The Evolving God

Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion

J. David Pleins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623568405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In focusing on the story of Darwin's religious doubts, scholars too often overlook Darwin's positive contribution to the study of religion. J. David Pleins traces Darwin's journey in five steps. He begins with Darwin's global voyage, where his encounter with religious and cultural diversity transformed his understanding of religion. Surprisingly, Darwin wrestles with serious theological questions even as he uncovers the evolutionary layers of religion from savage roots. Next, we follow Darwin as his doubts about traditional biblical religion take root, affecting his career choice and marriage to Emma Wedgwood. Pleins then examines Darwin's secret notebooks as he searches for a materialist theory of religion. Again, other surprises loom as Darwin's reading of Comte's three stages of religion's development actually predate his reading of Malthus. Pleins explores how Darwin applied his discovery to the realm of ethics by formulating an evolutionary view of the "Golden Rule" in his Descent of Man. Finally, he considers Darwin's later reflections on the religion question, as he wrestled with whether his views led to atheism, agnosticism, or a new kind of theism. The Evolving God concludes by looking at some of the current religious debates surrounding Darwin and suggests the need for a deeper appreciation for Darwin as a religious thinker. Though he grew skeptical of traditional Christian dogma, Darwin made key discoveries concerning the role and function of religion as a natural evolutionary phenomenon.

1

Unsettling Encounters: First Steps Toward an Evolutionary View of Religion

There was nothing terribly remarkable about Charles Darwin’s religious upbringing or theological training that would lead us to think that he would one day radically alter our way of looking at religion. While his mother’s dissenting Unitarianism and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s religious skepticism lay in the background, his sisters stoked a kind of familial pietism to counteract any freethinking tendencies. During his medical studies at Edinburgh, his sister Caroline urged him to read the Bible “not only because you think it wrong not to read it, but with the wish of learning there what is necessary to feel & do to go to heaven after you die.”¹ Charles reassured her about his Bible reading, though his tactful response to her counsel may not have entirely won her over: “I have tried to follow your advice about the Bible, what part of the Bible do you like best? I like the Gospels. Do you know which of them is generally reckoned the best?”² These are hardly the sentiments of a committed student of the Bible.

When Charles soured on a career in medicine, his father decided to make a Church minister out of his son to prevent his becoming “an idle sporting man.”³ The young Darwin “liked the thought of being a country clergyman,” so he prepared for his time at Cambridge University by thumbing Pearson’s An Exposition of the Creed, a work dating from 1659 which expounded creationist literalism.⁴ He also read and carefully noted Sumner’s The Evidence of Christianity (1824) with its certitudes about Jesus’s messianic role.⁵ He even delayed his fall entry at Cambridge to brush up on his knowledge of classical Greek with a private tutor.⁶ With Homer and the Greek Testament firmly under his belt, Darwin thought he was ready to pursue training for a career in the Church. He says of this early phase, “as I did not then in the least doubt the strict & literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.”⁷

To be sure, the sciences were gaining the upper hand in his mind as his time at Cambridge closed. His passion for beetle collecting was joined by an interest in geology sparked by hikes in Wales with his Cambridge mentor Adam Sedgwick.⁸ Nonetheless, when he left England to travel around the world, the religious writings he had with him included a durable Authorized Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Turner’s Sacred History of the World. He also took along some notions about Natural Theology derived from the Rev William Paley—the theological view that evidences for God’s creative power and character can be found in nature.⁹ During his voyage, he firmly intended to read the Greek New Testament on Sundays and he once invoked the Bible as a proof text in a moral argument against his fellow officers who responded with hearty laughter despite their own orthodox beliefs.¹⁰ He also carefully parsed the Book of Matthew using his German New Testament, if only to improve his language skills.¹¹

While we would be wrong to depict Darwin as a rabid fundamentalist, his initial forays into religion and theology were conservative and cautious. Needless to say, Darwin’s theological formation and sisters’ influences left him thoroughly unprepared to make sense of the religious diversity he would encounter on his voyage. His experiences with Catholicism, primitive tribes, and the English missions would prompt new ways to think about religion. Indeed, one of the long unappreciated aspects of Darwin’s view of religion is how soon he came to believe that religion is a material phenomenon with an evolutionary history. In this chapter, we explore the unsettling cultural entanglements that put Darwin on the path toward an evolutionary understanding of religion.

A sort of Christian

When Darwin told some “very pretty señoritas” in Chile that he had visited one of their churches “out of mere curiosity,” they were quite “horrified.”¹² Darwin had made his way south of Santiago to a little ranch house. He had managed to cross the rough waters of the Maypu river, stumbling down roads “made of bundles of sticks placed close together . . . full of holes” and braving bridges that “oscillated rather fearfully despite the weight of a man leading his horse.”¹³ Having survived the dangerous journey, he spent the night at a local farm house only to find he had entered the equally treacherous territory of religious belief. The señoritas chided Darwin, “Why do you not become a Christian—for our religion is certain?”¹⁴ Darwin responded as best he could. “I assured them,” he says, “I was a sort of Christian.”¹⁵ By which he meant that he was one type of Christian. But these women were convinced that Darwin could not possibly be worshipping the same God because Anglican clergy married, unlike Catholic priests.¹⁶ This encounter is just one of many during his voyage when Darwin was forced to reflect on religion as belief and practice. Such a vignette is one in a series of well-known and oft-quoted moments in which Darwin appears to be acknowledging his religious indifference. Indeed, much ink has been spilled assessing Darwin’s so-called “loss of faith.” At times, the focus is on identifying the precise turning point when Darwin’s faith gave way, whether due to the influence of evolutionary skeptics at Edinburgh, qualms about the Bible during his voyage, the death of his daughter Annie, or the negative reaction to the publication of the Origin of Species.¹⁷ When, so the question goes, did Darwin lose his faith? As if to amalgamate all these moments, the comprehensive biography by Desmond and Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, presents Darwin’s entire life as an unfortunate series of faith fracturing events.¹⁸ More recently, Spencer’s God and Darwin argues that this “loss of faith” paradigm is key to unlocking Darwin’s life trajectory. As useful as this “loss of faith” construct may be, the very image serves to eclipse what may be the more profound insight about Darwin’s life, namely that in his mind there was a growing awareness that evolution was not just about physical forms but had religious and moral trajectories. Darwin was stumbling toward the view that religion also moved through stages. His so-called “loss of faith” ran in tandem with the exciting realization that religion had evolved. What many have failed to realize is that Darwin’s voyage aboard H. M. S. Beagle ignited this intellectual search into religion’s origin and development.

After strong winds posed annoying delays, H. M. S. Beagle, captained by the 26-year-old Robert FitzRoy, set sail on 27 December 1831. Crossing the Atlantic, they arrived at Bahia (San Salvador) on 28 February 1832. The spring and early summer of 1832 were spent in and around Rio de Janeiro, while the rest of the year took them to Montevideo. An excursion far south in the land of the “savages” of Tierra del Fuego in mid-December of 1832 led to a year and a half mapping survey up and down the Brazilian and Argentinean coasts, including a second trip to Tierra del Fuego in February-March of 1834. During this period, there were also side jaunts to Santa Cruz, Patagonia, and the Falkland Islands. As the ship made its coastal surveys or dropped anchor in various ports, Darwin spent much of his time exploring the landscape, collecting specimens, and observing the region’s cultures. Leaving the eastern shores of South America behind, the crew headed through the Straits of Magellan in May, 1834 to Valparaiso in Chile. During the first half of 1835, the Beagle explored the Chiloe and Chonos archipelagos. Darwin ventured into the mountainous interior of Chile—the Cordillera—and went on into Peru. His historic trip to the Galápagos Islands took place between 15 September and 20 October 1835, where tortoises and finches caught his eye. The fall was rounded out with travels to Tahiti and New Zealand with their very different tribal inhabitants. It would be nearly a year before their return to England, passing through Sydney, the Keeling Islands, Tasmania, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, and back to Bahia for one last glimpse of South America. His journey ended on 2 October 1836 with their layover at the docks of Falmouth in southwestern England. Darwin’s geological and theological studies hardly prepared him for the world he encountered. Yet it was not only rocks and fossils that captured his attention, religion also became a focus of his observations.

While many authors look to Darwin’s voyage diary and subsequent Journal of Researches (issued in two editions in 1839 and 1845) to document his naturalist ventures, very little has been done to plumb these writings to explore Darwin’s many insights regarding the possibility that religion evolves. The treatment of this theme in the scholarly literature is quite uneven. To take just a few representative examples, William E. Phipps’ Darwin’s Religious Odyssey touches on some of the theological aspects of Darwin’s voyage in a chapter on “The Christian Voyager” without tying the threads together as the core of an evolutionary view of religion. Frank Burch Brown’s The Evolution of Darwin’s Religious Views, an admittedly brief monograph, overlooks almost entirely the impact of the voyage on the evolution of Darwin’s religious views. A standard biography such as Browne’s Voyaging draws on Darwin’s Diary and Journal of Researches for documentation of his travels but does not spell out the development of Darwin’s religious thinking found in these works, although she tantalizingly notes in passing, “His study of the religious customs of wild tribes . . . and his experience of travelling from country to country . . . played a much larger part in generating a feeling of theological relativity.”¹⁹ For the most part, however, Browne focuses on FitzRoy’s doubts about the Bible and Darwin’s misgivings about a future clerical career.²⁰ Again, Desmond and Moore’s magisterial Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, despite the obvious interest in Darwin’s religious struggles, does not consider this aspect of Darwin’s publication on the voyage.²¹ What is consistently overlooked is that everywhere during his voyage Darwin encounters clues about religion as a human phenomenon and religion’s probable evolution. He makes it a point to document these facts. As he began to think in cultural and even evolutionary terms about religion, Darwin was freed to critique Christian belief, reexamining major theological beliefs and practices. His Journal of Researches (also known as the Voyage of the Beagle) and the related trip Diary can, however, be read with profit as charting the essential moments that sparked Darwin’s realization that religion evolves and that monotheism is best understood as a high-point in the human religious venture.²² Darwin went so far as to comment on key theological problems, including the problem of evil and the question of “just war.” The construct of a “loss of faith,” I argue, needs to be replaced with the view that Darwin’s religious development goes from insight to insight regarding religion’s function and evolutionary character. Let us turn now to consider six key themes that arise in his Journal of Researches: primitive religion; Catholicism and heresy; natural disasters and the problem of evil; just war theory; Christian missions; and the sublime.

Hideous yells: Darwin on “primitive” religion

Certainly one of the most bizarre aspects of the Beagle’s mission was Capt. Robert FitzRoy’s compulsion to return several Fuegians who had been seized on his previous voyage (1826 to 1830). Three hostages were snatched in retaliation for the theft of one of the expedition’s boats.²³ The hostages were joined by another child that FitzRoy had purchased in exchange for a pearl button. The four were given curious names. They were the “violently passionate” York Minster (Elleparu), age 30, who was named after a prominent rock outcropping in Tierra del Fuego; the “nice, modest, reserved” young girl Fuegia Basket (Yokcushlu); and the “merry” teenage Jemmy Button (Orundellico), who, though he was “vain” about his clothing, was the “universal favorite” of the crew.²⁴ The fourth—Boat Memory—died of small pox while in England. During their stay in England, the Fuegians were settled for a time at the boarding school of the Rev William Wilson at Walthamstow, northeast of London, where they were instructed in “English, and the plainer truths of Christianity, as the first object.”²⁵ A London phrenologist confirmed for FitzRoy that at least two of the Fuegian captives—Fuegia Basket and Jemmy Button—had shown “strong feelings for a Supreme Being.”²⁶ Having been civilized and Christianized, FitzRoy aimed to reinstall his captives in Tierra del Fuego in ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Permissions
• Preface: Charles Darwin and the Evolution of Religion
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Unsettling Encounters: First Steps Toward an Evolutionary View of Religion
• 2 A Disposition to Doubt: Darwin as Skeptical Seeker
• 3 Did Religion Evolve?: The Search for a Theory
• 4 The Golden Rule: An Evolutionary Vision of Religion and Morality
• 5 A Certain Sympathy: Darwin and the Creed of Science
• Conclusion: Reflecting on Darwin Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright