![]() ![]() Turning to the closing pages of the Origin of Species, we find the same message restated. Darwin had read the book of nature and found God therein, acting through the laws of variation and natural selection. This book, the work of a respectable gentleman naturalist, was not a manifesto for atheism. At the foot of the page are the words: ‘Down, Bromley, Kent, October 1 st, 1859.’ Down House was Darwin’s home, a rural retreat where he conducted experiments and constructed theories over a period of forty years. The second is an aphorism from the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientific pioneer, Francis Bacon, suggesting that true understanding must be sought both in the book of God’s word and in the book of God’s works: in both scripture and nature. One is a statement by the Anglican clergyman and philosopher William Whewell, to the effect that God does not act by constant miracles but ‘by the establishment of general laws’. Having admired the gold lettering on the dark green cloth cover of the book, and turned passed the title page, the first words we read are two epigraphs about God. We can, thanks to the labours of a group of Darwin scholars at Cambridge University who have made Darwin’s complete works available online, try to recreate the experience of Victorian readers as they opened On the Origin of Species for the first time. ![]() For all these reasons, he did his utmost, when he published On the Origin of Species, to present his theory of evolution as an idea that was compatible with belief in God. ![]() Religious controversy would also, Darwin knew, be inimical to the acceptance of his ideas within the scientific establishment. His wife’s religious beliefs also had to be handled gently: the issue of her faith and his doubts was a sensitive one throughout their marriage. He was driven by a passion for understanding beetles and barnacles, not the Bible. At a more cerebral level, it shed little light on the scientific questions that most fascinated him. Apart from anything else, it exacerbated his chronic bowel problems. ![]() But before we examine the peculiarly American religious response to Darwin in more detail, let us return briefly to 1859.Ĭharles Darwin himself hated religious controversy. Rather, they are the products of a particular place and a particular time: the United States of America since the end of the Second World War. Creationism, and its most recent variation, ‘Intelligent Design’, are not a throw-back to the Middle Ages, nor are they evidence of some general and timeless antagonism between faith and reason. To imagine, however, that skirmishes between Richard Dawkins and religious anti-Darwinists are just the latest phase of an age-old warfare between science and religion would be a mistake. Battle has been joined with equal vigour by scientific atheists and religious fundamentalists. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of enthusiasm for the idea of a conflict between Darwin and God. That has certainly been true when it comes to the relationship between his theory and religion. But he has, in some respects, been misremembered. Many of us even carry miniature reproductions of the great evolutionist around with us in our pockets: an iconic image of Darwin, looking like a cross between Socrates and Moses, is printed on the reverse of every ten pound note. Does anything still need to be said about Charles Darwin, two hundred years after his birth and a hundred and fifty years after the publication of his world-changing book, On the Origin of Species? There does not seem to be any danger of the world forgetting who Darwin was, or how his theory of evolution by natural selection permanently altered our understanding of the history of life and our place in it. ![]()
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