly regarded physician and financier. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a skeptic and an agnositc. Robert Darwin was an atheist, but his lack of conviction didn’t keep from seeing the Church as a useful institution for educating his children and later as a source of respectable employment for his sons.

The Darwin children began their education in a school run by the local Unitarian minister, and they attended church services with their mother in the local Unitarian chapel. It was her intention to raise them as Unitarians. But Susannah died when Charles was only eight. Robert, being a person of some status in the community, maintained loose ties to the Church of England, and his children were baptized in that church. Soon after Susannah’s death, Charles was enrolled in an Anglican boarding school about a mile from his home. He studied there until his was fourteen.

The curriculum emphasized the classics and religion, but Charles’s passion was the world of nature. He loved to shoot birds, collect beetles, trap rats, and read all he could about the natural world. These pursuits did not please his father, who expected him to follow the family tradition and become a physician. Charles was not interested in this profession, but he was a dutiful son and went off to medical school to please his father.

Charles found the lectures dull, and the demonstrations of surgery were horrifying. (Remember this was before anesthesia.) It didn’t take long for both Charles and his father to realize that medicine was not his calling. He had occasionally attended services at the Presbyterian church near the medical school, and his father must have thought that his son had sufficient interest in theology to make a living as an Anglican priest.

At that time it was quite easy for wealthy families to purchase appointments for their sons in parishes with large endowments. Charles probably saw this as a way to make a respectable living. Afer all, if he became the vicar of a country church, he would then have time for his true calling: the study of natural history.

Although he had attended an Anglican school where he was forced to attend chapel and study the teachings of that church, Charles had some serious reservations about the doctrines of the Anglican church. He did have firm belief in the “literal truth of every word in the Bible.” And it was this faith that helped him persuade himself to accept the Anglican creed so that he could go through with his education for the priesthood. Later, he confessed to a friend that he found his behavior in this matter quite irrational.

During his years of study for the priesthood, Charles also studied the scientific theories of William Paley, who was an archdeacon of the Church of England. Although he was not entirely persuaded by Paley’s arguments that defended the Biblical accounts miracles of Jesus in the face of skeptics like David Hume, he was taken by Paley’s claim that proof of God’s existence was found in the designs we find in nature. Paley saw evidence of God’s hand and skill in every quarter of the natural world, from the tiniest pond-dwellers to the stars. He argued that the universe and all its wonders could have come into being only through the work of an intelligent Creator. Payley, along with other “natural theologians” of the day, believed that humankind was the pinnacle of God’s creation and that everything that existed in the natural world was created for human use, enjoyment, and instruction.

Darwin was deeply influenced by another professor who was on the faculty of Cambridge School of Theology: the Rev. John Henslow, a self-taught “natural philosopher” who was widely read in many fields of science. Like Paley, he saw the natural world as a manifestation of God’s work and love, and he taught his students that the study of this world was a means to move closer to God.

It was Henslow who nominated Charles Darwin as a potential companion for Captain Robert Fitzroy, of the HMS Beagle. This voyage would transform the course of Darwin’s life and he would change the scientific world with the observations and theories that he would develop as a result of this trip. Once he had the consent of his reluctant father, Charles was eager to begin this voyage that would allow him to learn more about what he called the “glories” of creation.

While on this voyage, Darwin studied Charles Lyell’s revolutionary book Principles of Geology, which offered proof that the Earth was far older than most people thought. Lyell also claimed that the process of the development of the continents was continual. He argued that this process was not fueled by divine judgment, but by natural events that occur according to natural law.

These new ideas surely planted seeds in Darwin’s mind. He may have been more open toLyell’s unorthodox ideas since he was a Unitarian and a natural theist who saw the proofs of “a Creative Intelligence and his foresight, wisdom and power” in nature. Darwin Biographer, Janet Browne writes that Lyell’s religious faith had a profound and lasting impact on Darwin’s own religious beliefs.

The seeds of doubt that would challenge those beliefs were planted by Darwin’s own observations of the natural world he was discovering as his five-year voyage unfolded. By the time he returned to England, he had changed his mind about becoming a priest. His confidence in the truthfulness of scripture was crumbling. He also began to disagree with some of the main ideas of the “special creationists” who claimed that everything living on earth was still exactly as God made it 6000 years ago. But even with his doubts and difficulties, Charles was not ready to exclude God entirely from the process of creation.

As Darwin began to challenge the foundations of the religious explanations and to develop his theories of evolution and natural selection, Darwin’s ideas about God’s role and power as the Creator shifted. In his first notebook on what he then called “transmutation” he wrote,

“Astronomers might formerly have said that God ordered each planet to move in it’s particular destiny, In the same manner, God orders each animal created with certain forms in certain countries, but how much more simple and sublime [a] power [to] let animals be created. . . by the fixed laws of generation.”

This statement does not mean that Charles was now a Deist — someone who believes that God created the world and then withdrew (perhaps to simply watch what unfolds as a disinterested observer or to simply disappear in some other dimension). In another notation in the same notebook, he wrote that God might still be at work on Earth, but at best his methods are indirect. It seemed much more likely that whatever happened “flow[s] from some grand and simple laws.”

When Charles was nearly thirty, he married Emma Wedgwood, a cousin on his mother’s side. Like her grandfather Josiah, she was a liberal Christian, and her faith was very important to her. Darwin’s growing rejection of scripture worried her, and in a letter she confided to him that it caused her great pain to think that because of his lack of faith, they might not be together for eternity. Darwin was deeply moved by his wife’s concern, and at the end of his life, he said that he had often shed his own tears over this tender sentiment.

There were more tears to come. The couple’s third child died shortly after birth. In 1850, the Darwin’s oldest daughter, Anne, died. She was Charles’s favorite child, and her death caused him to shed whatever vestiges of Christianity and belief in an omnipotent divinity that remained to him. He was still grieving the death of his atheist father, and he said that the idea that God would condemn anyone to an eternity of suffering was a “damnable doctrine.”

And yet, perhaps out of habit of thought and spirit, perhaps out of a need to understand how it all started, Darwin continued to make reference to God and God’s role in creation. As he worked on the book he called “Natural Selection,” he commented in a letter to a friend,

“I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection. . . which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.”

And in the manuscript itself, he noted,

“nature’s productions bear the stamp of a far higher perfection than man’s product by natural selection.”

But we should also note that Darwin’s views of nature were not entirely sanguine and admiring. In a letter written to a friend just a few months earlier, Charles revealed his personal dismay at the conclusions his observations and theories led him to.

“What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature.”

If the laws of nature were an expression of God’s nature, then this god was certainly cruel.

By the time he had finished On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859, Darwin was less certain that God was moving creation ever onward and upward toward perfection through the force of the natural laws of the Universe. In a remarkable shift of thought, he rejected the practice of using theology to explain science. It seemed to him far better to leave open those questions that science could not answer, than to turn to religion for the answers.

And yet, even at the end of his life, Darwin could not quite let go of God. In a letter to his grandson, he admitted that he had never been able to make up his mind about the existence of a Creator who was the first cause of all that he had studied in the course of his 73 years. One biographer, James Moore, says,

“he [Darwin] remained a muddled theist to the end.”

Stephen Jay Gould concluded that Charles Darwin probably retained a belief in some kind of personal god, but that this god did not intervene in the evolutionary process. Other biographers claim that at the end of his life, Darwin was an agnostic, not in the sense that he doubted the possibility of God, but in that he was willing to accept that he would never have an answer to this mystery. Another biographer believes that Darwin held on to his theism because “it made his science possible” by offering a first cause for creation. However, Darwin’s faith in the doctrines of the church was thoroughly eroded, as we can see in his quip that religious faith was

“akin to a monkey's fear of a snake.“

“His most tireless supporters were the Unitarians and free religionists, proud that Darwin had been brought up in their rational, dissenting tradition and always appreciative of his naturalistic views.”

It is not surprising that the man who devoted his life to creating and fleshing out the theory of evolution would evolve in his faith. His progression from a youth who was willing and able to talk himself into the acceptance of creeds and doctrines that he did not understand, to a difficult period of heretical theism, to an uncertain theism intermixed with agnosticism, was not the result of growing indifference or a diminished sense of the importance of religion as a part of human life. Charles Darwin traveled the path of a free and responsible search for truth as far as it would take him, and in the end he was content to say that if there was an answer to mystery of God, it was beyond even his original and brilliant mind.

In his book, Darwin’s Religious Odyssey, author William Phipps says,

“Darwin had the ‘holy curiosity’ that Albert Einstein said was needed for the study of nature.”

Darwin’s personal religion did not offer comfort in times of trouble, but neither did it deaden his spirit or blunt his determination to get at the truths that he sought. And if my own religious faith serves me as well, I will consider myself blessed.

May it be so.

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