Abstract
Allen Debus has striven to demonstrate that religion, in the early modern period, was not a foreign agent that bent science away from its true course, nor even an extrinsic force that benignly pushed thinkers more quickly along a path they would have otherwise trod. Allen has tried to show that religion was enmeshed within the interstices of scientific thought, that only from our contemporary perspective can we pick out those strands that unrolled toward modern science and those that folded around the Bible. Under this conception it would be foolish to sift out religion from our understanding of early modern science. Among recent historians, some would concede Allen’s historiographic axiom, but they would undoubtedly confine its use to the time when Paracelsus commanded attention. I think, however, that Allen’s perspective can be useful in trying to understand even that science which was believed to replace religion during the last half of the nineteenth century, namely Darwin’s theory of evolution.
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Notes
Andrew Dickson White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 1: 70.
This version of the confrontation between Wilberforce and Huxley is given in “Grandmother’s Tale, ” Macmillan’s Magazine 78 (1898): 425-435. See the discussion of various accounts of the interchange in Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 549-551.
Edward Manning, quoted in White, History of the Warfare, 1: 71.
Anonymous, “Dr. Draper and Evolution, ” Catholic World 26 (1878): 774-789, quotation from p. 782.
Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 51. See also Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, pp. 404-407.
Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Science History Publications, 1978), p. 276.
James Moore has charted the accommodation of Protestant religious thinkers to Darwinian theory in his continuously interesting The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Jon Roberts focuses a like concern on Protestant America in his Darwinism and the Divine in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). And Frederick Gregory charts comparable relationships in his Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
I discuss these above mentioned evolutionary “spiritualists” in Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, chaps. 8-10.
Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 87.
Darwin, Autobiography, p. 85.
Charles Darwin, Notebook B, MS 84, in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844, ed. Paul Barrett et al. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 192.
Charles Darwin, Notebook D, MS 36-37, in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, p. 343.
When he lived in London, in the years just after his return from his voyage, Darwin saw Babbage frequently, as he noted in his Autobiography: “I used to call pretty often on Babbage and regularly attended his famous evening parties. He was worth listening to, but he was a disappointed and discontented man; and his expression was often or generally morose” (p. 108).
Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, A Fragment, 2nd ed. (London: Murray, 1838), p. 46.
Charles Darwin, Essay of 1842, in The Foundations of the Origin of Species, ed. Francis Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), p. 51. See also similar remarks made in Notebook D, MS 36-37, Notebooks of Charles Darwin, p. 343.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: Murray, 1859), pp. 488–489. See also the comprehensive and instructive discussion of Darwin’s conception of natural law and its relation to God’s design in Neal Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 54-55.
Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22 May 1860), in Francis Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1891), 2: 105.
See Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, pp. 199-200.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1871), 1: 153.
Darwin, Essay of 1842, in Foundations of the Origin of Species, p. 6. Bracketed phrase was erased in original manuscript.
Darwin, Essay of 1844, in Foundation of the Origin of Species, pp. 86-87.
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 84.
Darwin, Essay of 1842, in Foundations of the Origin of Species, p. 52. Bracketed phrse was erased in original manuscript.
As an historian who adopts an evolutionary-epistemological method, I would not wish to suggest that any aspect of Darwin’s theory had only one cause. Darwin’s ideas evolved within a complex conceptual environment, which had many intellectual pressures being applied simultaneously though with varying force. Another obvious source of Darwin’s gradualism was his dependence on Lyellian uniformitarian theory. Lyell maintained that great geological changes could be explained by appealing to causes that operated insensibly and continually over vast stretches of time. Darwin was a Lyellian geologist and, I believe, brought the same principles to explain great zoological changes. But geology and zoology different in a significant way. Animal morphology exhibited, while rock morphology did not, minute and exquisite features of design. To explain the former, some agents of creative intelligence had to be implicitly assumed, which believe Darwin did in the case of natural selection.
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 41.
Ibid., p. 102. See also similar claims on pp. 105, 107, and 125.
See Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection, ed. R. C. Stauffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 225.
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 201.
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., p. 83.
Ibid., p. 79.
The discussion in this section is based on my Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, pp. 71-242.
Michael Ghiselin, “Darwin and Evolutionary Psychology, ” Science 179 (1973): 964–968; quotation on p. 967. See also Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, p. 218.
William Paley, Moral and Political Philosophy, in The Works of William Paley (Philadelphia: Woodward, n.d.), p. 40.
Charles Darwin, Notebook M, MS 1 32e, in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, p. 552.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1871), 1: 166.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 4, 11. 172-201.
Darwin, Origin of Species, pp. 489-490.
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Richards, R.J. (1997). The Theological Foundations of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In: Theerman, P.H., Parshall, K.H. (eds) Experiencing Nature. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5810-7_3
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