As Charles Darwin’s work showed that life on earth had evolved and that man’s origin was from the process of evolution, his ideas could not be contained solely in the realm of Science. He knew that these discoveries reached towards the heart of some of the deepest questions about who we are and where we have come from, questions that could not be ignored. Darwin, who was primarily concerned with producing original science that would be recognized by other scientists, additionally had the difficult task of navigating the broader religious implications of his work; for himself and his wife, for his scientific colleagues, and for society at large. In an 1844 letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker the personal burden is described in startling language by Darwin, “I am almost convinced…that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” The original letter is one of the many treasures currently on display in the Darwin exhibition that has just opened at the American Museum of Natural History. (For a full review of the exhibition see “The Grandeur in This View of Life: Darwin’s Story”.) Since it is the season for Darwin, it is worth considering in more depth the personal and spiritual journey that accompanied his pioneering scientific discoveries.

This wooden writing box is filled with mementos collected by Darwin’s wife to remember their first daughter, Annie, who died when she was only 10-years-old. photo © Craig Chesek, American Museum of Natural History

Charles Darwin was raised in the Unitarian faith. Just before embarking on the voyage of the Beagle, he had completed a Cambridge degree in preparation for a career as a clergyman, a profession compatible with his burgeoning interests in the natural world. Studying nature was a fitting pastime for a man of the Church because this work glorified the wonders of God’s Creation. Darwin had read William Paley’s influential 1802 work Natural Theology which rhapsodized about the living world, “The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence.” Paley’s ideas, including the famous watchmaker analogy, summed up the prevailing school of biological thought that life was so complex it must have been intelligently designed (like a watch) and each species had arisen from a separate act of creation by God.

When he embarked on the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin had conventional religious beliefs. His autobiography states, “Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves quite orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.” Voyaging around the globe, Darwin encountered some visions of beauty that gave him an inner conviction of Divine Creation. Contemplating a Brazilian forest, he wrote in his journal, “it is not possible to give an adequate sense of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.” He also wrote, “I well remember my conviction that there is more to man than the mere breath in his body.”

However, as the voyage of the Beagle progressed, some of Darwin’s scientific observations had raised questions about the stability of species and as he began to think about these ideas, he also examined his religious beliefs. His work would cast three long shadows.

The first of the trinity was that evolution did not fit with a literal interpretation of Genesis. Darwin was proposing that new species could arise without God’s intervention. This was perhaps the least problematic discovery as some branches of science at that time had already produced data that challenged Genesis. The mainstream view in geology, from work by scientists such as Charles Lyell, was that the earth was very ancient, much older than the 6,000 years of human existence calculated from the Bible.

Secondly, the mechanism that Darwin proposed for evolution—natural selection—is a process of ruthless struggle for survival: “all nature is at war.” What kind of Creator would design such a system? In an 1861 essay, Charles Darwin’s niece Julia Wedgwood wondered whether the command in Genesis “Be fruitful and multiply” might mean “let every creature engage in unremitting warfare with its fellows for means of subsistence.” Darwin’s autobiography noted that while the argument has been made that suffering facilitates man’s moral improvement, “what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?” A Tennyson poem of the era that vividly proclaimed “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” seemed more appropriate than the idyllic scene of creatures frolicking happily favored by William Paley. In an 1856 letter to Joseph Hooker, Darwin wrote, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.”

The third rail was the origin of man. In his autobiography Darwin says that “As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.” Investigating the origin of man would raise a lot of questions about how that origin might have shaped human nature. If man shared ancestry with the apes, does “the citadel itself” that is man’s mind show “the indelible stamp of his lowly origin”? Do human beings have a morality or soul of Divine origin? In one of his notebooks on evolutionary theory Darwin had jotted down, “Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.” He also scribbled, “Man…thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.” This was not only a religious question, there were also political reverberations. Should “the dignity of man” collapse, was society itself likewise at risk? If human behavior and morality could have arisen through the process of natural selection, did God need to be evoked for the creation of the soul? And if life did not require God’s hand and there was no afterlife to come, would the huddled masses start to demand justice this side of paradise?

The time when Darwin developed his ideas virtually all of his scientific colleagues were members of The Establishment—either wealthy gentlemen or clergymen. It was a time just on the brink of the arrival of professional scientists. Darwin was well aware of how horrified many of his colleagues would be with his ideas. Indeed, when he published The Origin of Species he only had one tantalizing sentence on man’s place in the scheme of things, “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history,” and Darwin did not broach the subject in print until The Descent of Man in 1871. When he sent off advance copies of The Origin of Species to the scientific leading lights, he included a range of melodramatic cover notes that expressed his trepidation. To the anatomist Richard Owen he wrote, “It will seem an abomination” and his comment to Hugh Falconer the paleontologist was, “how you will long to crucify me alive.”

Throughout his life, Darwin avoided discussing religion because he wanted his work to be judged on a purely scientific level. He did not want to “unnecessarily make enemies” and once when his son was about to publish an essay on religion, he counseled him “pause, pause, pause.” Our understanding of Darwin’s religious outlook comes from letters and from an autobiography he wrote for his family that was not intended for publication. When he returned from the voyage of the Beagle, he was starting to lose his Christian faith. He confided his spiritual doubts to his fiancée Emma, and a letter that she wrote to him reveals the foreboding she felt: “My reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us.” On a letter from Emma about concerns they would be separated in the afterlife, Charles Darwin had written, “When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cryed over this.” It is believed that the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter Annie in 1851 was the final blow to what remained of Darwin’s Christian faith. His wife Emma remained a devout Christian throughout her life.

In his autobiography, Darwin explains some of the reasons for his loss of belief in Christianity. He did not trust the Old Testament because of its “manifestly false history of the world…and from its attributing to God the feelings of a vengeful tyrant.” Darwin found it “utterly incredible” that if God was going to make a divine revelation in the form of Christianity, God would allow it to be connected to the Old Testament. Darwin continued, “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation…But I was very unwilling to give up my belief…disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete…I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. 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 men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.”

Darwin rejected Christianity, but he remained throughout his life unsure about the existence of God: “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to be an Agnostic.” Darwin always wondered if a deep-seated belief in God’s existence was just an instinctive behavior, or a consequence of instruction during childhood. The idea he found most persuasive that God exists was “the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense universe, including man and his capacity of looking far backwards, and far into futurity, as a result of blind chance or necessity.”

Darwin’s uncertainty about God did not result in him having a bleak outlook on life, and from all accounts he was a very humane and loving person. When one of Joseph Hooker’s sons was ill, Darwin wrote to him, “Much love, much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.” Darwin strongly distanced himself from the idea of the principles of evolution being applied to a human population, and he noted in The Descent of Man about those who were weaker in mind or body, “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the waging of hard reason, without our deterioration of the noblest part of our nature…but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”

When Darwin died he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the highest State honor possible for a funeral. The transcending mood was patriotic pride in Darwin’s achievements as the newspapers obituaries praised “the greatest Englishman since Newton.” The times were changing. The new professional class of scientists who were building on Darwin’s work were in the ascendancy, and the old order was rapidly fading.

The 22-year-old who embarked on the Beagle was on course for a life in the clergy and believed that species were fixed. By the end of his life he had gone through not only a scientific transformation, but also an astonishing personal journey. Steven Jay Gould aptly described him as a “gentle revolutionary.” Darwin followed science where it led him and he did not seek to impose his religious views on anyone. The new exhibition begins with Charles Darwin’s magnifying glass, a very touching symbol of a man who looked at the world with sincerity and was not afraid of honestly facing the questions that he saw.

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