John Durant, ed. Darwinism and Divinity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985)
Durant says that since 1859 people have pondered questions like these: 1) is the theory of evolution by natural selection essentially correct?, 2) what are the implication of NS to our view of God?, and 3) what light do the implications of NS throw on the human condition past, present, and future? (4). Durant claims that CD’s Origin was the last great work of Victorian Natural Theology (16); remember, CD was trained by natural theologians so he inculcated much of it, the problems he dealt with were those of English NT, and the audience he aimed for was largely composed of the English NTs. Indeed, CD received most of his natural history training at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where theory was provided by Paley, practical classes were provided by Henslow (botany), and also Sedgwick (geology). Durant notes that the Origin represents a secularizing trend in mid-Victorian natural theology; a trend in which the revelation of God in the works of nature came to be seen as having been written exclusively in the language of law (17). For many NTs in CD’s day, the uniformity of nature was the “veil behind which, in these latter days, God is hidden from us” (Hutton, 1185, 196).
Writing to acknowledge his receipt of the Origin on Christmas Eve, 1859, Sedgwick told CD that he had read parts of the book “with absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false and grievously mischievious [sic]” (Darwin, 1887, vol. 2, 248). Kingsley, however, admitted that the Origin would cause him to rethink what he had theretofore taken for granted. Kingsley writes, “I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self-development into all forms needful pro tempore and pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to *****loftier” (Darwin, 1887, vol. 2, 287-8). Throughout the years from 1859 until the consecration of Temple as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896, three issues dominated the discussion re: evolution and religion in England: 1) the interpretation of Scripture; 2) the relation b/t God and the world esp. with respect to providence, creation, and incarnation; and 3) the status, moral and spiritual, of humanity (19). In his Bampton Lectures of 1884, Temple stipulated that NT was actually strengthened by the Darwinian theory of evolution. In fact, Temple therein claimed that God makes things to “make themselves”. In saying this, Temple conserved Paley’s conception of God as craftsman and Paley’s conception of teleology, as well as Paley’s conceptioning of theodicy (Durant, 20).
Whereas CD offered a theory of organic change, Spencer provided a metaphysic based on change; whereas Darwin’s universe was subject to chance and randomness, Spencer’s was clear and had determined direction; whereas CD saw the environment as involving the inherently amoral processes of reproduction, competition and selection, Spencer discerned within nature the foundations of conduct – the survival of the fittest.
The Oxford Anglo-Catholic Aubrey Moore argued for the essential orthodoxy of the Origin.
Durant argues that Fundamentalism is a reaction against the liberal movement’s acceptance of Darwinism in the 20th century (27).
Search online for the following extended quotation: “In general, modernists adopted the kind of optimistic cosmology that had been so popular in the late nineteenth century, in which the theological concepts**************represented the rejection of a complacent natural theology that identified God too closely with the grand march of natural and human history” (Durant, 28).
Durant argues that there are resources within evolutionary theory that make it attractive to theology. In fact, he says that CD presented NS as a “secondary law” instituted by the creator to populate the earth. He argues that Darwinian evolution proffers a view of the progressive historical development culminating in humanity; this view has proven attractive to biologically-minded theologians, as well as theologically-minded biologists (33). This interaction deserves closer study, Durant therein says, and this volume is in part an attempt to address this need.
John Hedley Brooke, “The Relations Between Darwin’s Science and His Religion,” 40-75:
CD in his Autobiography noted that “the old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered” (87). CD was experimenting with his own form of NT, one in which had certain structural parallels b/t NS & NT (Cannon 1961). Brooke writes, “precisely b/c the theory of natural selection emerged through dialogue with prevailing concepts of design, there are certain structural continuities b/t the theory and NT which can all too easily be overlooked” (47). Among recent commentators, Manier (1978, 16) has observed that Darwin “often employed the patterns of speech, the argumentative structures, and the basic concepts of Paley as if they were his own.” As Young (1971) has indicated, there is a rudimentary classification of five different senses in which NT may have been reflected in Darwin’s science: 1) in the sense that a pattern of argument may be common to the presentation of two different theories; 2) in the sense that the one theory defines the problems that the second theory solves; 3) in the stronger sense that certain basic presuppositions of the one theory may be discerned in the other; 4) in the sense that concepts and metaphors drawn from the first may be used to explicate the basic concepts of the second; and 5) in the sense that the application of the new concept may be regulated or constrained by survivals from the old, thereby affecting the content of the new theory (as cited in Brooke, 48-49).Brooke claims that CD, by pushing God into the background, and entrusting the enforcement of the rules of creation, in a similar to the way that Paley transformed his defence of theism into a model of naturalistic explanation, so too did CD retain a concept of an original creator, as it is “striking how, from the time of Origin onwards, he would credit his creator with foresight, forethought, or foreknowledge, if not much else” (56). Brooke cites the well-known letter to Lyell in August 1861 as evidence, in which CD insisted that “The view that each variation has been providentially arranged seems to me to make Natural Selection entirely superfluous, and indeed takes the whole case of the appearance of new species out of the range of science.” But CD goes on to say, “I do not wish to say that God did not foresee everything which would ensue.” Brooke claims that CD’s loss of a specifically Christian faith occurred about the time that he outlawed divine activity from his biological theory (which was when???)l Brooke goes to to say that it is impossible to conclude whether the loss of faith preceded and made possible his “materialism” or whether it was caused and hastened by it (Brooke, 67; cf. Ospovat, 1980, 193). Brooke contends that “it is one of the more ironic features of the Darwinian revolution that, whilst Darwin was making biology more ‘scientific’, he was gradually dismantling one of the ideological supports of science itself” (69).
Thus, one may assert that Darwinian evolutionary ideas were a threat to 19th century religion by the impugning of the veracity of Scripture, literally read, and by their undermining of traditional ideas about the nature and origin of humanity.
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In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrote: “Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter [i.e. “WHY ARE PEOPLE?”]***************before 1859 are worthless and we will be better off if we ignore them completely.”
Jim Moore, in Post-Darwinian Controversies, argues that CD’s theory bore close affinities to certain forms of Protestant belief, and as a result was easily assimilated by those whose theology was ‘orthodox’.
Gillispie has written that in the years prior to CD’s Origin, the problem reflected within the scientific literature was one of religion in science rather than one of religion versus science (Genesis and Geology,1951, ix).
Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and General Physics, summed up the Paleyan view of the world that was held by most English NTs in the 1820s and 1830s which was the time that CD was trained: “with regard to the material world… we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws” (Whewell, 1834, 356)