Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  It was all a far cry from Gilbert White’s country garden at Selborne, or, come to that, the life of Darwin’s cousin Fox and the hundreds of others of naturalist-clergymen whose ranks Darwin was preparing to join. As he read Humboldt, his mind was filled with wider horizons, more exotic shores. There were three ways, in 1830, to excel as an English man of science. One was to read medicine, and to use the study of anatomy as a way into the study of other sciences. The other was Sedgwick’s way, Henslow’s way, to obtain a Cambridge or Oxford Fellowship and hope to be appointed to one of the very few chairs of botany, geology or mineralogy. The third was to be rich enough to become, like Joseph Banks, an independent traveller and collector. Darwin was unlikely to have done so well in the Cambridge examinations as to be elected to a Fellowship. The third course, that of a rich, independent man of science, was his only option. Meanwhile, in obedience to his father’s wishes, he prepared for the humbler option of becoming a clergyman.

  The final part of his Cambridge exams, in May 1831, would require him to display knowledge of divinity, in particular of the work of a former fellow of Christ’s called William Paley. The set book was Paley’s Evidences of Christianity. It remains to this day a powerful piece of work. Paley, who lived from 1743 to 1805, saw during those years the greatest assaults on Christian belief which that religion had endured since the times of the Roman persecutions of the third century. Mention has already been made of the French Revolution, whose fervent attempts to root out Christianity were viewed with appalled astonishment by most Britons, though not all. Old Dr Erasmus Darwin was among those who openly welcomed the Revolution, and who undoubtedly sympathized, if not with the murderous methods of Robespierre, at least with his desire to worship Reason rather than the – as they would see it – irrational faith of revealed Christianity.

  Moreover, it was not possible to ignore the fact that the infidels of Revolutionary France drew much of their inspiration from British philosophy. Voltaire, whose bust and whose portrait medallions were among the proudest productions of old Josiah Wedgwood’s manufactory at Etruria, openly acknowledged his debts to John Locke and the English empiricists. And in Paley’s lifetime lived the most sceptical British philosopher of them all, David Hume. The most devastating of his analyses was to be found in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which would have been dynamite had he published it in his lifetime. This posthumous work, which appeared in 1776, had probably been completed in its first version by 1755, but he revised it at least twice, in 1761 and shortly before his death in 1776.23 Although notionally, in his early work as a philosopher, Hume appeared to go along with the argument from design – that is, that the existence of the laws of nature and the intricacy of nature support the idea of a lawgiver and a Creator – this opinion did not survive. Huxley, in his book on Hume for the English Men of Letters series in 1887, wrote that ‘if we turn from the Natural History of Religion to the Treatise, the Enquiry, and the Dialogues, the story of what happened to the ass laden with salt, who took to the water, irresistibly suggests itself. Hume’s theism, such as it is, dissolves away in the dialectic river, until nothing is left but the verbal sack in which it was contained.’24 Clearly, by 1887, this was Huxley’s position, and Darwin, who had first seriously studied science in Edinburgh, the city of David Hume, with men, particularly Grant, who had soaked themselves in Hume’s philosophy, had begun to imbibe the Humeian scepticism much earlier than is sometimes supposed.

  Hume had two arguments with which he countered ‘natural theology’, or anyway Christianity’s version of it. One is that when Christians, from the earliest times to the present, attempt to impress the incredulous, it is with appeals not to the created order itself, but to departures from it: in short, to miracles. This argument, it might be thought, is a bit of a smokescreen. Although the argument from design leads you nowhere – or not very far – when you are considering the veracity of miracle-stories, this does not in itself invalidate the believers’ conviction that there is a natural order, from which it pleases God to depart.

  Much more undermining to faith was Hume’s attack on the argument from design itself. The Dialogues were, according to Leslie Stephen – the clergyman-father of Virginia Woolf, who lost his faith so wholeheartedly – ‘the first work of our literature to subject the argument from design to a passionless and searching criticism’.25 Hume does this partly by pointing out how often the argument from design resorts to metaphor, to anthropomorphic projection, to ‘a great analogy to the productions of art’.26 The basic analogy is between the cause or causes of order in the universe and human intelligence. But this is all it is – an analogy, says Hume.27 For our purposes, the most destructive and perhaps the most ‘Darwinian’ moment of the Dialogues bears the mark of having been composed at quite a late stage.

  Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.28

  It is impossible to believe that this paragraph, and the arguments implicit throughout the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, made no impression upon Darwin, the strength of the point being that there is no need for the analogy with human intelligence or art. Nature is blind. Its processes, and the great vivifying principle which animates it, do not need to be given names, though it is the task of science to understand those processes. Supposing it were possible for science to demonstrate just such a ‘blind’ process as Hume posits . . .

  It was as a counterblast to such scepticism that Paley wrote his own apologetics – the most celebrated two books of which are View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) and, his last work, Natural Theology (1802). In Evidences, the book on which Darwin was examined for his Cambridge degree, Paley has Hume in his sights all the time, particularly Hume’s attacks on miracles. Paley’s argument is from evidence, and, for him, the strongest argument for the truth of his religion is that there is overwhelming historical evidence that, from the very earliest times – certainly from the time of Nero in the AD 60s – those who claimed to be witnesses of the events described in the New Testament were prepared to undergo torture and death rather than deny what they had experienced. Paley, in other words, had an empirical defence for the likelihood of Christianity being true based upon actual historical truths.

  The only way in which one could refute Paley’s Evidences – since Juvenal, Pliny and many other witnesses attest to the Christians’ willingness to die for their claim to be witnesses to Christ – is to say that they were liars, or innocently deluded. Darwin did not have to read Paley’s Natural Theology for his examination, but he did so anyway, and he records in his Autobiography that the logic of Paley’s Evidences gave him as much delight as did Euclid. So too, he adds, did his Natural Theology.

  Whereas Hume saw the various species of nature as ‘hostile and destructive to each other’, Paley wondered in awestruck delight at the sheer variety of nature, and at its multiplicity of forms, its thousands of species of flies, its hundreds of different types of butterfly. As for the destructive and predatory aspects of animal life, ‘What one nature rejects another delights in. Food which is nauseous to one tribe of animals becomes, by that very property which makes it nauseous, an alluring dainty to another tribe. Carrion is a treat to dogs, ravens, vultures, fish. The exhalations of corrupted substances attract flies by crowds. Maggots revel in putrefaction.’29

  Paley matters, because he was almost the only theologian (apart from Pearson on the Creed) whom Darwin ever read. The opening chapter of Paley’s Natural Theology remained in Darwin’s head for the rest of his life. This
is the celebrated analogy:

  In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, it had lain there forever; nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place . . .30

  Paley’s geology, incidentally, is here shown to be up to date: he casually points out that it would be absurd to suppose that the stone had been there ‘forever’. As an arresting analogy, the discovery of the watch reminds any reader not merely of nature’s intricacy, but of its orderliness. All language is metaphor, a fact of which Darwin sometimes, in his writing, appeared heedless; but scientists, regardless of their religious opinions, find it useful to apply the word ‘law’ to natural phenomena. This is because, as with Paley’s analogy with the watch, nature does follow what we call laws. Whether you are studying thermodynamics, astronomy, quantum physics or chemistry, you will not progress far until you have mastered and learnt the laws which are observable in all these branches of knowledge.

  Darwin in his later career would claim that ‘the theory of Evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God’,31 though in his posthumously published Autobiography he would be somewhat more candid, admitting, ‘I had gradually come by this time [January 1839, thirty-three years before the final edition of The Origin of Species], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world . . . was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.’32

  Plainly, this is empirically the case, since there are millions of people in the world who believe in both evolution and God. With his distinctive way of arguing, however, it is plain that Darwin, anyway as an old man, believed that his own particular theory of how evolution worked – the theory of the evolution of species by natural selection – removed the need for believing in God.

  Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.33

  There is a certain amount of muddle here – not least in the suggestion that wind speeds and directions occur randomly, rather than being attributable to causes. If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true, then this would, for the theist, be the manifestation of how the ‘first great cause’ set evolving life in motion. For the atheist, there would be many other reasons for unbelief – the unfairness of things, the suffering of the innocent, the unlikelihood of life after death, and so forth – to be going on with, quite apart from adding the Darwinian natural selection to the list. What Darwin’s linking of Paley to his theory reveals is that he saw his Origin of Species idea as theological, or anti-theological: an answer, not to other scientists, but to the theology he had read at Cambridge. The more ardent neo-Darwinians of our own times retain this line, as demonstrated by Richard Dawkins’s wonderfully lucid exposition of these ideas in his 1979 book The Blind Watchmaker.

  Paley’s Natural Theology did not end with its first paragraph. One can see why the young Darwin appreciated the book, since it revels in the plenitude and variety of plants, insects, birds and beasts. Natural theology, however, that is to say, the deduction of the probability that there is a God from a study of the laws of nature, is for Paley the Christian theologian only the beginning of the true faith, which is the acceptance of a personal God, and the acceptance of His revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus. ‘Under this stupendous Being we live. Our happiness, our existence, is in his hands . . . The hinges of the wings of an earwig, and the joints of its antennae, are as highly wrought, as if the Creator had nothing else to finish . . .’34

  But, of course, He did have other things to finish, whereas the Darwinian ‘answer’ to Paley stops with a consideration of the Just So story – how the earwig got its wings. For Paley, this is only the beginning. ‘The works of nature want only to be contemplated,’ he wrote. But such a contemplation can only go so far. It was for this reason that William Blake, for example, in 1788 wrote that ‘there is no natural religion’.35 W. H. Auden, in his Commonplace Book, copied some words of Ferdinand Ebner with which Paley would have agreed: ‘To talk about God except in the context of prayer, is to take His name in vain.’36 Darwin was to be, for many people, during and after his lifetime, the embodiment of the essentially Victorian myth that science had somehow disproved, or invalidated, religion. In fact, of course, rather than disproving religion, science had become their religion, but neither as a young man nor as an old one would Darwin have agreed with that statement or have understood it. One learns, however, to tread carefully when he makes religious statements. Which came first? His decision that scientific facts made belief in a personal God impossible? Or his lack of belief in a personal God, and his inward unhappiness, making Hume’s bleak view of the universe more plausible to him than that of Paley, Henslow or Sedgwick?

  Darwin mastered enough of Paley’s Evidences, of Euclid and of his smattering of classical texts to sit his ‘Mays’, his final exams at Cambridge, four days sitting papers, with two papers each day lasting two hours each. In fact, having come up to Cambridge late, he sat his ‘Mays’ not in May but in January 1831. He did not put in for honours, and he came tenth on the list of what he called ‘hoi polloi’. It was a creditable result, but it scarcely put him in the running for a college Fellowship. The unpalatable prospect of a curacy beckoned, a possibly unsuitable role for one who ‘did not think much about the existence of a personal God’.37

  It was not until this late stage of his Cambridge career that he actually met the Professor of Geology, Sedgwick, an encounter which, like so much that was momentous in Darwin’s story, was engineered by Henslow. It was Henslow who proposed that Darwin should branch out into geology, perhaps aware that this was the area of science in which the great advances were being made. In 1830, Charles Lyell (1797–1875) had published the first volume of his Principles of Geology. Lyell, a Scotsman from a naval family, had studied geology at Oxford under the formidable William Buckland. He had absorbed the ideas of Hutton, that, far from being of recent origin, planet earth was very old, perhaps almost infinitely old. He had read Lamarck. Henslow, despite his remark to Darwin about being grieved if a single one of the Thirty-Nine Articles were altered, was aware of the changes in the air, and he could see what a groundbreaking work Lyell’s was. After Lyell, it was no longer going to be possible to do science in the old way. And botany and entomology and zoology and all the subjects which so obviously interested Darwin were going to be affected by the knowledge which Lyell and his fellow geologists imparted.

  Whereas Henslow was gentle and fatherly to Darwin, Adam Sedgwick, an extrovert Yorkshireman (1785–1873), was an amusing companion for the introvert Charles Darwin. Any scientist would have been interested to stay in the Darwin family residence, whatever their views of Zoonomia (and Sedgwick’s views of Erasmus Darwin Senior would have been robust). Moreover, Shrewsbury was en route to Wales, and Sedgwick had planned a summer of geological exploration in Anglesey, Caernarvonshire, Merioneth and Cardiganshire. Incidentally, that Sedgwick asked Darwin to accompany him on this trip gives the lie to Darwin’s implication that, until he sailed with the Beagle, he had scarcely studied geology. Sedgwick would not have wanted to be accompanied by an ignoramus, and it was obvious from Darwin’s conversation that while in Edinburgh he had learnt much from Grant, Jameson and others.