In early September, at a lunch gathering in Lincoln, Nebraska, I told my several companions that I was eagerly awaiting the forthcoming arrival of Janet Browne's second volume of her biography of Charles Darwin. That reminded one of my lunch companions, a professor of biology, that a student had earlier that week announced to him that he had just learned in church the previous weekend that Darwin had made a death-bed conversion and that while he (Darwin) might not have denounced his belief in natural selection, he did regret his falling away from Christianity.
Right then I realized that it was time to do a sermon on Darwin and his religious views. The folks in Manhattan, Kansas, had just invited me to speak to their small UU Fellowship in late November, so I had a topic to send their way, and did. A few weeks later I was invited into your pulpit, so this sermon, one could say, is a trial run for next week's sermon in Kansas - sort of opening on the road, prior to going to Broadway.
Charles Darwin's grandfathers were both religious non-conformists. One grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was more than a typical non-conformist however; he loathed the idea of meddling gods. He could even ridicule the Unitarian faith of Darwin's other grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, by calling it "a featherbed to catch a falling Christian."
Josiah Wedgwood's Christianity was stripped of its supernatural trappings; he fit well into the British Unitarianism of his age. Erasmus, on the other hand, saw little need for even the most liberal interpretation of religion. Who needed it when one can sup "the milk of science?"
For Erasmus, science explained all, and he even wrote poetry on the theme:
Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic Life began beneath the waves ...
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth.
Well, he was not likely to be appointed poet laureate. Long before his grandson would startle the Victorian peace of British society with his book on the mutability of species, Erasmus Darwin was an evolutionist. One of his poems was even made into a hymn that used to be in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal.
Erasmus Darwin was not an atheist. Atheists were not numerous in the 18th century, but neither was he a believer in the Biblical deity. He believed in a distant God, and a piece of verse of his goes:
Teach me, Creation, teach me how
T'adore the vast unknown.
Charles Darwin, late in his life, would write a sketch about his grandfather, whom he never knew, and that sketch would relate some of Erasmus' more radical views of religion. Darwin sent proofs of the essay to his daughter, Henrietta, sort of a family watchdog, and Henrietta saw that the sketch needed pruning, dropping the lines about "the vast Unknown" as, perhaps, too agnostic, and removing other evidences of Erasmus' unorthodoxy.
The authors of biography of Darwin, published a decade ago, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, declare that Darwin's sketch of his grandfather and Henrietta's deletions "held hard evidence of heredity." The assertions and deletions spoke for the two sides of the family. Henrietta was a Wedgwood, concerned with social position and appearances. Her father, at age 70, had already fought his battles with the Anglican establishment and had won them. As with his pursuit of scientific truth he had wanted to tell the truth about his grandfather, but, ever cautious, he bowed to his daughter's suggestions and cleaned up old Erasmus' act.
But the grandeur of evolution he could not change. All he could do, and what he did for nearly 20 years, was to conceal it. At first glance, it was not what one might expect from a Unitarian. We harbor that belief, I think, that we are people who can both seek openly for the truth, and declare it when we find it. And yet some truths hurt. They can hurt us and they can hurt people we love and care about. And in Darwin's view, at any rate, they could hurt the society and the neighborhood where he and his family lived. For the last half of his long life Darwin and his wife, Emma, lived in the Kentish village of Downe.
His reticence to publicize his evolutionary theories was the reticence of English dissenters within an Anglican society. He came well by it. If the example of his grandfather, Erasmus, was an exception in prudent society, his father, Robert, a physician like Erasmus had been, was not an additional exception. When Charles was born they had the baby baptized at the local Anglican Church. Darwin's father, say Desmond and Moore, was "a closet free-thinker," so it paid to be prudent in public.
But Darwin's mother, a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, stood by her heritage and took the children on Sunday to the Unitarian chapel. It was not an auspicious building; indeed, the Anglican-inspired British law, had prohibited any church building, other than Anglican ones, from looking like churches, or, from being on main street. Nor could they be called churches.
I once served a Unitarian congregation in the British Midlands, in a six-month exchange with an English minister, and the church, which was called Great Meeting, was hidden among a rabbit warren of city centre streets and could be reached only by those who had been given a password or at least a city map.
The chapel to which Darwin's mother took her children was in the village of Shrewsbury and "stood on the site of Shrewsbury's first meeting house for religious Dissenters, which had been burned by an Anglican mob a century before." (Desmond and Moore, p 12)
The next generation of Wedgwoods, however, would, like Robert Darwin, consider the advantages of social respectability. Darwin's biographers write:
Religion was a serious matter for the Wedgwoods, but since the 1790s the family had become more conformist. Like so many second and third-generation Unitarians, cosseted in wealth, secure in business, they were adopting Anglican respectability ........ It made sense for Emma to stay on the safe side and be confirmed as an Anglican. Certainly her mother was for the respectability, or at least for covering her options. It was "better to conform to the ceremonies" of the Church, she said, "for one can never be quite sure that in omitting them we are not liable to sin."
And so Emma Wedgwood was confirmed at St. Peter's Anglican Church in the Staffordshire village of Maer when she was 16. Fourteen years later she and Charles Darwin were married in the same church. The traditional Anglican service was altered somewhat so as not to offend the fading Unitarian sensibilities of the Wedgwood family or the Dissenting tradition of the Darwins.
Earlier, when Darwin was in college and contemplating his future, his family and some friends bade him consider becoming an Anglican parson and finding a cozy rural parish with few parochial demands and a lot of time to follow his interests in beetles and butterflies. He thought well enough of the idea to give it serious thought.
Fortunately for the world of science, an invitation came to him shortly after his college days were over from Captain Robert Fitzrey. He needed a naturalist on his scientifically-equipped ship which was seen to set sail on a two-year mapping survey of the coasts of South America. Darwin eagerly accepted and it was on this voyage of the Beagle that Darwin's real life began. On that voyage, which lasted nearly five years, Darwin's research and study and reflection moved him gradually away from the easy acceptance of the established religious pieties and beliefs of the age toward a much more independent and critical way. But it did not make him a religious radical like his grandfather Erasmus had been. He never wanted to be known as a radical of any type at all. He preferred a quiet life, studying his beetles and finches; but that study led him further and further away from the absurd notion that God had individually crafted every slug and snail. Such an idea, he thought, was degrading even to the idea of God. He wanted to give God back his omnipotency, his consistency.
The world was a place of natural law; the wide sweep of natural law controlled the climate, the landscape, changes in animals and plants, everything. Along with Unitarians and other religious dissenters of the age, Darwin found no reason to believe in miracles; a miracle, after all, was a disruption of the supreme law of God, and God didn't need to tinker with his own plan. That would be like warring with himself.
And yet Darwin worried about his heresies. He worried, not because he doubted his own theories about the origin of species, but because he did not want to be considered just another one of those radicals denouncing the church and traditional religion. He thought religious faith was necessary to morality and to social stability. He himself was becoming "destitute of faith, yet terrified of scepticism.''
Religion had been used all acknowledged it - to keep the lower classes in check. Without Christianity, it was widely believed, chaos would reign. But here was Charles Darwin, seeing that species of beetles and finches and just about everything else had changed, adapted throughout the ages. If living atoms had the power of self-development, of change, the divine influence of the God who watched over everything was waning. And if that God faded, what would become of the social order? The end of civilization?
Darwin knew what he knew, but he did not know the implications of what he knew. So he wrote his scientific papers and kept the larger implications of his discoveries to himself. Could he ever even come close to proclaiming that apes and human beings were somehow "netted" together, or that God's creation did not happen as Genesis said it had?
In 1844 he set forth his views in a long essay, but did not publish it. Instead, he gave it to his wife and asked that she publish it after his death. He didn't want to offend people; after all, some of his best friends were country parsons, some of whom dabbled in botany and geology. Nor did he want to be known as a religious heretic. He lived in Anglican-dominated England, and not many years before a law making the holding of Unitarian views a criminal offense was still on the books; and only 15 years before the so-called Sacramental Test had been abolished. It had been a law requiring that one take the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites and usage of the Church of England as a qualification for office.
But Darwin gradually grew more bold. He read some books defending traditional Christianity, one by the lapsed radical, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who proclaimed that hellfire awaited all unbelievers. Darwin realized that would apply to his grandfather, his father, and now, to himself. "This was a monstrous doctrine," he said. He could not believe it. He looked at the biological world and saw transmutation, change, evolution. Couldn't the religious instinct evolve too?
He was offended by the primitive deity of the Hebrew Bible, whose atrocities "had lit up hellfires in Christendom." Such a God was nothing but a barbaric tyrant. And the New Testament? Full of myths and inconsistencies. In 1851 the Darwin's ten-year old daughter, Annie, died. Her death, a savage loss to her parents, ended any warm thoughts Darwin might have retained for Christian theology. Prior to Annie's death he seemed willing to go along with the customs of the day, and he learned to keep his religious views to himself. But with Annie's death, he knew he could no longer believe the way his wife believed. For him, Christian faith was futile.
This did not make him a Unitarian; indeed, he was moving beyond the staid, Christian Unitarianism of his age and land. He was coming to agree with old Erasmus Darwin that Unitarianism was just a "feather bed to catch falling Christians."
So Darwin mostly kept his religious heresies to himself, as, to be sure, he had kept his scientific views about natural selection mostly to himself. As far back as 1844 he had written to his friend Joseph Hooker about the transmutation of life, and had said: "I am almost convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable."
He had seen, of course, what the Anglican clergy could do to innocent scientists whose theories questioned the traditional religious beliefs. It wasn't just that religious orthodoxy was being challenged; it was that the social order itself was being threatened.
Darwin himself was not immune from such feelings; he did not want to be identified with the atheistic, low-life church bashers. And yet he knew what he knew and he knew that true science could owe no allegiance to theology, to religious dogma. So he settled down and wrote what he knew about natural selection and took it to his publishers in 1859, 25 years after his journey on the Beagle had ended. The Origin of Species garnered great immediate support: from his friends and fellow-scientists like Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Stuart Mill, and the Harvard biologist, Asa Gray. Huxley wanted him to take on the protesting clergy directly. He said: "Theology and parsandom are the irreconciliable enemies of Science." He wanted no compromise with the clergy. Darwin was more temperate.
He had his detractors, to be sure. The absence of a role for deity in his argument concerned many. God had not been disposed of completely by Darwin, but certainly He had been pushed into a back corner. Natural causes, he wrote, did not suggest "the continuous operation of God's will."
Like Newton two centuries earlier, Darwin believed, at first, in a God who had laid out a general plan, but who thereafter did not interfere in the workings of the world. There was no support from Darwin for the Anglican view "that the Creator designs and updates each dragonfly personally." (p 479 Desmond and Moore).
Neither could he blame God for evil, for tragedy, for the many sorrows of existence. "I cannot persuade myself," he wrote to a friend, "that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars." That was an accident of nature, the way of the natural world. Thus, he relieved God of responsibility. Religious folk wrote and talked of God's harmony, and Darwin called it an illusion. This was hard stuff for ordinary people to take. As Janet Browne writes in her new biography of Darwin, he "was inviting people to believe in a world run by irregular, unpredictable contingencies..."
Darwin did not want to upset people's religious understanding and comfort, even as he became more sceptical as he grew older. He did net even write about a Creator as the origin of human beings - and only in the closing sentences of The Origin did he note: "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history..." He did not want to bog down in a battle about Creation.
Huxley did - any battle pleased him. He had written: "Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules..."
Darwin took a gentler approach. Nonbeliever as he gradually became, he still said that he did not want to write "atheistically." When a fellow scientist and friend, Asa Gray, wrote him about the "obvious presence of design" in the universe, Darwin answered that he could see no evidence of design and benificence. "There seems too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding with the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed." (176 Browne)
But in the end he thought the whole subject was "too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton."
When he composed the ORIGIN, he surely retained some religious views, but as the years passed, as he wrote, "not even the grandest scenes would cause such (religious} feelings to swell."
To Darwin, the Christian God was cruel. 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. (p 432)
In the end, in his posthumously published Autobiography he wrote that religious belief was little more than inherited instinct, "akin to a monkey's fear of a snake."
His family, following a long tradition in the family, omitted that remark from the first edition of the Autobiography.
With the passage of time, and with the publication of many other books, Darwin became the "grand old man of science." Even those who didn't understand evolution or who opposed it could respect his quiet persistence. Indeed, one of his closest friends was the pastor of the local Anglican Church. But when he was enticed away to another parish in Scotland, his successor at Downe, who came from the "sanctimonious" end of church doctrine, barely acknowledged Darwin, and wrote later that Darwin "never came to church."
Darwin was content in his rural home, to which came sermons and Biblical tracts and theological questions from a host of correspondent. He answered letters. In one he wrote: "as one with no assured and ever-present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward," he had not lived in fear of divine wrath. No, he told another letter-writer, he was not an atheist, but "I think that generally (& more & more as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."
Darwin died in 1882. His friends made hurried arrangements to have his body interred in that great shrine of the established church, Westminster Abbey. A decade and more earlier it might have seemed blasphemous, but by 1882 even a gentle agnosticism was permissible.
Even the Church Times, the house organ of the Church of England, wrote warmly of Darwin, but as his biographers have written:
.... the most tireless supporters were the Unitarians and free religionists, proud that Darwin had been brought up in their rational, Dissenting tradition and always appreciative of his naturalistic views. His trusted friend, William Carpenter, carried the entire British and Foreign Unitarian Association with his resolution applauding Darwin for unraveling "the immutable laws of the Divine Government...(Desmond and Moore, p 675)
Darwin had naturalized Creation and, from his day until our own, no biological enterprise could exist without acknowledgment that its foundation rested on what Charles Darwin had learned and transmitted, however haltingly, to the world.
Reverend Stephen also shared this poem, by Nicholas Biel:
On the third day I was dust, ordinary common dust
like you see on a country road in a dry spell,
nothing expected of me,
me expecting nothing neither.
On the sixth day he comes along and blows.
"In my own image too", he says,
like he was doing me a favor.
Sometimes I think if he'd waited a million years
by then I'd been tired maybe being dust
but after only two, three days,
what can you expect? I wasn't used to being dust
and he goes and makes me into Man.
He could see right away from the expression on my face
I didn't like it so he's going to butter me up.
He puts me in this garden only I don't butter.
He brings me all the animals I should give them names--
What do I know of names? "Call it something," he says,
"anything you want," so I make names up--lion, tiger,
elephant, giraffe--crazy but that's what he wants.
I'm naming animals since 5 AM, in the evening I'm tired
I go to bed early, in the morning I wake up,
there she is sitting by a pool of water admiring herself.
"Hello, Adam," she says, "I'm your mate, I'm Eve."
"Pleased to meet you," I tell her and we shake hands.
Actually I'm not pleased---from time immemorial nothing,
now rush, rush, rush; two days ago I'm dust, yesterday
all day I'm naming animals, today I got a mate already.
Also I didn't like the way she looked at me
or at herself in the water.
Well, you know what happened, I don't have to tell you,
there were all those fruit trees---she took a bite,
I took a bite, the snake took a bite and quick like a flash---
out of the garden.
Now I'm not complaining; After all, it's his garden,
he don't want nobody eating his apples, that's his business.
What irritates me is the nerve of the guy.
I didn't ask him to make me even dust;
he could have left me nothing like I was before--
and such a fuss for one lousy little apple
not even ripe (there wasn't much time from Creation,
it was still Spring), I didn't ask for Cain, for Abel,
I didn't ask for nothing, but anything goes wrong,
who's to blame?....Sodom, Gomorrah, Babel, Ararat...
me or my kids catch it,....fire, flood, pillar of salt.
"Be patient," Eve said, "a little understanding. Look,
he made it was his idea, it breaks down, so he'll fix it."
But I told him one day. "You're in too much of a hurry.
In six days you make everything there is,
you expect it to run smoothly? Something's always
going to happen. If you'd a thought first,
conceived a plan, consulted a specialist,
you wouldn't have so much trouble all the time."
But you can't tell him nothing. He knows it all.
Like I say, he means well but he's a meddler and he's
careless.
He could have made that woman so she wouldn't bite no apple.
All right, all right, so what's done is done,
but all the same, he should have known better,
or at least he could have blown on other dust.