Did Darwin kill God?
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 4th October 2009 by Denis Alexander (www.faraday-institute.org)
Readings: Psalm 104: 1 - 24 & Hebrews 1: 1 - 4; 2: 5 - 12
It probably has not escaped your attention that this year marks a double anniversary for Charles Darwin: 1809 for the year of his birth, and 1859 for the publication of his most famous work On the Origin of Species. There has already been a flurry of television programmes to mark the centenary, a week-long Darwin Festival in Cambridge back in early July, and a huge outpouring of new books. Then a few days ago the film Creation went on general release, portraying the life of Charles Darwin and his devoutly Christian wife Emma in the years leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species. Like the TV programmes, much of the portrayal of Darwin in this film is just made up for dramatic effect. In it Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's great defender, exhorts him to hurry up and complete the manuscript of On the Origin of Species because the new book would, in Huxley's view, mark 'the death of God'. As it happens, there is no historical evidence at all for such an episode, and in any case Darwin was already doing all he could to finish his manuscript as quickly as possible.
So a lot of the media hype surrounding the Darwin double anniversary this year does seem to depend on generating a mythology of conflict, of portraying the radical new theory of evolution as being resisted by Church authorities, as they carried out a rearguard action against the inevitable takeover by science of domains that previously belonged to religion. Darwin has even been portrayed as an icon of atheism, proposing the theory of evolution with the deliberate aim of subverting the claims of Christian faith. In reality, all this is complete fantasy.
Darwin himself of course read divinity at Cambridge and was heading for ordination in the Church of England when he was recruited to serve as the naturalist for what turned out to be a 5-year voyage on The Beagle. After the voyage, he gradually drifted away from an active Christian faith, partly it is thought through his own experience of suffering, for he lost three members of his own family in childhood, and was eventually content to call himself an agnostic, once the word had been invented by his friend Huxley.
But Darwin was never an atheist, writing to a John Fordyce in 1879: 'It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist'. 'In my most extreme fluctuations,' he continued, 'I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.' And here is Darwin in another letter, this time written to the aggressive atheist Edward Aveling who wanted to use evolution for an anti-religious campaign: 'Why should you be so aggressive?' Darwin writes, 'Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of mankind?'
Misguided attempts to recruit evolution in support of atheism are nothing new, but Darwin himself would have none of it. We need to rescue Darwin from the image of an atheist battling religion in order to establish his new atheistic scientific theory, an image propagated today to serve two very different agendas, by the so-called 'new atheists' on one hand who wish to invest evolution with atheism, and by the creationists on the other hand who wish to hold Darwin up as the wicked anti-theologian who undermines religious belief. In reality Darwin fits neither mould, and refused to ally himself with any campaigning ideology. As Darwin remarked in a letter to Henry Ridley (28 Nov 1878): 'Dr Pusey [the Oxford divine] was mistaken in imagining that I wrote the Origin with any relation whatever to Theology. I should have thought that this would have been evident to anyone who has taken the trouble to read the book.' Indeed so.
In fact the main criticisms leveled against Darwin's theory of natural selection when it burst upon the scene in 1859 were scientific not theological. Darwin had no theory of inheritance at his disposal - at the time of course he knew nothing about genetics - and this greatly weakened his theory. At its birth in 1859 evolution was a much more fragile theory than the robust theory we have today. And yes there were some voices raised against Darwin for theological reasons, not least from his old Professor of Geology at Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick, who thought that human evolution would subvert morality and the idea of human uniqueness.
But far more striking is the warmth of the reception given to evolution by some of the leading theologians of Darwin's time. Darwin himself exchanged letters with nearly 2000 correspondents in the course of his life, of whom around 200 were clergyman, some personal friends, many of whom provided Darwin with biological data for his publications. Much of the science of the first half of the 19th century was carried out by clergymen. One of Darwin's clerical correspondents was the Revd Charles Kingsley, soon to become the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. The Revd Kingsley was one of the privileged few to receive advance copies of the Origin, and in the wonderful collection of letters held in the Cambridge University Library we find Kingsley's thank-you letter sent back to Darwin, dated 18 Nov 1859, so written six days before the book's official publication date.
Kingsley writes of the Origin that 'All I have seen of it awes me', going on to remark that he didn't believe in the fixity of species anyway, and then making a comment that Darwin liked so much that he quoted from it in the Second Edition of the Origin: 'I have gradually learnt to see', writes Kingsley, 'that it is just 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 (or 'gaps') which he himself had made'. So the earliest written response that we have to the Origin of Species was from an Anglican vicar and was extremely positive.
A few months later we find a future Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, preaching the official sermon at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford and strongly supporting the idea that God works through the normal processes of the world that science describes. Although Temple did not mention Darwin by name, one member of his congregation recounted afterwards that 'he espoused Darwin's ideas fully.' Later Temple developed this theme in his Bampton lectures of 1884, in which he presented a specifically Darwinian view of evolution.
Another great Victorian clerical enthusiast for Darwinism was Aubrey Moore, a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, and Curator of the Oxford Botanical Gardens. Moore maintained that Darwinism had done the Church a great service in helping to get rid of the more extreme forms of natural theology and claimed that there was a special affinity between Darwinism and Christian faith, remarking that Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend'. The reason for this attraction, claimed Moore, was based on the intimate involvement of God in His creation for, as he put it:
'There are not, and cannot be, any Divine interpositions in nature, for God cannot interfere with Himself. His creative activity is present everywhere. There is no division of labour between God and nature....For the Christian theologian the facts of nature are the acts of God'.
Here in Scotland Henry Drummond provides another fascinating example of the way in which Darwin's Christian contemporaries readily absorbed evolution into their Christian world-view. Drummond (1851-97), Scottish naturalist and professor in the Free Church College in Glasgow, believed that 'Evolution is seen to be neither more nor less than the story of creation as told by those who know it best' (Ascent of Man), maintaining, most extraordinary of all, that the 'Origin' was 'perhaps the most important contribution to the literature of apologetics' to have appeared during the 19th century.
Meanwhile in the United States Asa Gray, Professor of Natural History at Harvard and a committed Christian, was Darwin's long-term correspondent and confidante who helped organise the publication of the Origin of Species in America. Given the present antipathy to evolution in North America, where the theory is rejected by no less than 44% of the population, it is ironic to reflect that evolution in 19th century America was mainly popularized by Christian academics, so that the American historian, George Marsden can write that with the exception of Harvard's Louis Agassiz, virtually every American Protestant zoologist and botanist accepted some form of evolution by the early 1870s. In the words of the British historian James Moore, author of the definitive book tracing the reception of Darwinism in Britain and America in the 19th century, with but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution.
So we need to rescue Darwinism from the claim that it initiated a clash between science and religion due to the concerted opposition by the Church against evolution, for that claim is indeed poorly supported by the historical data. By the mid-1860s questions that assumed the truth of Darwin's theory were already appearing in the undergraduate exam papers of Cambridge University, that bastion of Anglican respectability. The term 'Christian Darwinian' was already in use by 1867.
So historically did Darwin kill God? Clearly not. After some initial misgivings on the part of some, the Church took Darwinian evolution and baptised it into the traditional Christian understanding of creation. Evolution simply became viewed as the method through which God had chosen to fulfil his intentions and purposes in the created order. So how was it that the leading theologians of the day could so readily accommodate what was indeed such a radical scientific theory?
A clue comes from the passage from Hebrews Chapter 1 that we read a few moments ago where the writer is telling us that Christ is no mere prophet, but actually the Son of God, the one through whom God made the universe, an extraordinary claim. More than that, the writer goes on to say that the Son of God goes on sustaining all things. A similar claim is made by the apostle Paul when writing to the Colossians when he writes that 'all things were created by Christ and for Christ. He is before all things, and in him [Christ] all things hold together'.
In other words we have here the idea of God as creator not as some distant uninvolved deity who establishes the laws of the universe at the beginning, and then has nothing more to do with it. Instead we have a God who is intimately involved in sustaining all the material properties and processes of the world, a universe in which all things hold together in Christ. The creator is not like some heavenly engineer who occasionally tinkers with the world, more like the musical composer who both composes and conducts the ever-changing symphony of creation.
So the theological narrative of creation is complementary to the scientific narrative told by evolutionary biology we need both narratives to make sense of this complex entity that we call life. Evolution does a great job in telling us about the mechanisms involved. The theological creation account tells us about meaning, what's the point, where's it all going, why are we here? As Stephen Hawking has posed the question so well: 'Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?' What's the point of this whole incredibly long 3.8 billion history of life on planet earth? Science is never going to give us answers to those kinds of questions.
Neither with this understanding of God as creator is there any point in looking for 'god' in the gaps in our current scientific understanding the lazy so-called 'god-of-the-gaps' argument for God. It's a lazy argument because of course the scientist who believes in God as creator should be doing all they can to extend the boundaries of science as far and as wide as they can. The more we understand of God's creation, then the more our sense of wonder and of worship. Certainly Christians have no hidden theological investments in scientific ignorance.
So maybe there is just one sense in which Darwin did 'kill God' he helped kill off the idea of a distant, remote God uninterested in his creation a god-of-the-gaps kind of God. As it happens, this is not the Christian God anyway. It's often said that Darwin helped to disinfect 19th century theology, to restore the idea of a God who is immanent and involved in his creation, the musical composer who both composes and conducts the music of life. To repeat the same quote from Aubrey Moore again: 'Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend'.
So, no, Darwin certainly didn't kill off the God of Christian faith. 'In these last days God has spoken to us by his Son' writes the author to the Hebrews, 'whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. The good news is that the God of Christian faith is not just the amazing creator, who has brought into being this beautiful universe and given it meaning and purpose, but also the one who can be known personally through Christ, the one who is willing to come into our own lives, and to give us that sense of purpose and direction without which life ultimately looks pretty bleak.
The Darwinian narrative is a wonderful scientific account, but by itself is simply insufficient to give direction to our own personal lives. So the most rational step is to place our lives in the hands of the composer, the creator, of the whole process, for only he really knows where the symphony of life is heading.