 I am, of course, charmed by your warm appreciation of my educational background. My focus in the Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Vanderbilt, and for much of my life after, has been the relationship between the various different approaches to morality and the views of nature that support them. My dissertation was on Aristotle ("The Interdependence of Ethics, Politics, Physics, and Metaphysics in Aristotle"), and I've done extensive work, in this same regard, with other figures such as Epicurus, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, John Locke, and, neither last nor least, Charles Darwin.
I mention this because I have found it most fruitful, as an intellectual historian, to ask about the larger intellectual, social, political, and moral context of particular scientists and philosophers. The more you read in the history of science, the more you realize how individual scientists and their theories fit into the intellectual currents and moral assumptions running through their time. This is an absolutely essential aspect of our understanding the history of science, and surely then, of Charles Darwin. Reading "all of Darwin's books ... several times" is a good start, but it is not enough.
Let me illustrate why. Say, you read Darwin's Origin of Species several times. Good job! But will you find the following words: "To avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism...say only the emotions instincts degrees of talent, which are hereditary [sic] are so because brain of child resemble[s], parent stock." You'll forgive Darwin's innocence in spelling and grammar I'm sure, but these are words from his private notebooks scrawled in the late 1830s, two decades before the appearance of the Origin of Species. He wanted to avoid stating how far he believed in Materialism because Materialism was the philosophy of atheists of his day. If he let on how much of a materialist he was, then people would naturally draw the conclusion that Darwin was an atheist, and reject his theory outright. Even if we assume that Darwin wasn't ultimately decided at this point on whether God existed or not, he was busy forging an account of evolution that fit comfortably into an atheistic framework.
Have you read these notebooks? You really must. When you read these private notebooks—which Darwin never meant for the public eye—you find that he's far, far more radical in his views (and holds them far earlier) than one would ever suspect from reading the Origin. He certainly appears to be a pure materialist, reducing everything about human nature to simple physical mechanisms. In short, his earliest approach to evolution fits snugly into the kind of materialism that atheists had been pushing since the inception of the Radical Enlightenment in the latter part of the 1600s.
That would make sense. Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, the great philosopher, physician, and poet who penned his own evolutionary treatise at the end of the 1700s. He was considered an atheist by many (I think he was, perhaps, a pantheist). Robert Darwin, Charles' father, was also an evolutionist. Robert Darwin was certainly an atheist, as was Erasmus Darwin, Charles' brother. So Charles grew up in the milieu of religious skepticism and atheism. I doubt you will trust my biographical account in The Darwin Myth, so you should read Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin: the Life of a Tormented Evolutionist as well as the first volume of Janet Browne's Charles Darwin.
You'll find that I disagree with them about when Darwin became an atheist—I don't accept their view that it was his daughter Anne's death in 1851 that finally pushed him into full atheism—but these fine and detailed biographies make Darwin's radical intellectual background crystal clear.
This background helps us connect three important points. First, Darwin didn't discover evolution; it was a kind of family Radical Enlightenment intellectual tradition.
Second, it is hardly surprising that Darwin worked assiduously between 1838 and 1858 to come up with a purely materialist account of evolution that fit into his radical intellectual background. It's the kind you would expect him to come up with, given that background. It was God-proof from the very beginning. It was there long before Anne's death. It didn't change after her death. It's the same view.
Third, after the publication of the Origin Darwin adamantly opposed any attempt, even by his best friends and fellow evolutionists, to allow that theism could play any integral part in an explanation of evolution. Thus, Darwin was incensed when Alfred Russel Wallace came out with criticisms of his theory because they appeared to let a divine foot in the door. Who is Wallace? The man credited by Darwin himself as the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
So, do we ever find a passage where Darwin says, "I insist that evolution be understood as atheistic"? I'll let you be the judge. Wallace argued publicly that "While admitting to the full extent the agency of the same great laws of organic development in the origin of the human race as in the origin of all organized beings, there yet seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those laws in definite directions and for special ends." Wallace concluded with an exhortation, "Let us not shut our eyes to the evidence that an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature."
Darwin scribbled in the margin of his copy, "No!!!" and wrote to Wallace saying, "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own & my child... . I differ grievously [sic] from you, and I am very sorry for it." What does that "No!!!" mean, if not "I insist that evolution be understood on purely atheistic terms."
It is true that Darwin said many things, even after the publication of the Origin, that would lead one to think that he was not unfriendly to allowing God a part in evolution. The first edition of the Origin ended with the famous flourish: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one... ." To smooth ruffled feathers, later editions read: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one... ."
But here's the rub. In his own private correspondence, Darwin revealed the addition as a sop, thrown out to appease critics rather than reveal his own views. As he 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."
And so, I commend you for reading Charles Darwin's books several times, but as with any man, there's more to Darwin than what he wrote for public consumption, and much to be gained by reading more widely about his life and times.
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