Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

2: The Making of a Theory

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Thomas H. Huxley

The Smile of the Cheshire Cat

No sound escapes the ear of a soul touched by the Muse of music, no shade of colour the eye awakened by the Muse of art – and not a blade of grass or scrap of information about nature the budding ‘naturalist’. Charles Darwin drank it all. Evolution was in the air, and we know how he had listened when Robert Grant expounded animatedly Lamarck’s theory of evolution. Darwin talked with any expert he met and read anything about nature he could lay his hands on. He recalls in his Autobiography how inspired he was by the narrative of Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist and explorer, about his discoveries in Central and South America.

There was a sea-change taking place in Britain’s 19th century. The Enlightenment is generally associated with France and the philosophes, but the part of the British philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume in particular, was at least as important. Their critical attitude (empiricism) towards the long established European, mainly Christian values opened the gates for the principles of materialism, atheism, liberalism, science and progress. Most of the British intelligentsia had been shocked by the French Revolution, but even in Britain the rise of the new ideas could not be halted. The result was the Victorian age, named after the dapper and long-reigning Queen Victoria (1819-1901), and symbolizing a period of official Anglican religion (similar to Catholicism), strict morals and customs, and behind that dignified façade all intellectual viewpoints in as well as out of fashion.

Destined to be a clergyman, Charles Darwin was nevertheless inevitably influenced by materialism and atheism. His grandfather, father, brother, and almost all his best friends were disbelievers, freethinkers who did not hide their convictions. Moreover, the sciences had become materialistic and mechanistic since Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Laplace. God in his heaven had still been reverenced for some time, though mainly to avoid the persecution and heavy punishment Giordano Bruno, Galileo and many others had suffered. In Britain, for example, “the bishops considered Hobbes to be an enemy of the church and the most dangerous atheist in England. … In 1666, bishops blamed the fire [in London] on his atheism. Parliament investigated him for blasphemy for two years … He escaped being charged as a heretic, but he was forbidden to write ever again about human nature. … Locke worried that his writings might get him hanged.”¹

Darwin knew of more recent cases and therefore “hid his materialism, as he secretly scribbled away in his notebooks working out his theory.”² As he wanted to be a “philosophical naturalist” and contribute to the science of his time, he was forced to take an increasingly critical stance towards the religion of his youth, and of his wife. On the Beagle he had been “quite orthodox, but his faith waned with time … The Old Testament was ‘no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos [sic], or the beliefs of any barbarian’.”³ In time he could no longer accept miracles, hell, and the suffering in nature ordained by a good God. The death of his favourite daughter, Anne, at the age of nine, delivered the final blow to his formerly cherished religious convictions.

The more he thought, the more bewildered he became. Later in life he will describe himself as an “agnostic,” somebody who does neither accept nor deny the existence of God, and who acquiesces in his ignorance. In the mind of his century and the previous one, the belief in God’s existence had faded from self-evident to a rationally accepted opinion, then to doubt, and finally to denial. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra will proclaim the death of the Christian God. As the historian A.N. Wilson writes, God had disappeared like, in Alice in Wonderland, the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

Darwin’s Conversion

Darwin’s scientific thinking followed a development parallel with that of his changing religious beliefs. Since Descartes the dominant scientific view of the world had become mechanistic. Descartes had still accepted a rational soul, but held that the body and all animal life forms were machines. Newton had been an alchemist and a Bible exegete, but his model of the universe was a kind of clockwork, put in motion by God Almighty, but afterwards left to its own automatic movement. And Laplace, in a legendary answer to Napoleon, had declared that he no longer needed the hypothesis of a God to explain the workings of the universe.

As a reaction against this increasing materialism, religiously inclined persons, in the first place learned members of the clergy, launched ‘natural theology’. One of the early proponents of this view was John Ray, the title of whose book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691) states in a nutshell what natural theology was about. Ray was the first to use the metaphor of the watch: if you happened to find in nature something made like a watch, you could not but deduce that it must be made by an intelligent being, a watchmaker. Therefore, seeing how marvellously everything in nature and the universe had been put together and was functioning, one could not but deduce that there was a supreme Intelligent Being who had made it all. You had to conclude that God existed.

At Cambridge William Paley’s book: Natural Theology – or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1803) had been mandatory reading. Darwin had been fascinated by this and other works of Paley, one of the last writers on the subject. “The careful study of these works was the only part of the Academical Course which was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself with Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.”⁴ Darwin had boarded the Beagle as a convinced natural theologian.

A fixed mental make-up of this kind can only be transformed by a long and stressful process of conversion. The most persuasive indications that species can and do change must have come from the plant and animal breeders whom Darwin interrogated on every possible occasion, and possibly from the fossil record as it was then known, sustained by the Linnean classification. While his idea of the evolutionary process gradually took shape, he continued the studies which contributed to his increasing reputation as a naturalist. He studied coral reefs, climbing plants, earthworms and orchids, and dissected barnacles for a full eight years, from 1846 till 1854. Then: “At least 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 a murder) immutable.”⁵

He deemed Paley’s old argument of design in nature, “which formerly seemed to me so conclusive,” no longer valid, for he had thought out a scientific one. He had become convinced that all species originated from a common source, like the branches of one tree. The changes, or “modifications,” into different branches were caused by variations in the individuals of the species, the existence of which was confirmed by every breeder. The ruthless competition for food in the natural environment would allow only the strongest individuals to survive, in other words the carriers of the variations most fit to adapt. And over time these fittest animals would transmit their physical adaptations to their offspring.

It would still take Darwin some time and one or two lucky breaks to formulate his theory in this way, but it had become clear to him that Paley’s religious view belonged to the past. Darwin could, in his time and position, only come forward with a materialistic and atheistic explication. Species changed; the fossils showed that many had died out; the chain of being (never referred to but present in the background) and the new geology showed that changes took place gradually over long periods of time; the fight for survival was a common fact of existence. How these mechanisms of life actually worked, Darwin had as yet no idea, but future science would certainly find out. Like Laplace he neither needed a God anymore.

Gradually, Gradually

Darwin had met Charles Lyell (1797-1875) personally and had felt much honoured by their acquaintance, for the slightly older geologist was already a person of esteem and Darwin still a nobody. Professor Lyell was building on the theories of James Hutton, the founder of modern geology, who in 1795 “believed that the surface features of the Earth were shaped gradually by incremental changes extending over enormous lengths of time. He realized that millions of years would be needed to accumulate rock sediments and to raise and erode mountains.”⁶

In Darwin’s days the first trains were on the rails, but the idea of time was still based on interpretations of the Bible. In 1620 Archbishop James Ussher, “who had laboured over his studies for decades, even when he became chaplain to the king of England,” had concluded that Adam was created at 9 a.m. on Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC. Time had began on the previous day at 6 p.m. Nowadays one may react to declarations like these with a smile, but “Ussher’s date was recognized by the Church of England in 1701, and was thereafter published in the opening margin of the King James Bible right the way through to the twentieth century. Even scientists and philosophers were happy to accept Ussher’s date well into the nineteenth century.”⁷ “In the early nineteenth century even Charles Darwin would graduate from Cambridge University believing that the world was six thousand years old, give or take.”⁸

As Bertrand Russell reminded us: “Nobody nowadays believes that the world was created in 4004 BC; but not so very long ago scepticism on this point was thought an abominable crime.”⁹ It is worth reflecting on this fact to comprehend how much the world of Charles Darwin, in which his theory of evolution was conceived, differed from ours. The editor of The Faber Book of Science writes: “The remote antiquity of man was popularized not so much by a theory [i.e. Darwin’s] as by the discovery of a vast and undeniable subject matter: a new dark continent of time, prehistory. More persuasively than a theory, the artifacts themselves seemed to bear witness to a chronology of prehistory … Gradually the idea entered popular consciousness … In 1867, the announcement of the first Congrès international préhistorique de Paris brought the first official use of the word ‘prehistoric’.”¹⁰

The “disturbing notion” that man had existed long before 4004 BC, prudently proposed by scientists from Buffon onwards, was accepted with hesitation even by the scientific community. Such was the pressure from the powerfully authoritative Church, supported by the State, that every breach or widening of the narrow, rigid circle of general awareness threatened its author with the danger of punishment and social discrimination. Innovation and progress have needed their Socrates, Luther, Bruno or Galileo in all cultures, in all times.

Gradualism in geology was initiated by Hutton, taken over by Lyell, and accepted by Darwin. The first geologists, in Britain as well as in France, went exploring what was nearest to them: their own neighbourhood, region, country. (This is the reason that so many British and French place names are found in their geological nomenclatures.) Although they were very perceptive and accurate in the descriptions of their field work – they were without exception passionate researchers, even when amateurs – what they were exploring was a geological situation which had remained stable as long as they could remember. “Not even Lyell himself had seen a volcano erupt.” And so it happened that Hutton, and Lyell after him, formulated the principle of ‘gradualism’, according to which all changes in the surface of the Earth were the result of small differences which had gradually come about over long periods of time.

“Lyell applied Hutton’s great idea [of gradualism] with a ruthless severity that even Hutton would not have recognized. In the past, Lyell said, Earth had always looked much as it looks now … Everything concerning plant and animal life was determined: similar conditions recurring in the future would give rise to exactly the same species as in the past … Lyell’s uniformitarianism [another name for gradualism] was taken to a fanatical degree. He insisted that every past event had to be explained by causes now operating: there was nothing in the past that we cannot see in the world around us now.”¹¹ In science, this way of seeing is called ‘extrapolation backwards’. Even common sense will tell that it is a slippery way of reasoning, because experience teaches that things are never exactly the same.

In 1830 Charles Lyell published the first volume of his trilogy: Principles of Geology – Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation. The book came just in time for Darwin to take it with him on the Beagle, where he had ample leisure to read and reread it. If ever he had hesitated between sudden and gradual changes, Lyell convinced him of the latter. Darwin had witnessed a volcanic eruption and seen with his own eyes what massive sudden upheavals it could cause; still he decided for gradualism. His decision, taken against the advice of Thomas Huxley and others, would have long-lasting consequences in the study of evolution, even at the present day.

A Struggle for Survival

Charles Darwin has been called “the midwife of the idea of evolution” and there is substance in this metaphor. He caught as many seeds as possible floating on the winds of the century, covered them with the humus of his imagination, and was finally rewarded with the plant of his theory. We have met with some of the influences on his thought, but there were many others. There was e.g. John Herschel’s Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy (Darwin had met the astronomer, discoverer of Uranus, in Cape Town). And there was more recently Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a theory of evolution in the Lamarckian way, published anonymously for the sake of safety, and which had sparked a furore.

But the revelation that put everything together was caused by Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, first published in 1798. “Darwin would regard the reading of this book [in 1838] as an extended ‘Eureka!’ moment in the formulation of his views.”¹² Thomas Malthus, another clergyman, was an economist and demographer. He seems to have been struck by the sight of the impoverished masses created by the industrial revolution of which Britain was the cradle. The presence of those proletarians was a new phenomenon in British society and the established classes felt extremely uncomfortable with them. (Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848.)

From his social perceptions Malthus concocted a theory: population increases geometrically, the available food increases only arithmetically. This meant that there would always be less food than people vying for it, and that famine, war and ill health were the only certainties in the future. Depraved existence in poverty was humanity’s inescapable lot. “In Malthus’ grim essay, Darwin found the engine that could push evolution forward.”¹³ As the life of humanity was destined to be a permanent struggle for survival, so must be the life of all beings in nature. Darwin applied the doctrine of Malthus to the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

He found his conclusions confirmed in “the writings of Adam Smith and other utilitarian economists who presented individual competition as the driving force of economic progress. Perhaps more important, he lived in a [capitalist] society that embraced this view.”¹⁴ This was the explanation for the improvement and survival of the fittest, the success of their superior personal characteristics, and ultimately the appearance of new species. “It at once struck me,” wrote Darwin afterwards in a letter, “that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.”¹⁵

Looking back on this chapter, we see that the pillars of Darwin’s biological theory of evolution were in fact a one-sided geological theory, and a generalization of a socio-economical theory concerning a first-hand reaction to a new, unfamiliar and scary social situation. On biological facts an conceptual grid was projected that did touch some points of the reality, but left most others untouched and scientifically unexplained, for instance the mechanisms of inheritance and adaptation (which were still unexplainable at the time). The illumination which brought it all together in Darwin’s mind, Malthus’ theory, proved to be a chimera. As Tim Lewens writes in his book on Darwin: “Modern evolution has no essential commitment to the Malthusian view that lies at the heart of Darwin’s theory.”¹⁶