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Evolution of faith
Correcting common misconceptions about Charles Darwin’s descent from faith
Emily Pike ’12, English, Assistant Perspectives Editor
Expositions: Biography
In 1915, the “Lady Hope Story” was published in a Baptist newspaper called the Watchman Examiner. This story claimed Charles Darwin recanted the theory of evolution and accepted Jesus Christ as his savior on his deathbed.
Darwin’s children and various historians have vocally opposed the story, and it certainly seems far-fetched. However, it does raise the question: What did Darwin believe?
Darwin is held by many to be an icon of skepticism, one of the first prominent scientific naturalists who openly abandoned irrational religious thinking in the light of scientific discoveries. But it is very interesting to study his true faith journey, and to see that it was not science alone that pushed the biologist from Christianity. Clarification of his true beliefs and how he came to them can be found in compilations of letters between Darwin and his friends and loved ones.1
In 1825, Darwin was apprenticed to his father for medical studies and later went to the University of Edinburgh Medical School to pursue a career with his brother, Erasmus Alvey Darwin. He became disinterested in medicine, but learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave, which led him to join the Plinian Society, a student naturalist group.
This involvement frustrated his father, who proceeded to send Darwin to Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge to become an Anglican parson.2
Darwin was very interested in natural history and was excited about the science of Christian apologist William Paley, who described nature as designed by God acting through the laws of nature to produce adaptation. Darwin later wrote in his autobiography, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology: I could almost formerly have said it by heart.” 3
As his studies at Christ’s College finished, Darwin planned a trip to the tropics before settling into the life of a clergyman. At this point, he had studied the ideas of Herschel, Paley, and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. He had also studied geology, taxonomy, and Lamarckian evolution theory.
Aboard the HMS Beagle, he initially described himself as “quite orthodox” and looked to the story of Creation to explain the distribution of species; however he found little or no real evidence to support the biblical account. He became critical of the Bible as history and began to consider the validity of other religions. When he returned in 1836, he developed his ideas on geology and some ideas on the transmutation of species.4
A few years after his return on the Beagle, he married Emma Wedgwood. Prior to their marriage, they exchanged letters that disclosed some of Darwin’s skepticism of Christianity.5 He continued to play a role in the local parish church in Downe, Kent, but by 1849 he started to go for walks while his family attended church.
The primary reason Darwin ceased attending church was the parish’s failure to hire a quality clergyman. Darwin and other parishioners had numerous problems with the priests being lax in their duties, pursuing women, upsetting the church order, and pushing distasteful ideas on the congregation in their sermons.6
One of the most significant blows to Darwin’s faith came in 1851, when his beloved daughter, Anne, was weakened by scarlet fever and died of tuberculosis. Darwin wrote letters to friends, expressing his anger towards the “clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.” Darwin started to doubt the existence of a benevolent God. To him, either nature was the work of a cruel God (entirely powerful, but not all-good), or everything was just nature.7
Darwin ultimately rejected Christianity outright when he found he couldn’t accept the doctrine of Hell. He wrote:
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.8
Darwin asked, how could a loving God condemn these wonderful individuals?
He continued his research, but held back the publication of his theory to avoid public controversy until naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace informed Darwin that he was researching a similar theory. In 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
According to Darwin’s autobiography, he was still shaken by Anne’s death and skeptical of Christianity, reflecting:
The clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become. … I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine religion. … Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. 9
He also wrote that his “old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley … fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being.”10
According to a letter written in 1879 to his friend, John Fordyce, Darwin was never an atheist: “Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.” 11
Despite his disbelief, Darwin again wrote to another friend, J.B. Innes in 1878 to complain, “Why the disciples of either school should attack each other with bitterness.” 12
A few years before his death, Darwin describes in a letter to a Russian diplomat why there is no reason for that bitterness:
Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any Revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities. 13
Clearly, Darwin was not a Christian.
He did not become one on his deathbed, despite what “Lady Hope” claimed. What is true is that Darwin initially considered himself a theist14 and slowly moved away from Christianity as he faced struggles with his scientific conclusions, his daughter’s untimely death, increasing frustration with his local church, and finally, an inability to accept a distasteful but important Christian doctrine. Perhaps now the question of Darwin’s faith can be laid to rest once and for all.
1. Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Charles Darwin. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958.
5. Wedgwood, Emma. “Letter 441.” Darwin Correspondence Project. November 22, 1838. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-441 (accessed Feb. 10, 2010).
6. Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Darwin, Charles. “Letter 12041.” Darwin Correspondence Project. May 7, 1879. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-12041 (accessed Feb. 10, 2010).
12. Darwin, Charles. “Letter 11763.” Darwin Correspondence Project. November 27, 1878. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-11763 (accessed Feb. 10, 2010).
13. Darwin, Charles. “Darwin, C.R. 1882.” The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. June 5, 1879. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F1998&pageseq=1 (accessed Feb. 10, 2010).
14. Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958.
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