Dr. Benjamin Wiker responds to a reader's letter

The Original Letter:
This is interesting but I think completely mis-represents Darwin, who at one point studied to become an anglican parson and considered himself a christian. He wasn't interested in removing God from moral or natural life. In fact he saw nature studies as natural theology. At Cambridge Darwin enjoyed the language and logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity. Darwin studied Paley's Natural Theology which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as God acting through laws of nature. He graduated in January 1831 from Cambridge and 4 weeks later left for a 4+ year voyage on the HMS Beagle. He was dismayed by how others later used his theory to promote social darwinianism, which he saw as taking it much too far, beyond empirical implications. But he also considered himself a scientist and believed that truth could overcome such misinterpretation. (My own opinion is that many people will be surprised to see him in heaven because so many Christians have vilified him.) Later Darwin joined a group of social scientists who thought God was the orchestrator of natural laws and by studying them we gain insight into Him. Darwin did think that morality was present in humanity through natural selection, but I think would have said that God set it up so moral virtues increase species' survivability. I think he would have argued that that natural selection was the mechanism God used to bring us to His higher moral standard.

I do not think that Wilberforce knew Darwin. He died in 1833 when Darwin had just graduated from college and was on his first voyage on the Beagle and before Origin of the Species was thought of or published. When it came out there was a storm of discussion and anger which surprised Darwin.

I think Dr. Wilker should get the money back that he spent on his PhD and he should check his facts.

Well, I think it's too late to get the money back for my Ph.D., but I try to be very careful about the checking the facts. In the case of Darwin, I've had to be doubly careful because of what I call "the Darwin Myth," the glowing but confused portrait of Charles Darwin that has controlled our understanding of the man and his legacy for well over a century. I can tell by the objections of the letter-writer that she is relying on older scholarship, and directly or indirectly, Charles Darwin's own Autobiography.

A different, much more ambiguous, and much more human portrait of Darwin has emerged from the sustained scholarship on his life over the last twenty years. Here, I cannot recommend too highly Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist and Janet Browne's two volume Charles Darwin. They are both excellent, but I think have not gone far enough in correcting the myths surrounding Darwin's life, so I have written The Darwin Myth: the Life and Lies of Charles Darwin.

So, on to the facts. First the easy ones. You are confusing William Wilberforce (1759-1833) with Samuel Wilberforce, his son (1805-1873). Darwin took his final exams at Cambridge in January 1831, officially graduated in the Spring of 1831, but the HMS Beagle didn't leave Plymouth England until December 27, 1831. Finally, Darwin was not surprised at all by the "storm" that broke when he published the Origin of Species in 1859. Indeed, it was fear of the storm that caused him to delay publishing anything on evolution for about twenty years. He had the basics of his argument by the early 1840s, and knew the radical implications for morality and religion would not go down well in conservative English society.

And now the difficult ones. Darwin was studying to become an Anglican parson, but not out of any devotion to the Anglican Church. The Darwins were several generation Whig freethinkers. The grandfather Erasmus Darwin was at best a very thin theist, and Charles father, Robert Darwin, was almost assuredly an atheist. Both Erasmus and Robert Darwin were famous physicians. Robert had originally sent Charles to medical school at Edinburgh, but Charles more or less flunked out because (in Charles own self-deprecating words) he was "an idle sporting man." As Robert said to him, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." Sending him to Cambridge was an act of desperation on his father's part, a way to find a living for his "idle sporting" son. Charles accepted the idea, not out of any piety on his part, but because a country parsonage would allow him to continue shooting, running dogs, collecting beetles, and generally enjoying life in the life of a country gentleman.

Darwin gives the impression in his Autobiography that, at this time, he believed in the Anglican Creed and the literal truth of the Bible, but this is surely disingenuous on his part. The Darwins were liberal Whigs, three-generation religious skeptics, and heirs to the Enlightenment acid critique of scriptural literalism and dogmatic belief. That Charles would suddenly have become a devout Anglican and biblical literalist, against his entire upbringing, is quite difficult to believe. Charles did, I believe, have a kind of blush of theism while at Cambridge, given his friendship with the Anglican parson-scientists John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick, and that is when Paley was most attractive to him. But this did not last. By the time he was about to marry Emma Wedgwood at the beginning of 1839, he had to confess to her that, like his own father and her father, he was an unbeliever. This nearly broke Emma's heart.

Darwin did in fact eliminate God from his account of evolution; that is, he devised a systematic way, natural selection, that made divine intervention impossible. He knew what he was doing. Much to his discredit, he later offered theological-sounding sops to readers to blunt criticism of his theory, and make it more acceptable. He even added a line about the "Creator" to his Origin of Species, about which he later quite candidly admitted to his friend Hooker, "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used [a] Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared' by some wholly unknown process." Anyone who still holds to the myth that Darwin allowed, even invited God, into his account of evolution or that he in some way remained a Christian must read the biographies by Desmond and Moore, Browne, and yours truly.

Now for morality. Here, if I may be perhaps too blunt, you couldn't be more wrong. During the two decades between the time he stepped off the Beagle and when he published the Origin Darwin carefully worked out the implications of his evolutionary theory for human beings, but he left them out of the Origin because they were so shocking. A little more than a decade later, he was ready to publish what he really thought, and everyone should read Darwin's Descent of Man. He wrote it precisely because some of his staunchest allies—Charles Lyell, William Wallace, and Asa Gray—insisted on a theistic account of evolution that allowed God to guide human evolution and define human morality. Darwin would have no part of it, and wrote the Descent to convince them, and everyone else, that evolution, not God, was the sole cause of morality and religion. The results are not pretty. In the Descent Darwin makes clear that he is indeed the father of social Darwinism, the modern eugenics movement, and "scientific" racism. - Dr. Benjamin Wiker