Let Darwin Rest in Peace

This essay was written in 2011 for a Master of Arts at Birkbeck in ‘The History of Ideas’. It considers the controversy over the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species with particular reference to his changing Christian beliefs. The essay further considers the discussions in the early 21st century provoked by the ‘New Atheists’, a group of authors of books promoting atheism including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.

Derek Perry
Let Darwin Rest in Peace 

From the controversies over his Origin of the Species to the rise of the ‘New Atheists’ in the twenty-first century, Charles Darwin has been cited as the champion of godlessness. Along the evolutionist / creationist divide, one side glorifies him while the other decries him. For both believers and non-believers, the death of the Christian god at the end of the nineteenth century, as proclaimed by Nietzsche, was at least partly instigated by Darwin, a militant naturalist who challenged the creator in an ideological battle.[1]

The dispute has continued between the followers of the white-bearded gentleman in heaven and the disciples of the white-bearded gentleman in Bromley.[2] Darwin has attracted epithets such as ‘saintly’ and ‘Pope Darwin’.[3] These quasi-religious descriptions only serve to underline the antagonism between creationists and evolutionists. However, the British establishment did eventually accept him. Ignoring his agnosticism, they allowed his burial in Westminster Abbey amongst other great Christian Englishmen.

Darwin has since been beatified as England’s greatest scientific saint but to blame him for promoting atheism, or to raise his banner in support of atheism, is a misapprehension. Nevertheless, Darwin has been adopted by the New Atheists[4] and placed at the forefront of their campaign against religion. This is a misrepresentation. We should restore Darwin to his scientific eminence, and to the peace and quiet of Downe House.

Darwin did not invent either evolutionism or atheism. He was the genius who discovered the missing links in evolutionary theory which had many precursors. On the other hand, his sense of disbelief in a Christian god was fertilised by personal emotions rather than rational thinking. He was not a very good agnostic and kept it mainly to himself, regretting a great loss to his intellectual vocabulary which came between him and his devotion to his wife.

Evolutionary ideas were already accepted among geologists who held a wide spectrum of beliefs, religious and scientific, by the time Darwin published Origin in 1859. Naturalists were less receptive of evolution before Origin but discussion was already under way over Lamarckism and the publication of Vestiges in 1844 by Chambers.[5] Evolution was already challenging conventional thought and the role of a creator. It was fear of the controversies over Vestiges that perhaps contributed to Darwin’s delayed publication of his Origin.

In general, science and theology were working out their positions relatively amicably, as new scientific discoveries were made. Some established scientists of the day, such as Lyell, were willing to reconsider their ideas and take up new theories. The old guard which promoted bible-inspired science from the old universities could not resist the young scientists of the new universities like University College London and gifted amateurs such as Darwin.

Darwin added little to these theological discussions, preferring to stay away. The controversies around his publications were taken up by his supporters, sometimes for their own ends. In her 2002 book, Janet Browne identified four who she termed his ‘four musketeers’.[6] They were Lyell, Hooker, Huxley and Gray, who were not united in any belief except in their support for Darwin and had different theological ideas and areas of work.

Charles Lyell had published his multi-volume Principles of Geology between 1830 and 1833, some years previously, but moved away from the subject and took up the geological history of mankind as his special contribution to evolutionary theory. He was a reluctant evolutionist due to his religious beliefs although a strong supporter of Darwin.

Joseph Hooker was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew which gave him a great deal of authority in the scientific establishment of his day. Britain’s empire gave access to newly discovered plants and natural resources, the exploration and study of which were supported by the Government. Darwin’s own voyage on the Beagle was part of this process. New foods such as breadfruit and natural products such as rubber were being investigated for their economic potential in a growing industrial nation. Hooker ensured that Darwin was well supplied with experimental samples and data. He also disseminated Darwin’s work across the globe to the outposts of empire.

At first, Thomas Huxley was not an evolutionist, attacking Chambers’ Vestiges in 1853. But it was he who led the Darwinists in the British Association for the Advancement of Science debate against ’Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce in 1860. After trouncing Wilberforce, Huxley opted to base his work on the study of apes and comparisons with humans.[7] He became the great publicist for evolutionary theory, running a campaign for a reformed, scientific, rational England against the church and aristocracy. In a tragic parallel with Darwin’s own loss of a child to the effects of scarlet fever, he was badly affected by the death of his son, Noel. Despite the comfort of his friend Charles Kingsley, his traditional religious belief had disappeared. He remained ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ to the end.

Asa Gray ensured support the Darwinists in America. Like Huxley, he had disliked ‘transmutation’ and had rejected Vestiges. But he also scorned Agassiz’s metaphysical biology and was happy to present Darwin’s Origin as a serious alternative to transatlantic scientific orthodoxy.

These and other supporters provided a formidable phalanx of intellectual and persuasive power. Darwinism went international. American editions appeared in 1860 although Asa Gray had to intervene to regulate their production. There were translations into German, French, Dutch, Italian and Russian by 1864. Further translations appeared while Darwin was still alive. The difficulties that Darwin encountered with these translations were not theological but attempts by translators to re-interpret his work and introduce their own ideas.

In Britain, difficulties over the acceptance of evolutionism were only partly religious. Natural selection, making the evolution of very complex creatures a random principle, was a step too far for some agnostics. Even Huxley had his doubts. Some religionists advocated scientific theories which threatened to undermine Darwin’s theories while keeping a place for a Christian god. For example, Kelvin was a believer but was willing to give up a literal reading of the Bible and use science to prove that while creation took more than the biblical seven days, it still did not give enough time for Darwin’s evolutionary theory to work.

There were many jokes published about evolution, cartoons were drawn which transformed Darwin’s face into that of a chimp. However, these but these were humorously mocking rather than brutally dismissive. Darwin was not the threatening atheist but a figure of ridicule. After the initial controversies, Darwinism was rapidly popularised and accepted academically. Evolutionary theory was applied to other disciplines leading to developments in sociology, psychology, genetics and other areas. It certainly helped that Darwin was a genius, a meticulous observer and a great writer. He also possessed a campaign group that promoted him brilliantly, and no-one could doubt his respectability, surrounded by his ideal bourgeois family. His last photographs show a kindly old man with a long white beard, presenting him as the greatest scientist and Englishman of his age.

His reputation was unaffected by his changing Christian belief. He recorded his own loss of faith as a slow realisation that God no longer had a place: ‘(Disbelief) crept over me at a very slow rate but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.’[9]  But his agnosticism was sealed by the death of his daughter, an emotional rather than a reasoned response.  After this tragic event, ‘he could no longer pretend to a belief in a traditional god or in an afterlife.’[10]

Much has been written about Darwin’s agnosticism. However, Darwin never used it in his theories of natural history. Nature may be random, and there was no ‘design’ or ‘intention’. But this did not prove the non-existence of a god. For him, science was not a battle of ideas but an attempt to discover explanations. He was far from the tub-thumping controversialist. Instead, he was a conservative thinker, obsessed with detail and suffering from a mysterious, possibly psychosomatic, illness. He was reluctant to take part in the argument. He did not want to change the world – he was far too comfortable in it.

Evolutionary theory may have increased the level of agnosticism but it had little effect on the development of atheism as a movement. Atheism, as a scientific progressive force, had already been established during the Enlightenment. By the end of the eighteenth century, the French revolution had swept away the church in France, replacing it with temples of reason. Napoleon carried off the aged Pope Pius VI and imprisoned him in Paris. The Age of Reason, promulgated by Voltaire and Hume had triumphed. It may have begun as an esoteric discussion in the salons of Europe but by the end of the eighteenth century it became the battle cry of revolution in America and Europe. In Britain, Shelley wrote paeans to atheism. Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man popularised the idea. A secularist tradition grew among the new working class communities of Britain. All this had happened while Darwin was still a boy.

While controversy raged among intellectuals and scientists, the Church of England quietly adjusted to the rise of secularism in an increasingly industrial Britain. The Church lost its role in marking the stages of peoples’ lives with the municipalisation of death and marriage by the introduction of government registers from the 1830s. In the new cities, the Church changed from being a bastion of the establishment and took up a new role as missionaries and social workers. Secularisation became an essential aspect of the modern world in response to the growth of capitalism[12]. As the Church’s role in society changed, there began a debate over the role of the Church in government, with some advocating a split between Church and State[13]. While the role of the Church was being questioned, so was the role of the Christian god.

By the end of the nineteenth century, atheism was entrenched as a movement, with its own organisations and martyrs. The South Place Religious Society, established in 1793 by Unitarians, became an ‘Ethical’ society in 1888, rejecting its religious origins. The National Secular Society was founded by Charles Bradlaugh in 1866. He later became MP for Northampton but was barred from Parliament and imprisoned for refusing to take a religious oath. The Rationalist Press Association, set up to disseminate controversial books, was set up in 1899.

Other movements, while keeping a form of theism, maintained a secular stance. Spiritualism rejected organised religion while keeping belief in a spiritual world and took up a number of radical causes. It came to Britain from America in the early 1850s and was adopted by Alfred Wallace among others. The Theosophical Society, promoting a rational combination of theology and philosophy was set up in 1875.

Science was only part of the move towards a more rational and secular society. Science stood alongside other radical thinking of the age including socialism, anarchism, feminism and psychology. It took a large number of people with many different ideas to kill God in Nietzsche‘s terms. Darwin was only one contributor to this process.

By the twentieth century, atheism was firmly established as a credible intellectual alternative, although the ruling ideas were still Christian in the West. The Church was adapting to a secular society. Christians could combine scientific theory with a new type of transcendental god. By the 1950s, even the conservative Catholic Church accepted evolution. Evolution has been accommodated by many other faiths.

This paradigmatic change had its setbacks. Fundamentalist Christians in America attempted to ban the propagation of evolutionary theories. Taking the Bible literally, they denounced evolution as anti-religious and had sufficient political influence to change state laws in the 1920s, leading to legal challenges such as the ‘monkey’ trial.[14] This generated a great deal of publicity, including a Hollywood film. These victories by Christian fundamentalists were short-lived and are best viewed as part of the political movement in the USA after the First World War which also led to prohibition and other restrictive laws. Evolutionary theory has been condemned by fundamentalist Muslims in an attempt to condemn yet another Western idea as atheistic and anti-Islamic.

As a ‘belief system’, atheism grew during the twentieth century. In a review of ‘faiths and beliefs’ in the New Statesman published on 18 April 2011, ‘Humanism’ with an estimated one billion ‘followers’ came third after Christianity (2.1 billion) and Islam (1.6 billion) among the major belief systems. In general, atheists in their millions were quietly getting on with their lives.

In April 2011, in Britain, atheism became newsworthy. The reasons were several, including a campaign by the British Humanist Association for the right to state ‘no religion’ on the National Census form. The main reason was the arrival in Britain by Sam Harris to promote his new book The moral landscape: how science can determine human values. This led to a number of articles in the intelligent press about religion, atheism, and Sam Harris himself.[15]  However, atheism was not a controversial issue in Britain at the time.

Sam Harris is one of the ’New Atheists’. His earlier book, The End of Faith, published in 2004 set out a militant atheist agenda in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001.[16] He has been joined by Daniel C Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens who produced a series of books between 2004 and 2008 which advocated a more ‘militant’ atheism. In 2007, the group produced a filmed discussion which was released on DVD under the title The Four Horsemen, referring to the epithet ‘The Four Horseman of New Atheism’ used to describe their apocalyptic vision of religion.[17]

Harris wrote Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, a severe criticism of Christianity. Also in 2006, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, which led to a British television series and promotion of the book at a discount in a major chain of newsagents. Soon after there were other books, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (2006), God: the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger (2007), and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens. All were aggressively promoted and became bestsellers. The flow of books continued with The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason by Victor J. Stenger (Prometheus Books, 2009).

The New Atheists take a hard line, advocating a rationalist view against faith and belief. Their emphatic titles are direct challenges to belief systems. Faith is finished, deity is a failed hypothesis, belief is a delusion, religion a magic spell or poisonous potion. The books use scientific arguments to criticise religion and expose its influence as mere superstition. They treat religion as another scientific theory which they then demolish using rational ideas. For them, there is no place for belief and they see the influence of religion in any sphere of life as pernicious.

Those who suggest that there is room for a spiritual dimension in scientific theory are deemed to be the worst hypocrites and are roundly condemned. Stephen Jay Gould suggested that belief or faith in a creator can be compartmentalized as separate from science with his ‘NOMA principle’. New Atheists consider this is treasonous.[18] Richard Dawkins recently labelled Sir Martin Rees, the ex-President of the Royal Society, a ‘compliant Quisling’ for accepting a one million pound prize from the Templeton Foundation which is offered to ‘a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension’. It is not exactly clear just what that spiritual dimension may be according to Sir Martin who is also Astronomer Royal and a declared atheist.

Richard Dawkins, who is probably the best known member of the group in Britain, is a scientist who wrote a popular book, The Selfish Gene, in 1976. His later books expanded on these theories. He also discovered the power of the media and appeared on several television programmes. This combination of scientific rigour and media showmanship has brought him popularity and a great deal of criticism. Dawkins’s fame also derived from his role in the British Humanist Society. Under his influence, the BHA has gone from a staid fringe organisation to an up-to-date campaigning body using the internet, advertisements on buses, Twitter, Facebook and information campaigns to get its message across.  Emphasising the role of science, they have adopted Darwin as their champion, even belatedly advocating a public holiday in his name.

Inevitably, religious thinkers have responded to this attack by the New Atheists but much reasoned argument has also come from scientists and agnostics. The New Atheists were criticised for their apparent ignorance of the history of atheism and its controversies. Michael Ruse, a well-respected agnostic scholar who has written several books on Darwinism, wrote: ‘And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster … because they won’t make any effort to think seriously about why they hold their positions about the conflict between science and religion.[19]

Jacques Berlinerblau, a biblical scholar with moderate views, has written: ‘The central insight of the New Atheists is: “Unless you as an atheist are willing to disparage all religious people, describe them all as imbeciles and creeps, mock every text and thinker they have ever produced, then you must be some sort of deluded, self-hating, sell-out, subverting the rise of the Mighty Atheist Political Juggernaut.”.’[20]

Julian Baggini (born 1968) is a British philosopher and the author of several books including Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (2003). He has criticised New Atheism’s ‘anti-theistic’ fundamentalism. He writes: ‘This anti-theism is for me a backwards step. It reinforces what I believe is a myth, that an atheist without a bishop to bash is like a fish without water. Worse, it raises the possibility that as a matter of fact, for many atheists, they do indeed need an enemy to give them their identity’.

Baggini also notes: ‘New Atheism, however, tends to claim reason as a decisive combatant on its side only. With its talk of "spells" and "delusions", it gives the impression that only through stupidity or crass disregard for reason could anyone be anything other than an atheist. "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence," says Dawkins, once again implying that reason and evidence are strangers to religion. This is arrogant, and attributes to reason a power it does not have. Non-atheists can be intelligent and reasonable.’

Baggini continues: ‘The new atheism has also, I think, created an unhelpful climate for atheism to flourish. When people think of atheists now, they think about men who look only to science for answers, are dismissive of religion and over-confident in their own rightness. Richard Dawkins, for example, presented a television programme on religion called The Root ofAall Evil and has as his website slogan “A clear thinking oasis”. Where is the balance and modesty in such rhetoric?’[21]

In a 2010 column entitled “Why I don't believe in the New Atheism”, Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry and The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, argues: ‘That’s why I think it is important to recognize that there is no New Atheism. There are no New Atheists. There is atheism, and there are atheists. A spectrum of national atheist, free thought, secular humanist, and religious humanist organisations already stands prepared to serve unbelievers of many inclinations, without the need for any New Atheist group to hang out its shingle.’

Flynn also points out that the triumph of the so-called New Atheists was to take arguments against religion that were long familiar to insiders, brilliantly repackage them, release them through major publishers, and expose them to millions who would never otherwise pick up an atheist book.[22] A mass marketing success.

In his 2008 book I Don't Believe in Atheists, journalist Chris Hedges argues that there is nothing inherently moral about being either a believer or a non-believer. He goes a step further by accusing atheists in general and New Atheists in particular of being as intolerant, chauvinistic, bigoted, anti-intellectual, and self-righteous as their arch rivals - religious fundamentalists. In other words, being secular versions of the religious right. Like the New Atheists, Hedges is disgusted with the Christian right, going so far as to call it the most frightening mass movement in American history.

The New Atheists have not stimulated such a vehement response from religious thinkers or faith groups. In that respect, the New Atheists have failed to challenge what they call delusional thinking. Instead, they have antagonised their own potential supporters who are the agnostic, rational, scientific thinkers from their own milieu. They are accused of arrogant, publicity-seeking showmanship which undermines their own supporters.

There are major philosophical and ethical problems in the scientific community which require answers. In the past, belief or faith has contributed to some issues which rationalism was unable to deal with. The New Atheists offer no alternative and even condemn attempts by those such as Stephen Jay Gould to find a solution to ethical problems.

These controversies have diverted debate about evolution when recent advances in gene theory, palaeontology and neuroscience offer the possibility of filling in gaps in evolutionary theory. We should be looking at how evolutionary theory has developed and where it might go without pointless controversies over creationism or the argument from design which do nothing to advance the cause of science in general and evolution in particular. What can we say about the future evolution of Homo sapiens? Have we been artificially selecting our species for generations, ensuring the survival of the least fit? Are we reaching a point in over-population where we should look at neo-Malthusian theories?

There are no New Atheists in, for example, the fields of sub-atomic physics and cosmology. These theories have also challenged the role of a god but have conveniently left a place for a deity, if only in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang. Instead of arguing about theology, international scientific consensus has led to the investment of billions of dollars in the largest machine ever built, the Hadron Collider, in order to look for what is even called ‘the god particle’. Neither rationalists nor the very few believers in the field have any problems with the name.

If we can return to discussing science rather than non-existent theological problems perhaps we can get on with building the biological equivalent of the Hadron Collider and look for the Secret of Life. Inevitably, it will be called the Darwin Machine.

END NOTES

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science (ed Bernard Williams) (Cambridge, 2001). ‘God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed Him!’ Other writers including Pierre Bourdieu have added the names of Freud and Marx to the list of the Christian god’s nemeses.

[2] The first description of a gentleman is an allegorical description, the latter a literal one. Darwin’s home, Downe House in Bromley, can be visited.

[3] For example, see illustrations 32 and 42 in Desmond, A and More, J. Darwin (London, 1991).

[4] ‘The New Atheists are authors of early twenty-first century books promoting atheism. These authors include Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. The “New Atheist” label for these critics of religion and religious belief emerged out of journalistic commentary on the contents and impacts of their books. … New Atheists have provoked considerable controversy with their body of work.’ Quoted at: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http:// https://iep.utm.edu/new-atheism/ (accessed 6/3/2024).

[5] Chambers, Robert (1844). Vestiges of the natural history of creation (ed J A Secord) (Chicago, 1994).

[6] Browne J, Charles Darwin: the power of place: volume II of a biography (Princeton, 2002). Chapter 4: Four musketeers.

[7] For a description of the debate, see Hellman H, Great feuds in science: ten of the liveliest debates ever (New York, 1998). Chapter 5, Darwin’s bulldogs versus Soapy Sam.

[9] Quoted in Greene JC, Darwin and the modern world view (New York, 1963).

[10]  For the full text of his memoir written a few days after the death of his daughter see Orel H (ed), Charles Darwin: interviews and recollections (London, 2000). pps 91-95. The quote is from Orel’s own notes on page 95.

[12] Gilbert A. The making of post-Christian Britain: a history of the secularisation of modern society (London, 1980). Chapter 4: The evolution of a secular society p.68.

[13] The favourite ‘longest’ word of generations of schoolchildren, ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ was coined at this time to describe the movement which opposed such a split.

[14] The Scopes Trial - informally known as the Monkey Trial - was an American legal case in 1925 in which a high school biology teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating the state's Butler Act that made it unlawful to teach evolution.

[15] For example, New Statesman 18 April 2011 which was deemed a ‘faith edition’ with articles on Sam Harris, Saint Augustine, Hinduism in Britain and the beliefs of public figures.

[16] Harris S. The end of faith: religion, terror, and the future of reason (New York, 2004).

[17] The four horsemen (film) (2007). http://richarddawkins.net/videos/3625-the-four-horsemen-hd-now-on-youtube (accessed 1/5/2011).

[18]  Gould SJ. Rocks of ages: science and religion in the fullness of life (London, 2001).

[19]  Ruse M. New Atheism: A Disaster Comparable to the Tea Party (20 March 2011).
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/new-atheism-a-disaster-comparable-to-the-tea-party/33421   (Accessed 1 May 2011).

[20] Berlinerblau J. Quote of the day (29 March 2011).
http://curiouspresbyterian.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/quote-of-the-day-jacques-berlinerblau-on-the-predictable-snark-of-new-atheist-trolls. (Accessed 1 May 2011).

[21] Baggini J. The New Atheist Movement is destructive (19 March 2011).http://fritanke.no/index.php?page=vis_nyhet&NyhetID=8484. (Accessed 1 May 2011).

[22]  Flynn T. Why I don't believe in the New Atheism (2010). Cited in
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=flynn_30_3 (Accessed 1 May 2011).