Friday Night Theology

Can you do Darwin and God?

13 February 2009

 Darwin was a Christian and he lost his Christian faith. Contrary to popular opinion, however, he was never, even in his "wildest fluctuations", an atheist and he was insistent that you could be "an ardent Theist and an evolutionist."

Darwin's loss of faith has much to tell us, even today. His family stock was variously sceptical and Unitarian and he himself recognised that his faith was never that deeply rooted. He needed encouragement to read his Bible when studying medicine in Edinburgh and trained for ordination largely because his father, worried he was turning into "an idle, sporting man", forced him.

His time at Cambridge and the following five years on the Beagle was the period during which he was at his most "orthodox", but it was a particular kind of orthodoxy: objective, rationalistic, propositional. He eschewed personal experience and, in as far as it played a role, scripture was primarily a source of raw material for arguments that proved Christian truths. The cross and its crucified messiah were largely absent.

Perhaps most importantly, Darwin was heavily influenced by the theology of William Paley, which insinuated that the existence and nature of God could be read off the demonstrably designed and benign world of nature.

In the years after his return from the Beagle, Darwin developed a theory of evolution by natural selection that eroded that designed and benign vision of nature. Not surprisingly, his Christian faith, which had rested heavily on just those foundations, toppled and fell.

It was a slow process, however, and only complete many years later when he sat at the bedside of his favourite child, Annie, aged 10, as she died of a "typhoid fever". It was a devastating loss about which he could never speak again and one that would have threatened the most robust of Christian faiths.

In reality, it was this suffering that lay at the heart of Darwin's loss of faith: not evolution per se, which early notebooks show him accommodating with an intellectually defensible concept of God.

Even suffering was not an outright deal-breaker for Darwin. His musings on the subject were subtle and alert us to the fact that somewhere along the line, biology turns into theology and fundamental value judgements are involved.

Today, some modern Darwinians talk about the suffering of sentient creatures as if it were a conclusive argument for the non-existence of God. Others ridicule such sentiments. "Nature is too cruel to have been invented by God! A wet, mawkish, bunny-hugging argument," remarked Libby Purves in the Times.

For Darwin the balance may have weighed in favour of happiness over suffering, but that was not enough. Once he had lived through Annie's wretched death, he could not reconcile the reality of suffering (albeit, he thought, outweighed by happiness in the final reckoning) with his understanding of the Christian God.

Hence, while only the ideologically-blinded think that evolution somehow disproves God, it would be intellectually dishonest to think that it poses no questions whatsoever to Christians. Contrary to popular opinion, those questions are nothing to do with Genesis or human uniqueness. Rather, they are about the oldest problem of all: suffering.

Nick Spencer, Theos Think Tank

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