The Challenge of Darwinism

Charles Darwin concluded his Origin of species (1859) with the proclamation that there was grandeur in his view of life. From a simple beginning, in which living powers had been “breathed into” a few forms or even one, the most beautiful and wonderful organisms had evolved. Because he used that Old Testament metaphor, and because he also referred to “laws impressed upon matter by the Creator,” it was possible to read into his conclusion a set of meanings and values associated with a biblical religion. His private correspondence suggests that this had not been his intention. He confided to the botanist J. D. Hooker that he had long regretted having truckled to public opinion by using the biblical term of creation, by which he had really meant “appeared by some wholly unknown process.” It was not that he had deliberately concealed an underlying atheism. Rather, in retrospect, he saw that he had invited the attribution of a particular meaning to his science with which he was uncomfortable – especially when writing to sterner naturalists than himself.

Darwin’s unease raises a point of general significance. Debates that have so often been interpreted in terms of the “conflict between science and religion” turn out, on closer inspection, to be debates in which rival claims are made for the “correct” meaning to be attached to scientific theories. Many of those who, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had constructed their distinctive accounts of the earth’s history felt themselves to be defending a particular set of social and religious values that they perceived to be under threat from the cosmologies of their opponents. During the period through which Darwin worked on his evolutionary theory there had, however, been signs of a shift in sensibility, with scientists themselves wishing to exclude cosmological debate from the practice of science. Charles Lyell, for example, had argued that geology would only become a science when it disentangled itself from biblical precepts, narrowed its scope to the reconstruction of the past in terms of forces known in the present, and deliberately excluded speculation about origins, purposes, and ultimate meanings. Darwin, too, came to share this view. There were questions that lay beyond the purview of current science. To admit them would be to reintroduce metaphysical and theological issues alien to the quest for positive scientific knowledge.