(Atheist – a person who does not believe in the existence of God or gods. Agnostic – a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.)20
To Frederick A. McDermott, barrister, Darwin wrote in November 1880:
I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.21
The only possible conclusion to be reached from this statement by Darwin, is that he finds the notion of the Holy Bible as a source of revelation – defined as a divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world22 – completely unacceptable. Therefore, despite admitting that his ‘judgement often fluctuates’, and despite declaring himself to be an agnostic, he was indisputably, at any rate as far as the Christian religion is concerned, an atheist, although this did not preclude him from believing in ‘a God’ (as already mentioned) – though he was not specific about whosoever this deity might be.
For Darwin retirement was not an option and he continued with his scientific researches almost to the very end, as this letter, printed in the correspondence column of The Academy (a weekly review of literature and general topics) reveals. Its author was one William Watson of Ormskirk, Lancashire and the subject, surprise, surprise, was natural history!
It has been suggested to me that a letter which I received from Mr Darwin on the day before he died, though not important in itself derives from the accident of being among the latest things he wrote, an interest such as entitles it to publicity. Written by return of post in answer to the mere casual communication of a stranger, it has, at all events, the interest of being one of the many illustrations of that almost proverbial courtesy which characterized the greatest, since Newton, of ‘those who know’. I had taken the liberty of pointing out to him what seemed to me, for certain reasons, a false conclusion arrived at in a paragraph of ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’, where Darwin certainly seems to imply that the familiar canine practice of throwing up earth by backward ejaculations of the hind-feet is a ‘purposeless remnant’ of a habit, on the part of the dog’s wilder progenitors, of ‘burying superfluous food’. Mr Darwin’s reply was as follows:
Dear Sir,
You have misunderstood my meaning; but the mistake was a very natural one, and your criticism good. I ought not to have interpolated the sentence about the burying of food; and if inserted at all, it ought to have been at end of [the] paragraph, or in a separate one. The case was instanced solely to illustrate a long-continued habit, for, as far as I have seen, well-fed domestic dogs do not revisit their buried treasures. A dog when burying food makes a hole (as far as I have seen) with his front legs alone, and thrusts in the earth with his nose, so that there is no resemblance to the supposed excrement-covering movements,
Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, CH. DARWIN.23
Darwin died at Down House on 19 April 1882 at the age of seventy-three. It had been his wish that his funeral should take place at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Downe, and that he should be buried in the churchyard, alongside his children who had predeceased him and his brother Erasmus, who had died the year before. However, Sir John Lubbock ‘drew up the memorial [a statement of facts, especially as the basis of a petition]24 to the Dean of Westminster’, requesting that Darwin be buried in Westminster Abbey.25
Said his friend and colleague A. R. Wallace, ‘I was honoured by an invitation to his funeral in Westminster Abbey, as one of the pall-bearers ….’26 Other pall bearers included Huxley and Lubbock.
The funeral sermon was conducted by the Reverend Frederic W. Farrer, Master of Harrow School, whom Darwin had once proposed for fellowship of the Royal Society in recognition of his work on philology. For Darwin, the irony of his being buried in Westminster Abbey, the mighty monument to Anglicanism, would not have been lost on him!
A memorial service was subsequently held at South Place (Unitarian) Chapel, Finsbury, London in Darwin’s honour, and conducted by the Reverend Moncure Conway.27 Conway was later to say, proudly, that among the ‘veteran Freethinkers and Radicals at whose graves I officiated were Sir Charles Lyell [who had died in 1875] and Charles Darwin’.28
Said the Darwins’ daughter Henrietta Litchfield:
My mother spent the summer of 1882 at Down, but she felt that the winters in the great empty house would be lonely, and she therefore decided to spend part of each year at Cambridge, where two of her sons, George and Horace, were living, and where her son Francis could better go on with his botanical work.
She therefore bought ‘The Grove’, a pleasant house on the Huntingdon Road, a mile from great St Mary’s, and there she spent the winters till her death.29
Henrietta also wrote:
The Memorial Statue of my father was unveiled on the 9th June, 1885 at the Natural History Museum. My mother did not attend the ceremony; she wrote, ‘I should like very much to be present but I should prefer avoiding all greetings and acquaintances.’30
Emma died on 2 October 1896. She is buried at Down.
NOTES
1. Emma to Fanny Allen, 21 January 1873, in Litchfield, Henrietta, op. cit., p.211.
2. Matthew and Harrison, op. cit.
3. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
4. Conway, Centenary History of the South Place Society, p.19.
5. Ibid, p.55.
6. Ibid, p.58.
7. Ibid, p.58.
8. ‘The Story of the South Place Ethical Society’ by Norman Bacrac. Based on a talk given to the Farnham Humanists, 24 February 2008.
9. Conway, Moncure Daniel, Centenary History of the South Place Society, p.53.
10. Ibid, p.53
11. Ibid, p.79.
12. Ibid, p.83.
13. Ibid, p.86.
14. Darwin to Nicolaas D. Doedes, 2 April 1873, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 8837.
15. Darwin to Lyell, 3 September, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 9621.
16. Darwin to Grant, 11 March 1878, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 11416.
17. Darwin to Ridley, 28 November 1878, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 11766.
18. Emma to Mengden, 8 April 1879, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 11981.
19. Darwin to Fordyce, 7 May 1879, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 12041.
20. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
21. Darwin to McDermott, 24 November 1880, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter 12851.
22. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
23. The Academy, 10 June 1882, No.527, p.417.
24. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
25. Howarth and Howarth A History of Darwin s Parish,
26. Wallace, op. cit., pp.237–8.
27. Conway, op. cit., p.49.
28. Ibid, p.49
29. Litchfield, op. cit., p.260.
30. Ibid, p.270.
Epilogue
Darwin, the reticent atheist
In the early years of his disillusionment with religion, and Anglicanism in particular, Darwin was relatively reticent about what he described, euphemistically, as his ‘agnosticism’ – which was, in reality, atheism. This behaviour on his part was undoubtedly primarily in order to protect the feelings of his wife Emma. However, as time went by, he became more and more outspoken.
Dawkins and the invidious nature of religious indoctrination
As already mentioned, Darwin had grave reservations about religious indoctrination, especially of children. Professor Dawkins is of the same opinion.
I don’t think it’s harmless. There is something insidious about training children to believe things for which there is no evidence.1
Had Darwin been alive today …
Darwin, in his bachelor days, had composed a list of the pros and cons of marriage. What if he had composed a similar list of the pros and cons of living in the twenty-first century
? Perhaps it would have read something like this.
a. Sources of satisfaction, wonder and delight
Darwin would have marvelled at how:
i. Mankind has benefited from modern medicines and vaccines.
ii. Modern agricultural methods are helping to feed the world.
iii. Space exploration is now a reality and, with it, the prospect of discovering how the universe has evolved.
iv. Fossils of previously unknown species continue to be discovered and are taking their place on the evolutionary tree of life.
v. It has recently been demonstrated that, as he and Lamarck always suspected, the environment does have an influence on the way variations of species come about, and the mechanism by which this occurs has now been demonstrated, though this branch of science is as yet in its infancy. Furthermore, it has been shown that the environment can have an influence, not only on the morphology of an organism, but also, and in particular in the case of man, on his behaviour, mood, belief systems, etc., and also on those of his descendants.
vi. The truth of his great theory of evolution has been universally accepted by the scientific community, and fully corroborated by the science of genetics.
b. Sources of disquiet
On the other hand, he would have been alarmed that:
i. The Reverend Thomas Malthus’s dire warnings about the perils of overpopulation, delivered more than two centuries ago, are still being ignored; meanwhile, the population of the world continues to increase virtually unchecked. Today, Malthus’s views are echoed by naturalist and broadcaster Sir David F. Attenborough, who declared:
The population of the world is now growing by nearly 80 million a year. One and a half million a week. A quarter of a million a day. Ten thousand an hour. In this country it is projected to grow by 10 million in the next 22 years. That is equivalent to ten more Birminghams.
All these people, in this country and worldwide, rich or poor, need and deserve food, water, energy and space. Will they be able to get it? I don’t know. I hope so. But the government’s chief scientist and the last president of the Royal Society have both referred to the approaching ‘perfect storm’ of population growth, climate change and peak oil production, leading inexorably to more and more insecurity in the supply of food, water and energy.
Why this strange silence? I meet no one who privately disagrees that population growth is a problem. No one – except flat-Earthers – can deny that the planet is finite. We can all see it – in that beautiful picture of our Earth taken by the Apollo mission. So why does hardly anyone say so publicly? There seems to be some bizarre taboo around the subject.
It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet human population will quite definitely stop at some point. And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births – in a word, by contraception. That is the humane way, the powerful option that allows all of us to deal with the problem, if we collectively choose to do so. The alternative is an increased death rate – the way that all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That, translated into human terms, means famine or disease or war – over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space.
The sooner we stabilize our numbers, the sooner we stop running up the ‘down’ escalator. Stop population increase – stop the escalator – and we have some chance of reaching the top; that is to say, a decent life for all.2
ii. Human activity is causing the extinction of species and a consequent reduction in biodiversity.
iii. Again (allegedly) as a result of human activity, global warming is now a serious threat to the planet and all who reside thereon.
iv. Some have even spoken of another ‘Great Extinction’, in which man, this time, will be the principal victim.
v. There still exist people who, for reasons already discussed, choose to deny the truth of Darwin’s great theory.
Professor Steve Jones and Origin
In the view of geneticist Steve Jones, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection provides the basic grammar without which it is impossible to understand the science of biology.
You can’t learn a language without understanding at least something about its grammar, and you couldn’t be a biologist before 1859 (when Origin was first published) because none of the facts seemed to fit together. But suddenly The Origin of Species made it all make sense.
Darwin’s magnum opus, said Jones, ‘really was and still is the central book of the science of biology’.3
Professor Dawkins and the solace of Darwinism
Said Professor Dawkins
There is a sort of happiness, there is a sort of bliss, in understanding the elegance with which the world is put together, and Darwinian natural selection is a supremely elegant idea. It really does make everything fall into place and make sense, and I find great consolation, great happiness, in that level of understanding.4
Some may indeed find these concepts consoling. For others, however, this impersonal explanation of life will not be enough. For them, it is impossible to accept that there is no ultimate purpose in the existence of human beings, or of other animals, plants, the Earth, or the Universe, and they will therefore cling on, come what may, to their gods, whether benign and seemingly reasonable, or bloodthirsty, intolerant, or irrational, and they will do so however uncorroborated the evidence for the existence of these gods may be. Another powerful influence is the comfort factor. How much more consoling it is to believe that there is a god who cares about us, especially in adverse circumstances.
Down House
Here we may imagine Darwin in his prime, pottering about in the hot house amongst his precious plant specimens; rummaging in the undergrowth collecting beetles to swell his collection, or light-heartedly pushing his children on their garden swing, as his beloved terrier snaps playfully at his heels.
Darwin’s former home remained in the Darwin family until 1927. It subsequently became a girls’ school. English Heritage is now its proprietor and it is open to the public.
Darwin resides in splendour
On 23 May 2008 it was announced that the 2.2 tonne statue of Charles Darwin was to be replaced in its original position – at the top of a flight of stairs in the Central Hall of London’s Natural History Museum.
The Darwin statue was created by Sir Joseph Boehm and was unveiled on 9 June 1885. In 1927 it was moved to make way for an Indian elephant specimen [how it would have amused Darwin, to learn this fact!], and then moved again in 1970 to the North Hall.
This was in preparation for ‘Darwin200’, a nationwide programme of events in 2008/9, celebrating Darwin’s ideas, impact and influence, and scheduled to take place at about the time of the bicentenary of his birth.
Moving the Darwin statue took 8 people about 26 hours. The team had to first move a 1-tonne statue of [Professor] Richard Owen, the Museum’s founder, to its new position up on the balcony.5
Darwin’s upstaging of his former opponent Owen in this way, would undoubtedly have afforded the former a quiet satisfaction whilst enraging the latter! So now Darwin sits in pride of place in Britain’s great monument to science and learning.
What became of HMS Beagle?
In 1837, under the command of Commander John C. Wickham, she set off to survey the coast of Australia. Two years later Wickham named a harbour in northern Australia, ‘Port Darwin’, in honour of Beagle’s former shipmate. Here, a settlement developed into what became the town of Palmerston, which was likewise renamed Darwin, in 1911.
In 1845 Beagle was used by HM Customs and Excise as a watch vessel, and moored in the river Roach to control smuggling on the coast of Essex. In 1870, at the end of her working life, she was allegedly broken up, or possibly sunk deliberately in the Roach. How sad that it was not possible to restore her to her former glory and put her on display as a national treasure.
Darwin’s legacy
In addition to demonstrating how all life on Earth,
mankind included, and both the living and the extinct, has evolved, Darwin’s legacy was to encourage each and every one of us to think for ourselves: a process which is not only extremely liberating, but which can also be a source of enormous joy and fulfilment, as he himself so amply demonstrated.
NOTES
1. ‘Beautiful Minds’, Episode 3, Series 2. BBC4, 2012.
2. Attenborough, ‘This Heaving Planet’, New Statesman, 27 April 2011.
3. ‘Darwin’s Struggle: the Evolution of The Origin of Species’, BBC Productions, Bristol, 2009.
4. Dawkins presents ‘The Genius of Charles Darwin’, ‘The Enemies of Reason’, and ‘Root of all Evil?’, op. cit.
5. www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2008/may/darwins-statue-on-the-move13846.html
Appendix I
HMS Beagle’s ship’s company, at the time of embarkation for South of her embarkation for South America, 27 December 1831. Included amongst the of 1831. Included amongst the seventy-four persons aboard were the following:
Robert FitzRoy
Commander and surveyor
John Clements Wickham
Lieutenant
Bartholomew James Sulivan
Lieutenant
Edward Main Chaffers
Master
Robert Mac-Cormick
Surgeon
George Rowlett
Purser
Alexander Derbishire
Mate
Peter Benson Stewart
Mate
John Lort Stokes
Mate and Assistant Surveyor
Benjamin Bynoe
Charles Darwin Page 36
