What did Darwin have to say about religion?  What were his religious, or anti-religious, beliefs?  Did he believe that his theory of evolution by natural selection was incompatible with belief in a Creator? Was it his revolutionary science that turned him into an agnostic? It is important to answer these questions in a balanced way because Darwin’s authority and example are continually invoked to justify metaphysical and theological claims that go far beyond the details of his evolutionary biology and that of his scientific successors. 

Darwin’s great gift to science was to show how an explanation could be given for what had been described as the mystery of mysteries, the successive appearance of new species discernible in the fossil record.  If new species could emerge from pre-existing species by a process of natural selection, it was no longer necessary to suppose there had been what Darwin called independent acts of creation.  For atheists and scientific materialists the plausibility of Darwin’s theory was a particularly welcome gift because it could be used to dispel the notion of divine intervention in nature and to challenge the long-cherished belief that each species had been separately and meticulously designed by its Creator.  Not surprisingly, there was much apprehension and some downright hostility among religious believers, which in ultra-conservative religious circles still continues today.  Darwin’s theory has certainly proved divisive within Christendom; but a long tradition of assimilation and accommodation suggests that some at least of Darwin’s insights have been received as a gift by religious thinkers as well as scientists.  As the nineteenth-century Anglican theologian Aubrey Moore put it, under the guise of a foe Darwin had done the work of a friend, liberating Christianity from a false image of the deity in which God was only present in the world when intervening like a deus ex machina.

Darwin’s inheritance of a Christian natural theology

The gradual process whereby Darwin abandoned Christianity was certainly complete by the time he composed the Origin of Species in the late 1850s.  Some of the seeds of doubt were sown during his voyage on HMS Beagle, when he witnessed a degree of violence and instability in nature that jarred with the stable, “happy world” of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802).  Darwin had been captivated by this book with its detailed descriptions of the adaptations to be found in plants and animals.  For Paley they testified to the wisdom and power of their Creator, who had lavished care on even the lowliest creature.  For his lifelong fascination with the study of adaptation, Darwin remained indebted to Paley, using him as a sounding board to test his naturalistic theory of how such adaptations could have been accomplished through the perfecting action of natural selection working on random variations. 

In South America Darwin saw the devastating effects of an earthquake; he observed nature red in tooth and claw on a grandiose scale; he registered the staggering numbers of species that had become extinct; and he witnessed the terrible struggle for existence faced by the natives of the Tierra del Fuego.  Such experiences, when combined with philosophical reflection, eventually made it difficult for him to discern in nature the workings of a beneficent deity.  He was particularly struck by the fact that neither the Fuegians nor the aborigines of Australia appeared to have an innate sense of God.  This caused him to question one of the most basic assumptions of his day, namely that humans could be sharply differentiated from animals by their possession of that religious sense.

It is commonly supposed that Darwin’s science was responsible for his rejection of Christianity.  A less common, subtler view is that the rejection of Christianity was a precondition of his innovative science.  Both interpretations, however, trade on the same assumption – that of an inherent conflict between science and religion.  The reality was more complex.  There were features of an emerging scientific naturalism that did contribute to new forms of scepticism on religious matters and Darwin’s writings reveal them.  The main reasons for his rejection of Christianity, however, lay elsewhere.  While his science did play a role in disposing him against an intervening deity, the loss of his earlier Christian beliefs had more to do with issues common to all humanity than with conclusions entailed by his theory of natural selection.  The claim that it was his renunciation of Christianity that made his science possible suffers the inconvenience that his theory began taking shape in 1837 and 1838 before he abandoned belief in divine providence.

Moral and existential issues

When Darwin wrote that he could not see how anyone could wish Christianity to be true, he was not thinking about a supposed incompatibility with science.  The issue was rather coherence with a civilised morality.  He was thinking about the doctrine of eternal damnation for the unregenerate as it was commonly preached at the time.  Freethinkers outside the Christian fold – and these included his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, his father and his brother Erasmus – were destined for eternal perdition if this doctrine were true.  For Charles it was the doctrine that was “damnable”, not they. [3]

There were philosophical as well as ethical considerations.  Darwin was well aware that to posit a first cause for the universe invited a rebellious question concerning the cause of that cause.  In common with the sceptical eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, Darwin also attached weight to the consideration that false religions, notoriously, often spread quickly.  He did not find the miracle stories in the New Testament gospels sufficiently compelling to authenticate the Bible as a divine revelation and his general antipathy to claims for revelation was often accompanied by remarks about the ignorance of the biblical writers.

For some scholars, notably Darwin’s biographer James Moore, the death of Darwin’s favourite daughter Annie, early in 1851, marked the real watershed in Darwin’s engagement with Christianity.  One cannot read the letters that passed between Charles and Emma at this desolate time, without shedding tears with them.  Why should so innocent a child suffer? What pattern could possibly be discerned in such human tragedies?  Annie’s death was the most heart-rending example, and the one closest to home, of a more general problem Darwin experienced in seeking to rationalise particular events.  After the Origin of Species was published he entered into a revealing correspondence with Asa Gray in which the question of design in nature was explored in depth.  For Gray, natural selection was not inconsistent with a Christian natural theology; Darwin was more sceptical.  He asked Gray whether he believed that if a man stood under a tree and was struck by lightning there was design in such an event.  In pressing Gray for an answer, Darwin acknowledged that many did believe it; but he could not.  By the early 1860s Darwin was sure that the accidents of life (and by extension the countless contingencies in evolutionary processes) should not be ascribed to the immediate control of a divine agent.

This did not mean, however, that an ultimate Creator and designer of the universe was deleted from his philosophy of nature.  He did not believe that the universe was self-explanatory and in the late 1850s and early 1860s was still willing to describe the laws of nature as ordained by the Creator in such a way that the highest good we can conceive – namely the production of the higher animals – would be brought about.  In his large book on natural selection, of which the Origin was a summary, he explicitly defined what he meant by ‘nature’ in order to make this clear: “By nature, I mean the laws ordained by God to govern the Universe.” [4]

This is not Darwin the atheist of popular caricature.

Darwin’s legacy in the religious sphere

The religious controversies surrounding Darwin’s science have been well documented for the Christian churches, rather less fully for other religious traditions.  Attention has been paid, correctly, to the problems that were posed for those who still wished to read the Genesis creation narratives literally or who recognised that the principle of natural selection required, at the very least, a revision of natural theology.  For Christianity a distinction has to be drawn between the understandings to be found within popular religion and those of a Christian intelligentsia, which, even before Darwin published, had come to appreciate the many different literary genres to be found in the Bible.  One of Darwin’s legacies was to reinforce recognition that attempts to harmonise science with Scripture on the premise that the Bible had authority on questions of natural science were inappropriate and counter-productive.

There were other legacies welcomed by Christian commentators. One of Darwin’s earliest converts was the Christian socialist Charles Kingsley who in his popular novels could be said to have done more than almost anyone to transmit evolutionary ideas to an English-speaking public.  Kingsley delighted Darwin when he concurred that it was “as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development … as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which he himself had made.”  Kingsley implied that he found the former the “loftier thought”. [7]

Darwin’s most able defender in North America, Asa Gray, also commended the new theory from a Christian point of view.  In common with Darwin and with the co-founder of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, Gray valued the conclusion that all living things were linked together by a single evolutionary story.  In contrast to the view that the distinctive human races had been separate creations, which could easily underpin racial prejudice, Gray rejoiced that all humankind constituted a single species united by a common ancestry.  Recent research has shown how Darwin’s own abhorrence of slavery affected his thinking on the origins and unity of the human species. [8] Gray also believed that Darwin had provided a new resource for addressing the theologians’ problem of suffering.  While there was a real sense in which Darwin’s theory put the spotlight on pain, struggle, cruelty and waste in the works of nature, Gray believed that if they were preconditions of the possibility of a creative process that eventuated in humanity, their presence could be better understood.  This line of argument, in which Darwin’s theory became a resource for the construction of theodicies still finds expression today among evolutionary biologists with religious sympathies.  To the question why there were so many displeasing, even devilish creatures in the world, Darwin himself had answered that this was a problem of greater magnitude for those who believed in the direct and separate creation of each species – for the deity would then be immediately responsible for vile molluscs and the wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars.  But if the only world in which the evolution of human beings had been possible was a world in which the production of these other beings was also possible, might there be a sense in which the deity could be exonerated?

Darwin’s repeated appeal to laws of nature, with their origin in an ultimate Creator, did resonate with the thinking of the most open–minded religious thinkers. A striking example is Frederick Temple who, as early as 1860, preached a sermon in Oxford in which he welcomed the expansion of scientific explanation and chided those who tried to make theological capital out of phenomena that the sciences could not yet explain.  This was an early recognition of the dangers for religious apologists who pinned their hopes on a god-of-the-gaps, whose jurisdiction would forever shrink as the sciences advanced.  Temple was a convert to evolution, finding in Darwin’s theory a welcome unification of nature and a licence to believe that the history of life on Earth had been progressive and not directionless.  The fact that Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1880s symbolizes the acceptance of Darwin’s achievement by the English Church.  When Darwin died in April 1882 he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the national newspapers finding no religious obstacle. [9] The Times declared the clash between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in 1860 a piece of “ancient history”; the Liberal Daily News adding that Darwinian doctrine was quite consistent “with strong religious faith and hope.”

That reference to the Wilberforce-Huxley debate at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science is a reminder of the diversity of religious reaction.  The Bishop of Oxford had found Darwin’s theory offensive with its postulation of continuity between humans and their animal ancestors.  Wilberforce’s contention that a graduation from primate to human was incompatible with Christian claims for human uniqueness overlooked the fact that to say humans were derived from ape-like ancestors was not to say they were nothing but apes.  To regard his intransigent reaction as fully typical of the religious response is, however, another common mistake.

A further legacy?

Darwin’s legacy is far from exhausted in the sciences.  In the religious sphere it has proved more equivocal. The oppositional stance of fundamentalist groups and the equally aggressive rejoinders from exasperated atheists has contributed to a polarization that one can only deeply regret.  There is another legacy from Darwin, which, if appropriated, could only be beneficial in contexts where dogmatism on either side prevails.  The manner in which Darwin conducted himself in his dealings with friends and critics alike might still be held up as an example.  There was an attractive humility in the self-deprecating way in which he declined to dogmatise on intractable questions such as the existence of God or the existence of transcendent purposes in the universe. 

Darwin also displayed an impressive honesty in his rhetoric, conceding the difficulties surrounding his theory as well as underlining its strengths. One of his grievances against the evolutionary biologist St George Mivart was that, in a severe critique of Darwin’s dependence on natural selection, Mivart dwelled only on the difficulties, disregarding the strengths.  Mivart was a convert both to evolutionary thought and to Roman Catholicism, making it easy for Darwin and Huxley to impute a religious motivation to his critique.  There were other qualities in Darwin that are often lacking among contemporary antagonists.  He knew where to draw the lines on the limitations of his science, recognising that the future would bring fresh insights and a deeper understanding of the processes he sought to understand.  Two presuppositions characterise much of his thinking on questions of science and religion.  One was that it would be sacrilegious to suggest that the deity was incapable of achieving its creative purposes through natural causes.  The other, associated with his agnosticism, was an attitude of tolerance to those whose intimate beliefs he did not share.  In so far as he had a creed at the end of his life, it was that each man should hope and believe what he can.

John Hedley Brooke

Published on this site April 2013