Darwin and God

From a piece in the Telegraph, George Pitcher writes that Darwin was not the father of atheism.

I just want to suggest that Darwin wasn't the father of atheism; that his story is far more complex than that and that his contribution to the relationship between faith and reason is what really counts, rather than whether he came down firmly on one side or the other, like Sir Alan Sugar deciding whether to hire or fire God.

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The prevalent Victorian religious mindset was Natural Theology and, if its principal proponent, William Paley, would forgive the paraphrase, it ran that life, the universe and everything was too ordered, too complex, too coincidental and too downright beautiful to have come about by accident. It followed that it all must have had a benign and purposeful creator.

Little wonder that Darwin's revelations about evolution undermined that. But he was still able to write this intriguing confession, about the effects of contemporary theology on him, in The Descent of Man: "I had not formerly sufficiently considered the existence of many structures [which are] neither beneficial nor injurious, and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work." Darwin was apparently unable to annul his former belief that each species had been created on purpose. And this led him to assume that everything "was of some special, though unrecognised, service."

But it wasn't his science that destroyed his residual faith; it was the death of his 10-year-old daughter, Annie. Darwin's alienation from his former faith was driven by bitter personal experience, not cold, scientific analysis, as those who hail him as faith's nemesis might like to claim.

In later life, Darwin refrained from committing himself to atheism. He tended to have theistic moments, such as when contemplating how the universe came to be here at all. Darwin intuitively understood the pre-Enlightenment relationship between faith and reason, or the idea of a reasonable faith that is as old as Augustine. Unlike today's posturing and positioning, he was a brave and honest explorer of all that makes us work. That's what we should be celebrating and aspiring to recapture this week.