Dear Sir John Herschel

I am pleased with your note on my book on species, though apparently you go but a little way with me. The point which you raise on intelligent Design has perplexed me beyond measure; & has been ably discussed by Prof. Asa Gray, with whom I have had much correspondence on the subject. I am in a complete jumble on the point. One cannot look at this Universe with all living productions & man without believing that all has been intelligently designed; yet when I look to each individual organism, I can see no evidence of this.

You will think me very conceited when I say I feel quite easy about the ultimate success of my views, (with much error, as yet unseen by me, to be no doubt eliminated); & I feel this confidence, because I find so many young & middle-aged truly good workers in different branches, either partially or wholly accepting my views, because they find that they can thus group & understand many scattered facts. Forgive me boasting, if you can; I do so because I shd. value your partial acquiescence in my views, more than that of almost any other human being.

Believe me with much respect Yours, sincerely & obliged

Charles Darwin

Why do champions of evolution like Richard Dawkins and others hold so firmly to the idea that God couldn’t possibly have created life? It all goes back to Charles Darwin. It's widely believed that through his discovery of evolution by natural selection, Darwin demonstrated the truth of naturalism. Naturalism is the philosophy that says that everything has a natural explanation---no supernatural explanations are necessary or permitted. Darwin is also widely believed to have lost his own Christian faith on account of evolution.

Many contemporary atheists proclaim themselves followers of Darwin in this sense. Author and Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer writes that he abandoned Christianity when he learned about evolution. Shermer writes that finally he could see how there could be design--or the appearance of design--without a designer. Consequently Shermer became a naturalist, rejecting all supernatural explanations. Following the same path, biologist Richard Dawkins writes that it was Darwin who finally made it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist."

In reality Darwin’s theory in no way demonstrated the validity of naturalism. Nor did his atheism have much to do with his scientific discoveries. First of all Darwin was never a very devout Christian. He was raised as a nominal Anglican. It says something about Anglicanism in Britain that a lukewarm Christian like Darwin actually considered becoming a clergyman. Darwin turned against Christianity, however, for two reasons.

First, we learn from Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s book Darwin that several of his children either died or has chronic illnesses. This was probably hereditary, as Darwin himself suffered for most of his life from one ailment or the other. When Darwin's daughter Annie died at a young age, however, Darwin was inconsolable. Usually a man of the stiff upper lip, Darwin could not stop himself from weeping even in public. Darwin blamed God for Annie's untimely death. This was in 1851, several years before Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859.

After Annie's death, Darwin began to reflect morbidly on mortality, and during his process he recalled that his own famous grandfather Erasmus Darwin, as well as several other family members and friends, were unbelievers. Since Darwin saw them as good and respectable people, he angrily fulminated against the doctrine of eternal damnation, asking what kind of a God would consign good people to hell just because they refused to accept Christianity? The thought of all these people in hell filled Darwin with such revulsion that he completely jettisoned Christianity.

At the same time Darwin recognized that his theory of evolution was quite compatible with Christianity. When the American biologist Asa Gray wrote Darwin to say that his theory of evolution demonstrated how God created species, Darwin congratulated Gray for being the first one to see the point. Gray later wrote an essay “Natural Selection Not Inconsistent With Natural Theology” which Darwin praised and distributed in England. In London, the preacher-poet Charles Kingsley argued for the compatibility with evolution and Christianity, and Darwin encouraged his efforts.

Over the years, however, Darwin’s personal embitterment with God hardened and this influenced his attitude toward evolution. Gradually Darwin became obstinately resistant to any suggestion that supernatural intervention could be involved, even at the outset. Without a shred of evidence, Darwin speculated that life may have originated in a “warm little pond,” a prospect that scientists today dismiss as implausible in the extreme. When Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution, proposed to Darwin that natural selection could not account for human rationality or morality, Darwin insisted that it must, and that on no account would he permit a divine foot in the door.

In truth evolution says nothing about who or what created the universe. Evolution doesn't even say anything about how life got started. Evolution merely describes how one life form gave rise to another. Yet Darwin’s personal hostility to God somehow inaugurated a new fanaticism among his disciples. Today writers like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett argue that evolution is a kind of master key that unlocks the universe. These writers illegitimately invoke the scientific theory of evolution to prove the metaphysical doctrine of naturalism. We are still living with the tragic consequences of Darwin’s atheist moment.

Naturalist and spiritualist, Alfred Russell Wallace, made discoveries equal to Darwin's but is only now getting his due.

"G. K. Chesterton once remarked that Wallace was one of the world’s great men because he led a revolution and then a counter-revolution. Having done as much as anyone to overturn traditional religious assumptions, Wallace proceeded to horrify his fellow-evolutionists by concluding that natural selection could not in itself explain the uniqueness of man. He never renounced his evolutionary theory, but instead made it the cornerstone of a theistic explanation of the universe. No wonder a later scientific generation, newly professionalized, ignored him in favor of his more austere and single-minded colleagues. But the twin impulses in Wallace’s work make him compelling and oddly contemporary. He combines both halves of the debate over the meaning of evolution, coolly articulating the materialist mechanisms by which the simplest organisms morphed into human beings while arguing that our existence offers evidence of divine agency. If his name is relatively unknown, his spirit is still making itself felt nearly a hundred and fifty years after his seminal discovery.

The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/02/12/070212crat_atlarge_rosen

Darwin solved the problem of teleology, a problem that had occupied the best minds for the 2000 years since Aristotle.

Ernst Mayr

What would convince Darwin of design? Botanist Asa Gray asked Charlie himself. Here’s his ‘nosy’ response.

In September, Darwin responded to a question from Gray and informed him of his correspondence with Lyell on the subject of Design. In a lengthy passage, he wrote:

Your question of what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, & I was convinced, from others seeing him, that I was not mad, I shd believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life & mind was in an unknown way a function
of other imponderable forces, I shd be convinced .... I have lately been corresponding with Lyell, who, I think, adopts your idea of the stream of variation having been led or designed. I have asked him (& he says he will hereafter reflect & answer me) whether he believes that the shape of my nose was designed. If he does, I have nothing more to say. If not, seeing what Fanciers have done by selecting individual differences in the nasal bones of Pigeons, I must think that it is illogical to suppose that the variations, which Nat. Selection preserves for the good of any being, have been designed. But I know that I am in the same sort of muddle (as I have said before) as all the world seems to be in with respect to free will, yet with every supposed to have been foreseen or preordained.

http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/2001/PSCF9-01Miles.html

By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.

Douglas Futuyma

Darwin’s reading material of choice on the Beagle voyage: Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. The volume suggests that grand geologic change comes from a gradual accumulation of small changes.

Darwin applied this theory to biology, confessing, “I really think my books come half out of Lyell’s brain.” The two friends did disagree on one key point. Lyell was a providentialist. He believed God steered variations in a definite direction instead of the passionless impersonality of Darwin’s ‘deity’-- natural selection. Lyell endorsed guided selection, as many theists do today, believing there simply has not been enough time for natural selection alone to form today’s complex life forms.

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