Darwin and Faith - Reg Luhman
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DARWIN AND FAITH.
George Bernard Shaw said that Darwin “had the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind’ and this has included many Christians. For instace the creationist writer Henry Morris claimed that, “One can be a Christian and an evolutionist, just as one can be a Christian thief, or a Christian adulterer or a Christian liar. It is absolutely impossible for those who profess to believe the Bible and to follow Christ to embrace evolutionism.” This contrasts strongly with the reception given by the original fundamentalists to Darwin’s theory. B.B.Warfield, the avid defender of the inspiration and authority of the Bible, called himself “ a Darwinian of the purest water” and A.A.Hodge claimed that “Evolution considered as a plan of an infinitely wise Person and executed under the control of His everywhere present energies can never be irreligious, can never exclude design, providence, grace and miracle.” So was Darwin the arch-enemy of Christianity as creastionists and atheists like Richard Dawkins would have us believe or , to quote the title of the latest book by Denis Alexander
‘ Creation or Evolution, Do we have to choose?’
The intellectual world into which Charles Darwin was born was one dominated by a belief that the universe was like a fine piece of machinery created by God.. The idea that we can find evidence of God by examining the world of nature is called ‘Natural Theology’ and the most famous exponent of this view was William Paley, who wrote of a book with that title in 1802. It was a book that had a great influence on Darwin. It was required reading for undergraduates at Cambridge when he was there and he recalls how he was “...charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.” although he later came to acknowledge that, “ The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me conclusive, fails, now that the law of Natural Selection has been discovered.”
The young, sensitive Charles Darwin could not settle to a course in medicine and become a doctor, like his father, and was sent to Cambridge to study for the Christian ministry. At first he wasn’t sure whether he could accept the Christian Faith in its entirety but as he later reflected, “...as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.” But, although he obtained a passable degree, he was not interested in the Church and spent his time at university studying nature.
Charles Darwin did not invent evolution. Evolutionary ideas had been around since ancient times and more recently ideas similar to those of Charles Darwin had been propounded by his grandfather, Erasmus, as well as by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It was during his voyage on HMS Beagle , which circumnavigated the world from 1831 to 1836, that the ideas for his theory began to form in Darwin's mind. He was able to observed first hand the amazing variety of animals that exist and wondered why such unique animals existed in Australia and nowhere else and why, on the Galapagos islands, God should create distinct birds and tortoises to inhabit the various islands. He also witnessed the excavation of the fossils of a giant sloth and an extinct armadillo in Patagonia and recognised their essentially similarity to the bones of modern tree sloths and armadillos. Were such animals destroyed only to be replaced by God with smaller animals of the same design ? He also marvelled at the adaptation of animals to their environments, particularly where there was an abundance of life forms, such as in the Brazilian rain forests. The answers to these questions did not occur to him immediately. On the expedition he collected numerous specimens and wrote thousands of pages of notes.
It was eight years later that Darwin wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker about his revolutionary idea, " At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing to murder) immutable. ( i.e. not subject to change.) ” The next year he included in the second edition of the book about his voyage the following sentence about the finches on the Galapagos islands, “ Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure is one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species has been modified for different ends.”
The other important contribution to the development of Darwin's theory was his reading of the book by the Rev. Thomas Malthus entitled ‘ Essay on the Principle of Population.’ Malthus pointed out that populations grow geometrically. A mother may have two children (although most Victorian mothers had far more) who might themselves have a further two and so on. However food supplies only increase arithmetically and the inevitable result is the population outstrips the food supply leading to famine, disease and bitter fighting over the limited amount of food. We can see this only too well in the third world today. Darwin recorded in his autobiography,
“ In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I began my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement, ‘ Malthus on Population’, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unvariable ones destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species.”
Darwin had, he believed, “...at last I have got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it.’ In June 1842 he wrote a brief abstract and a larger one (230 pages) two years later. In 1858, the day after his son had died from scarlet fever and his daughter was dangerously ill and he, himself, was ill and depressed, a letter came from the naturalist Alfred Wallace with a manuscript that gave a virtually identical account of evolution to that of Darwin himself. Being an honest man Darwin wrote to Profesor Lyell in desperation. “ But as I had not intended to publish my sketch, can I do so honourably, because Wallace has sent me an outline of his doctrine? I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any other man should think that I have behaved in a paltry spirit. Do you think his having sent me this sketch ties my hands? ...” . Lyell suggested that both authors' papers should be read together at the prestigious Linnean Society on 1st. July 1858. The next year Darwin published his now famous ‘Origin of Species’.
Darwin categorically denied that he was an atheist. He certainly rejected much of traditional Christianity but not primarily because of the his belief in evolution. He suffered physical and mental anguish over issues of faith, not least because his beloved wife, Emma, was a sincere evangelical Christian who was concerned about his eternal salvation. Darwin wrote, “My judgment often fluctuates…In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.” For Charles Darwin, as for so many Christians, the heart of the dilemma is the problem of suffering both in the natural world and among human beings. He once wrote, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.” When his father and brother, who were both unbelievers died, Charles had a serious breakdown. Three years later, in 1851, his favourite daughter Annie died. She hardly ever needed to be punished in this life, let alone in the next. He could not believe that his father and brother and especially not his beloved daughter, would be condemned to eternal punishment in hell This was the last straw and he finally broke with orthodox Christianity.
There is a story that was circulated in the Christian press in the 1920s claiming that Charles Darwin had a deathbed conversion. The source of the story is Lady Hope who in 1915, disgraced and dying of cancer, gave a talk to an evangelical convention in the U.S.A. She claimed that she had visited Darwin in 1881 when he was bedridden. She said he was reading from the letter to the Hebrews and requested that she conducted a meeting for the local people and servants in the Summer House in the grounds of Downe House where he would be able to hear her. He specifically requested that she spoke about Jesus Christ. Darwin was never bedridden and would not have seen an unchaperoned lady in his bedroom. However, despite his agnosticism, Darwin was happy to support Christian causes and allowed James Fegan and Lady Hope to use an old schoolroom he had set up as a temperance reading room for evangelistic meetings. On of his servants was converted and this seems to be the basis for the legend.
Did Darwin believe that God was the creator of the world and evolution the method He used? We will let him have the last word, in fact literally the last words in ‘The Origin of Species.’ Darwin concluded his book with these words, “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
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