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Author of the Origin of Species (1859) and the Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin (1809–1882) famously challenged the popular belief that every species had been separately and immediately created by divine fiat. His theory of evolution by natural selection was based on what he considered an empirical fact: the presence of variation among members of every species. Darwin's powerful argument was that, in competition for limited resources, those variants having characteristics that favored them in their struggle would tend to be preserved and produce more offspring than those less advantaged. Over many generations the gradual accumulation of advantageous variations would lead to the emergence of a new species markedly different from its progenitor. Applied to humankind the argument was particularly contentious for the continuity it affirmed between animals and humans, and because the idea of species transformation was often associated with political radicalism and materialism. Darwin himself recalled that admitting the mutability of species had been like confessing to murder.

Providing a naturalistic account of species production and then of human evolution, Darwin risked offending the piety of those, including his own wife Emma Wedgwood, who wished to give the moral sense a transcendental significance. If humans had evolved from humbler species could humans be said to be made in the image of God? Was it possible to speak of an immortal soul? What remained of the argument for design, which in Christian natural theology had often presupposed the perfect adaptation of organic structures to the needs of the organism that possessed them?

Darwin was not the atheist vilified in ultraconservative religious literature, but he did become increasingly agnostic. Attacked in the name of religious orthodoxy, he found it "ludicrous" that he had once intended to become a clergyman. This was a reference to his Cambridge education, which had followed an abortive preparation in Edinburgh for a medical career. At Cambridge, the young Darwin encountered divines such as John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick who combined scientific enthusiasm with reverence for nature as a work of creation. In Edinburgh he had moved in free-thinking circles and had been introduced to the evolutionary theory of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin also knew that his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had proposed organic transformation, but Charles Darwin was not yet a convert to such ideas. On leaving Cambridge his destiny would be to find ways of explaining the appearance of design in such intricate mechanisms as the human eye without recourse to the divine "Contriver" celebrated by the theologian and philosopher William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802).

Darwin's research

This destiny was shaped by a five-year voyage on which Darwin embarked in December 1831 as companion to Robert Fitzroy, captain of HMS Beagle. The ship was sailing for South America, enabling Darwin to enlarge his horizons as a naturalist and geologist. Having been captivated by the travelogues of Alexander von Humboldt he soon luxuriated in the rain forests of Brazil. As Adrian Desmond and James Moore have observed, their sublimity afforded a surrogate religious experience: "twiners entwining twiners, beautiful lepidoptera, silence, hosanna" (p. 122). Thoughts of a Christian ministry gradually receded as Darwin was enchanted by the study of nature, delighted by the discovery of fossil bones, staggered by the number of species that had become extinct. He was intrigued by resemblances between lost and living forms, by tantalizing patterns in the distribution of flora and fauna, and by disruptive natural forces. Entering the city of Concepción in Chile he found the cathedral shattered by an earthquake. At the Southern tip of South America natives of the Tierra del Fuego were struggling to survive in one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth. The world was perhaps not the "happy world" of Paley's English garden. Even before reading economist Thomas Malthus's Essay on Population in September 1838, Darwin had been "well prepared" to appreciate the struggle for existence that Malthus's arithmetic on reproductive fecundity convinced him was inexorable.

Of his visit to the Galapagos Islands it is often said that Darwin recognized that each island had its own distinctive species, eventually concluding that the different finches, for example, had diverged from a mainland ancestor, molded by nature to occupy different niches. But there was no such "Eureka" moment. Darwin had muddled his finch specimens from various islands and it was not until March 1837, following his return to England, that the ornithologist John Gould broke the exciting news that three forms of mockingbird, from different islands, were genuinely different species. Gould identified fourteen species of finch from Darwin's specimens. The enthralling question was why so many similar species lived in such proximity, but Darwin was unable to prove that the geographical isolation of each island had been responsible for the proliferation.

Darwin's earliest speculations on evolutionary change preceded his reading of Malthus. They show him playing with the idea that nature employs bisexual reproduction as a way of introducing variation into each new generation, so permitting continuing adaptation to changing conditions of existence. Darwin flirted with, but quickly rejected, the possibility of sudden mutation as a source of evolutionary change. As with the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace later, it was when reading Malthus that the penny finally dropped and a theory of natural selection took shape.

The metaphor of "natural selection" allowed Darwin to exploit a simple analogy. Domestic animals and birds showed a degree of plasticity as breeders chose which specimens to mate when selecting for characteristics they wished to accentuate. Darwin crossed social barriers in fraternizing with pigeon fanciers and he emphasized the diversity of form ultimately derived from the common rock pigeon. Even a trained ornithologist, he argued, would be tempted to think that the pouter, runt, and fantail were not merely different varieties but different species. If, through human "selection," such effects could be produced, might not nature achieve much more in the millions of years at its disposal? For insight into the age of the Earth and for an emphasis on the incompleteness of the fossil record, which would help him to explain the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record, Darwin was indebted to the geologist Charles Lyell.

Darwin's view of religion

Did the metaphor of "selection" imply a divine selector in the management of the evolutionary process? Some of Darwin's contemporaries believed so. Darwin's own emphasis, however, was on the interplay of unconscious forces. Without denying a creator on whom the existence of everything ultimately depended, Darwin rejected the kind of deity who might be micromanaging the process. Rejecting the argument for design as formulated by Paley, Darwin's extension of natural law to explain how new species had arisen did not preclude a transcendent legislator. In his first transmutation notebook, he wrote of a "Creator who creates through laws," one who had "impressed" certain laws on nature, as a consequence of which beautiful organic forms had evolved. Darwin resembled earlier deists, admitting the existence of a creator but doubting there had been divine revelation or intervention

In certain respects his science corroded a residual faith. The more people know of the fixed laws of nature, he wrote in his Autobiography, "the more incredible do miracles become" (p. 86). As his wife recognized, the questioning mentality demanded of a scientist could induce skepticism. Debating the question whether evolution was under divine control, Darwin stressed the elements of randomness in the process. His conclusion was that the variations on which natural selection worked appeared without a prospective use in mind. The presence of so much pain and suffering also affected Darwin deeply. This was difficult to square with belief in a beneficent deity, but was consistent with his hypothesis of natural selection and with what in the first full sketch of his theory (1842) he called the "concealed war of nature."

To ascribe Darwin's agnosticism to his science would, however, be simplistic. During the Beagle voyage he was already asking himself whether an intuitive sense of God was universal among humankind, concluding it was absent among Fuegians and native Australians. Some Christian teaching he found morally repugnant. Aware of high moral standards among the freethinkers he met in the circle of the English writer and social reformer Harriet Martineau, he declared in his Autobiography that the idea of eternal damnation for those outside the fold was a "damnable doctrine" (p. 87). Although opinions differ as to when he finally renounced Christianity, the death early in 1851 of his young daughter Annie produced a crisis in which belief in a beneficent God became unsustainable. His agnosticism was to be peculiar since he retained the conviction that the universe as a whole could not be the result of chance. But so nuanced was his thinking that he came to mistrust his own conviction. If the human mind was itself the product of evolution, what guarantee was there that it could be trusted when engaging such metaphysical issues?

Religious responses to Darwin's science

Religious responses to Darwin's science have varied enormously. From 1859 until the 1930s, when a powerful new synthesis of genetics and Darwinian theory appeared, the controversial status of natural selection left plenty of scope for supplementary or alternative mechanisms for evolution in which divine control was affirmed. Strictly speaking, as the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley insisted, Darwinism had no implications for the central tenets of theism. Huxley even conceded that it was still possible to assert design in an original cosmic state from which all had developed through natural processes. Modern atheists and materialists, by contrast, frequently stress the apparently directionless aspects of biological evolution, weaving them into a completely secular and naturalistic world view.

Within the Christian churches the theory of evolution, not surprisingly, continues to be a divisive issue compounding the problems posed by historical criticism of the Bible. In some religious communities it has become the symbol of secular and liberalizing values and is still vehemently resisted. Yet religious writers have also appropriated Darwin's theory for constructive purposes, as did one of Darwin's early converts, Charles Kingsley, who concluded that a deity who could make all things make themselves exhibited greater wisdom than one who simply made things. Might a unified process of evolution testify more eloquently to a single creator than piecemeal creation? Darwin's American correspondent Asa Gray, a botanist, even suggested the theory might assist the theologians with their greatest difficulty—the problem of suffering. If competition and struggle were the prerequisites of a creative process, without them there could not have been the evolutionary development that had culminated in human intelligence and responsiveness. Darwin himself had toyed with the idea that a deity who had created the possibility for humans to evolve might be considered less directly responsible for the uglier facets of nature that had also been possible in such a world. Sophisticated theologians have invoked the Darwinian theory to illuminate what they see as God's self-limitation rather than coercive agency. Others have seen in evolution evidence of divine immanence and participation in the world. It was the view of nineteenth-century Oxford theologian Aubrey Moore that, under the guise of a foe, Darwin had done the work of a friend, destroying infantile images of a conjuring god who was inactive except when intervening.

See also CREATIONISM; CREATION SCIENCE; DEISM; DESIGN; DESIGN ARGUMENT; DIVINE ACTION; EVOLUTION; EVOLUTION, BIOCULTURAL; EVOLUTION, BIOLOGICAL; EVOLUTION, HUMAN; EVOLUTION, THEOLOGY OF; GENETICS; IMMANENCE; INTELLIGENT DESIGN; REVELATION; SCOPES TRIAL

JOHN HEDLEY BROOKE