Justified True Belief

(●) The naturalist who found a natural cause for the fit between a creature and its world, and who lost his own faith slowly and said so plainly. + Before Charles Darwin, the strongest argument for God that an ordinary educated Englishman knew was an argument from watches. William Paley had asked his readers to imagine finding a watch on a heath: the wheels fitted to each other and to the purpose of telling time, so plainly the work of a maker that no one would seriously suggest otherwise. Then Paley pointed at the eye, the wing, the hinge of a shell, and said that all of it was better made than any watch. Darwin read that book as a Cambridge undergraduate and loved it. Thirty years later he published a mechanism that explained the same hinges and wings without a watchmaker, and he knew exactly what he had done to Paley, because he wrote it down. He matters to Christian readers for that reason, and for one more besides. The first is the theory itself. It is why the design argument had to be rebuilt, and rebuilding it is a live piece of work still. The second reason is quieter. Darwin was not a village atheist with a grudge. He had gone up to Cambridge meaning to be a country parson, he was buried in Westminster Abbey with the Abbey’s canons reading the service over him, and the record of how his belief drained away is one of the most honest accounts of unbelief anyone has left. He is also the source of a doubt that C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga would later turn back on him. He set that doubt down in one letter written nine months before he died, and then let the subject drop. There is one more fact worth holding on to, because it is the kind that makes a whole life look precarious. Darwin sat on his theory for twenty years before Alfred Russel Wallace, working alone in the Malay Archipelago, sent him the same idea in an essay and forced him into print. Everything he is famous for was very nearly somebody else’s.

(●) 1809 AD: Born in Shrewsbury into a rich medical family where quiet unbelief was already a habit. + Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in the market town of Shrewsbury, in the English county of Shropshire, the fifth of six children. His father, Robert Waring Darwin, was a physician of enormous size and enormous practice, a man his son found frightening and admired anyway. His mother, Susannah, was a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter whose china sat on half the good tables in England. Money was never a difficulty in his life, which is part of why he could spend eight years dissecting barnacles without a salary. Susannah died in July 1817, when Charles was eight. He said later that he could remember almost nothing of her, only the black velvet gown she was laid out in and a work-table in her room, and his sisters would not speak of her afterwards. The family’s religion was thin and polite. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a physician and poet, had written a sprawling medical work called Zoonomia that flirted with the idea that species change over time, and had no orthodox faith to speak of. His father was a freethinker who kept it to himself and sent his children to be baptized in the parish church all the same. Charles himself was taken as a small boy to a Unitarian chapel with his mother, a congregation of the kind that had set the doctrine of the Trinity aside, and then, after her death, to the Church of England school in Shrewsbury. So the house ran on two settings at once: very little believed at home, and everything correctly observed in public. Nothing in that prepared anyone for a boy out of such a family who would take the ministry seriously, and for a while that is exactly what he did.

(●) 1825 AD: He fled the operating theatre at Edinburgh, and his father redirected him to Cambridge and the parish ministry. + At sixteen he was sent to the University of Edinburgh to train as a physician like his father and his older brother. Surgery in 1826 was done on conscious patients, twenty years before anaesthetic reached an operating theatre, and Darwin ran out of that theatre twice and never went back. He filled the time instead with the things that actually held him. He learned taxidermy, the craft of preparing and mounting dead animals so they keep their shape, from John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guiana who had travelled in the South American forests and whom Darwin remembered warmly for the rest of his life, and he walked the shore at Leith collecting sea creatures with Robert Grant, a zoologist who was an open admirer of the French naturalist Lamarck and his theory that species transform over time. Darwin heard the idea young, from a man he respected, and was not persuaded. His father, watching two years of medical fees produce a son with a beetle collection, made a practical decision. A younger son with no profession would be an idle man, and an idle man was a disgrace; so Charles would take a general degree at Cambridge and become a clergyman of the Church of England. Darwin thought it over, decided he could say he believed the Thirty-Nine Articles, the doctrinal statement every Anglican clergyman had to affirm, and agreed. He was admitted to Christ’s College in October 1827 and came into residence the following January, once a tutor at home had patched up his rusty Greek. He sat the examination in January 1831 and came tenth out of a hundred and seventy-eight men taking the ordinary degree, and the degree itself was conferred at the end of April. Two things at Cambridge mattered more than the degree. The first was a friendship with John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany, whose Friday evenings and long walks made Darwin a working naturalist. The second was the reading. The set books for the examination included two by William Paley, the Evidences of Christianity and the Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, and Darwin went on to read the Natural Theology on his own. He was captivated, and forty-five years later he still said so plainly: the logic of the Evidences, and of the Natural Theology as well, gave him as much delight as did Euclid, whose geometry he had worked through with a tutor and never lost his taste for. That is high praise from a man who found most of the Cambridge curriculum a waste of his time. A country parsonage with a good garden and time for beetles looked, at twenty-two, like a very pleasant life.

(●) 1831 AD: He sailed round the world on a small survey ship, and came home with a question he could not put down. + Henslow passed on an unusual offer: a naval survey ship needed a gentleman naturalist, self-funded, to keep the captain company and collect specimens. HMS Beagle was ninety feet long, which is to say a little longer than a tennis court. She had been built as a ten-gun brig, a small two-masted warship, and was then made over for survey work, her guns cut to six and a third mast added to turn her into a barque, the steadier arrangement for years of slow work close to a coastline. Darwin was to sleep at the stern of her, in the poop cabin, in a hammock slung over the chart table. His father objected and then relented. The ship left Plymouth on 27 December 1831 and did not come back to England until 2 October 1836. Darwin was twenty-two when he sailed and twenty-seven when he landed, and he was seasick for most of five years. Two things happened on the voyage that mattered more than any single specimen. The first was a book. Henslow had given him the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which argued that the earth had been shaped over vast ages by causes still in operation, rain and frost and earthquake, rather than by a series of catastrophes. Darwin then felt an earthquake for himself, lying down to rest in a wood near Valdivia in Chile on 20 February 1835, and a fortnight later walked through the wrecked town of Concepción and over a coastline the same shock had lifted several feet in a morning. He found fossil seashells high in the Andes and understood what he was looking at. The second thing was distribution, and what struck him there was not that the animals were strange but where the strangeness fell. Down the coast of South America one species of ostrich-like rhea gave way to a closely related one, with no barrier between them. In the Galápagos, a scatter of volcanic islands he visited for five weeks in the autumn of 1835, the vice-governor mentioned in passing that he could tell which island a tortoise came from by its shell. Darwin had not been labelling his bird specimens by island, and had to reconstruct it later from the ship’s collections. The famous finches were sorted out for him back in London by the ornithologist John Gould in March 1837, and it was Gould’s verdict, that these were separate species and not varieties, that turned a suspicion into a research programme. There was a third thing, which had nothing to do with species. Darwin came home certain about slavery. He had seen it in Brazil, heard the screams from a house near Pernambuco, and lived opposite a woman in Rio who kept thumbscrews for her female slaves. He quarrelled with the Beagle’s captain Robert FitzRoy about it so violently that he was briefly turned out of the great cabin. The last chapter of the published Journal carries the sentence, "I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country."

(●) 1838 AD: A book on population handed him the mechanism, and he told a friend that admitting it felt like confessing a murder. + In July 1837 Darwin opened a small notebook, marked it B, and began writing down what would happen if species were not fixed. A famous page in it carries the words "I think" above a spindly sketch of a branching tree. He had the pattern. What he did not have was a cause. He found it in September 1838, reading, for amusement, Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus was an Anglican clergyman who argued that human numbers grow faster than the food supply, so that famine and disease are permanent features of the world. Darwin, who had spent the past year putting questions to stock breeders and gardeners about how a domestic strain gets shaped, saw the point turned outward. Every species produces far more young than can possibly live. A pair of birds raising four broods leaves a world with room for two survivors. The rest followed from there. If the ones that survive differ even slightly from the ones that do not, and if the difference is heritable, meaning that it passes down to the young rather than dying with the individual, then nature is doing what a breeder does, only without intending anything and with all the time in the world. His private life settled at the same time. Earlier that year he had written out the case for and against marriage on a scrap of paper, in two columns; the "Marry" column includes "Constant companion, (& friend in old age)" and "better than a dog anyhow," and it won. On 29 January 1839 he married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, who was a serious believing Christian and who wrote to him a few weeks after the wedding, gently, to say she feared that the habit in scientific work of believing nothing till it is proved might carry over into things that cannot be proved that way. They had ten children and an unusually happy marriage, and he kept her letter and wrote at the foot of it that when he was dead she should know how many times he had kissed and cried over it. In September 1842 they left London for Down House, a rambling old parsonage in the Kent village of Downe, and there he stayed for forty years. He wrote a thirty-five page pencil sketch of the theory in 1842 and expanded it to two hundred and thirty pages in 1844, sealed it with a letter instructing Emma to publish it if he died, and told almost no one. To the botanist Joseph Hooker, in January 1844, he wrote the line that has followed him ever since. He was almost convinced, he said, quite contrary to the opinion he had started out with, that species are not immutable, that they do not stay fixed as the kinds they are; and into the middle of that sentence, in the gap just before the word that carried it, he dropped a parenthesis to say that admitting this felt like confessing a murder. It was a joke, and it was not only a joke. He had a believing wife and a great many clerical friends, and he had worked out what the idea was going to cost him.

(●) 1851 AD: His ten-year-old daughter Annie died at Malvern, and by then his own belief was already quietly draining away. + Anne Elizabeth Darwin, called Annie, was the eldest daughter and the one her father could not stop watching. She was ten when she sickened, probably with tuberculosis, and Darwin took her to the water-cure doctor at Malvern, whose treatment of cold baths and wet sheets he had tried on his own long sickness and half believed in. She died there on 23 April 1851. He was in the room. A week later he sat down and wrote a private memorial of her, a few pages of small remembered things: the quarter of an hour she would spend arranging his hair, making it beautiful as she called it, and the stolen pinch of snuff she carried downstairs to him with her whole face lit up by the pleasure of giving pleasure. Its closing paragraph begins, "We have lost the joy of the Household, and the solace of our old age." Biographers have often made Annie’s death the hinge of his unbelief, and it may well have been. It should be said honestly that Darwin himself never wrote that. In the autobiography he composed for his family in 1876 he dates the change earlier and describes it as a slow leak rather than a break: reflection on the Old Testament between 1836 and 1839, then a growing doubt about miracles, and then, he says, disbelief crept over him at a very slow rate and was at last complete. The one thing he singles out as intolerable is not grief but a doctrine. He could not accept that unbelievers, and he names his father, his brother and nearly all his best friends, would be everlastingly punished, and he called that a damnable doctrine. Emma cut the passage from the version published in 1887; his granddaughter Nora Barlow restored it in 1958. Whatever the sequence was inside him, the outward habit is well attested by his children: on Sundays he would walk the family to the church door in Downe and then go on walking. He remained on friendly terms with the parish, subscribed to its funds, ran the village coal and clothing club for twenty years, and was treasurer of the local friendly society for more than thirty years. A friendly society was a village club into which working men paid a few pence a week against the sickness and the funeral that would otherwise ruin a family, and Darwin had helped the vicar set this one up. There is one more thing to record about these years, and it looks at first like avoidance while being, in fact, discipline. From 1846 to 1854 he set the species question aside and dissected barnacles, eight years and four volumes of them, until he was one of the world’s authorities on a single obscure group. He wanted the standing of a man who had done the patient work before he asked anyone to believe the large idea. The children, meanwhile, assumed every father did this, and one of them, visiting a friend’s house, is said to have asked where their father did his barnacles.

(●) 1858 AD: A letter from a rival in the Malay Archipelago forced him into print, and the booksellers took the whole first printing of the Origin of Species before publication day the following year. + On 18 June 1858 the post brought Darwin an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, a self-taught collector who was then in the Moluccas, financing his travels by selling beetles and bird skins. Wallace had worked out natural selection independently, in a few feverish days, and had sent it to Darwin of all people, asking him to pass it to Lyell if he thought it worth anything. Darwin, in genuine distress, wrote to Lyell that all his originality would be smashed. Then the week that followed turned into the worst of his life, and it had nothing to do with priority. Scarlet fever was in the village. His youngest son, Charles Waring, an infant of eighteen months, died of it on 28 June. While Darwin was burying a child, Lyell and Hooker arranged a compromise without him: on 1 July 1858 Wallace’s essay and extracts from Darwin’s unpublished 1844 essay were read together at the Linnean Society in London, the chief gathering of British naturalists, with a letter Darwin had written to Asa Gray in 1857 as proof of priority, which is to say as proof of who had the idea first. Neither author was present. The society’s president, Thomas Bell, reported the following May that the year just past had not been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize a department of science. Darwin then wrote fast, for him, and On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared on 24 November 1859. The publisher John Murray printed 1,250 copies, and at the trade sale two days before publication the booksellers subscribed for more than the whole run. Darwin called it an abstract, by which he meant a boiled-down summary of the far larger book he had been writing for years and now had to abandon, and he apologised in its opening pages for its lack of references. He had spent enough time among his opponents to write it as one long argument aimed at a reader who did not agree. He sent early copies to the men most likely to object, including his old geology teacher Adam Sedgwick, who replied that he had read it with more pain than pleasure. Wallace, for his part, never complained. He called the theory Darwinism in the title of his own book, and the friendship lasted until Darwin’s death.

(●) 1871 AD: He carried the theory into humanity itself, and the England he had scandalized buried him in Westminster Abbey. + The Origin had said almost nothing about human beings, one sentence about light being thrown on the origin of man, and everyone noticed the silence. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex ended it in 1871. Darwin argued that human beings descend from an ape-like ancestor, that the difference between our minds and an animal’s is one of degree rather than kind, and that conscience itself grew out of the social instincts of a creature that had to live in groups. He followed it in 1872 with The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, an odd and delightful book full of photographs of weeping babies and snarling dogs. His last decade was spent, of all things, on plants and worms. He tested how orchids trick insects into carrying their pollen, watched climbing plants feel for a support, fed bits of meat to sundews to prove that a plant was digesting them, and finally spent years measuring how much soil earthworms move. The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms came out in 1881 and outsold the Origin in its first year. He was ill for most of his adult life, with vomiting, headaches and eczema that no doctor then or since has confidently diagnosed, and he organised his days around it: a few hours of work in the morning, the same gravel path walked the same number of times, kicking a flint aside at each circuit to keep count. He died at Down House on 19 April 1882, aged seventy-three. The family meant to bury him in the churchyard at Downe. A petition from members of Parliament and the scientific societies changed that, and on 26 April he was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to John Herschel and a few feet from Isaac Newton. The following Sunday Harvey Goodwin, Bishop of Carlisle, preached in the Abbey that it would have been unfortunate if anything had given currency to the foolish notion, for which Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of nature and a belief in God. One story about that death has outlived nearly every true thing about it, and it deserves to be met head on. An evangelist calling herself Lady Hope claimed decades later to have visited the dying Darwin and found him repenting of evolution and reading Hebrews. His daughter Henrietta, who was there through his last days, denied it flatly in print in 1922: she was never there, and he never recanted anything.

What He Taught

(T1) Species are not fixed: every living thing descends, with modification, from earlier and different living things. + Take a family photograph album, the kind with four generations in it. Nobody in it is identical to anybody else, and yet the nose keeps reappearing. Run that forward not for four generations but for four million, with the branches separating and never rejoining, and you have Darwin’s picture of life: not a set of kinds each made to its own pattern, but one enormous family tree. The word for the older view is fixity of species, the belief that each kind of creature was made separately and stays what it is. Almost everyone in Darwin’s Britain held it, and it was not a foolish belief; species really do breed true, and the fossil record as it stood in 1859 was full of gaps. What convinced Darwin otherwise was not one knockdown fact but the way several unrelated bodies of evidence kept pointing in the same direction. For one thing, closely similar species turned up next door to one another rather than scattered at random, which is what you would expect if they had budded off a common stock and stayed near home. For another, the species of an island resembled the species of the nearest mainland rather than the species of similar islands elsewhere, so that a hot dry island off Africa was stocked with African creatures and not with the creatures of a hot dry island off South America. Then there were the embryos, so alike among distinct animals of one class that Agassiz, having forgotten to label one of his, could not afterwards say whether it was a mammal, a bird or a reptile. And creatures carried parts that did them no good at all, the useless wings of a flightless beetle, the buds of teeth in a calf that never cuts them. That last kind of evidence is worth pausing on, because it is where the argument bit hardest. A designer working from scratch has no reason to fit an unborn calf with teeth it will never use. An inherited past has every reason. Darwin called such things rudimentary organs, and he treated them the way a scholar of language treats a silent letter. The b in doubt does nothing whatever for the pronunciation. It is also the one thing in the word that tells you where the word came from. Useless for speaking, decisive for tracing descent, and that is exactly the work Darwin wanted a rudimentary organ to do.

(Q) "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed." + Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, first edition (1859), chapter XIV. Note how carefully it is hedged: "I should infer," "from analogy," "probably." Darwin is claiming a well-supported inference rather than a demonstration. Note also the last clause. He does not say where the first life came from, and in the second edition of 1860 he added that life had been breathed in "by the Creator," a phrase he later told Hooker he regretted, saying he had truckled to public opinion (T3). From the third edition of 1861 he cut that clause out of this sentence and softened what was left to "may be descended." The phrase itself he kept elsewhere: it stands in the closing line about the grandeur of this view of life in every edition from 1860 through the sixth of 1872.

(T2) Nature itself does the selecting: slight differences that help a creature survive are preserved, and they add up. + Darwin’s argument starts in a pigeon loft, because that is where his readers already believed him. English fanciers had taken the ordinary rock pigeon and, by choosing which birds to breed from, produced pouters and fantails and short-faced tumblers so different that a naturalist shown them cold would call them separate species. Nobody disputed this. The breeder does it by picking. Then comes the turn, and the turn is the whole of Darwin’s originality. Suppose nothing does the picking, and suppose the picking happens anyway. Three plain facts do all the work. Every species produces more offspring than can survive to breed. The offspring differ slightly from one another, and some of those differences are inherited. And a difference that even marginally helps its owner live long enough to breed will be a little more common in the next generation. That is the whole mechanism, and Darwin named it natural selection: nature standing in for the breeder’s hand, with no purpose, no foresight, and vastly more time. Two misreadings are worth heading off, and Darwin headed off both himself. The first is that natural selection is a force that pushes creatures toward complexity or toward us. It is not. It is a filter, and it has no direction beyond whatever happens to work here and now; a cave fish loses its eyes by exactly the same process. The second is that this is a theory about chance. The variations arrive without regard to what is needed, and in that sense they are chance, but the sorting is the reverse of chance. It is the least random thing in the world: what fails to work is removed, over and over, for as long as the earth has been habitable. He also said, in print, what would sink the whole thing. If any complex organ existed that could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, he wrote, his theory would absolutely break down. That is a real test, and it is the kind of sentence most authors keep out of their own books. Then, rather than leave the obvious candidate to a critic, he raised it himself. To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection seems, he freely confessed, absurd in the highest possible degree. Having said it, he set about dissolving it. The next several pages argue that the absurdity is apparent rather than real, walking through living eyes of every grade: an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and no other mechanism at all, then the many gradations to be found among crustaceans, then a cornea with a lens behind it, each grade useful to its owner and every one of them alive somewhere today. A reader who quotes the confession without the answer has quoted half a sentence.

(Q) "It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life." + Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, first edition (1859), chapter IV. Darwin was criticised for exactly this sentence, because "scrutinising," "rejecting" and "preserving" are the verbs of a person, and he had just spent a chapter insisting that no person is involved. He answered that he meant the phrase metaphorically, in the way a chemist speaks of the affinity of elements, and in later editions added that by nature he meant only the aggregate action of natural laws.

(T3) The design argument as Paley framed it fails, because the contrivances now have a natural cause. + Of everything Darwin taught, this is the claim a Christian reader has to reckon with, and it is worth stating in his own terms rather than in a caricature of them. Paley’s argument was an argument from contrivance, from a thing plainly rigged up to do a job. Open a bivalve, a mussel or an oyster, and look at the hinge: two shells meeting in a joint with a ligament that springs them open when the muscle relaxes. A hinge like that on a door proves a carpenter. Darwin’s reply is not that the hinge is unimpressive, and not that it arose by accident. It is that there is now a third possibility between design and accident, a slow natural process that produces exactly the appearance of contrivance and needs no contriver, and that once you have such a process in hand, the hinge stops being evidence of a maker. In the autobiography he wrote for his children he put it as flatly as it can be put, and then added a general principle that reaches well past the biology. There seems to be no more design, he said, in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection than there is in the course the wind blows. Wind goes where the pressures send it. Nobody aims it, and nobody needs to. Two limits should be marked, because Darwin marked them. First, he never claimed to have explained the origin of life itself, and said so repeatedly; the theory begins with a living thing that reproduces and varies. Second, he denied that his conclusion was atheism. The Origin opens with two epigraphs, the quotations printed at the front of a book to announce the spirit it is written in, and the first of them is from William Whewell, a Cambridge clergyman and philosopher of science. Its point is that God works in the material world through general laws rather than by separate interventions in each case. Darwin chose it, and he put it where every reader would meet it before the first page of argument. What he had displaced was a particular argument for God, not, in his own estimate, God. Whether the displacement is as complete as Darwin thought is a question Christian thinkers began answering within months of the book appearing, in more than one way, and have never stopped answering since.

(Q) "The old argument of 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." + Source: Charles Darwin, Autobiography, in the unexpurgated edition of Nora Barlow (1958). Darwin wrote the autobiography in 1876 for his children and grandchildren, with no intention of publishing it. The passages on religion, this one among them, were cut from the version his son Francis published in 1887 at Emma’s request, and restored by his granddaughter Nora Barlow in 1958. The same page records how much he had once loved the book he is answering.

(T4) The suffering built into nature counts against a good and all-powerful designer. + There is a family of wasps called the Ichneumonidae. The female finds a caterpillar, lays her eggs inside it, and the larvae eat the caterpillar from within, taking the fat and the gut in an order that keeps the host alive and feeding as long as possible. It is a common insect, not an exotic horror; there are thousands of species, and they were in every English hedgerow Darwin walked past. For Darwin this was not a debating point. It was the thing he could not get past, and his difficulty was more exact than a general complaint that nature is wasteful. On Paley’s account every contrivance is evidence of the Maker’s intention, and the argument only carries if that rule is applied everywhere, to the wing and the hinge and whatever else turns up. Apply it everywhere, though, and the wasp’s egg-laying tube, which is as exquisitely fitted to its work as any eye, is evidence of an intention too. The design argument, pressed consistently, seemed to him to make God the author of what happens inside the caterpillar. Natural selection offered a way out, and the relief he felt at it was genuine: on his view the cruelty is not designed at all, and never was, it is simply what a filter with no mind behind it will throw up sooner or later. He was writing this, it is worth remembering, to a Christian. Asa Gray was a Harvard botanist, a Presbyterian, Darwin’s most effective defender in America, and the man who spent years arguing with him that variation might itself be guided. Darwin would not have it, and the two of them kept the argument going, and the friendship, for the rest of his life. In the same letter he admits how far out of his depth he feels: the whole subject, he says, is too profound for the human intellect, and a dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.

(Q) "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." + Source: Letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860 (Darwin Correspondence Project, DCP-LETT-2814). The transcription keeps Darwin’s own ampersand and spelling. A few lines earlier in the same letter: "I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world."

(T5) Conscience and reason came by descent too, and Darwin thought conscience the noblest thing about us. + The Descent of Man is where the theory stops being about barnacles. Darwin’s account of morality runs in four steps, and he lays them out plainly enough that they can be followed at a kitchen table. First, a social animal has instincts that draw it to its fellows, as a dog is miserable alone. Second, as intelligence grows, the animal becomes able to remember what it did yesterday and to weigh a passing appetite against a lasting instinct, which is where regret becomes possible. Third, language lets the group say out loud what it expects. Fourth, habit makes the expectation second nature, so that the child who was taught it no longer feels taught. Out of those four ingredients, he says, comes the sense of duty. He had no interest whatever in belittling the result: of all the differences between man and the lower animals, he wrote, the moral sense is by far the most important. What he denied was that any of it comes from outside the process. On his account "you ought not" is the voice of an evolved social instinct that has learned to speak, and he was honest enough to follow the thought where it went. A species reared under very different conditions, he suggested, hive-bees for instance, would have arrived at duties we would find monstrous, and would have felt them as duties just as we feel ours. That is his account of conscience. His account of reason is where he left a hole in his own floor, and he left it in a letter written nine months before his death, in what may be the most consequential paragraph he ever set down for the argument between belief and unbelief. The worry is easy to state and hard to shake. If our convictions are the output of a brain shaped by survival, and survival does not care in the least whether a belief is true so long as it keeps the creature alive, then what warrant have we for trusting the convictions? Darwin raised that question against his own theory, in his own hand, and could not answer it. Christian philosophers have been picking it up ever since.

(Q) "I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important." + Source: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, first edition (1871), chapter IV. Darwin goes on in the same sentence to quote Sir James Mackintosh, that the moral sense "has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action," and then adds in his own words that it is summed up in "that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance." Immanuel Kant’s apostrophe to duty follows a few lines later, quoted with plain admiration. Then Darwin spends the chapter explaining the imperious word as a product of the social instincts.

(Q) "But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" + Source: Letter to William Graham, 3 July 1881 (Darwin Correspondence Project, DCP-LETT-13230). Graham was a philosopher who had sent Darwin his book The Creed of Science, arguing that the laws of nature imply a mind behind them. Darwin replied that the argument had given him more pleasure than any other book in a long time, agreed that he could not look at the universe as the result of blind chance, and then, in the next breath, undercut his own agreement with the horrid doubt. He left it sitting there and changed the subject.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Christians divided at once, and the division did not run along the lines a modern reader expects. + The picture most people carry is of a united church against a lone scientist. The actual response was a three-way argument among Christians that started within months and has never entirely stopped. Some welcomed it. Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who arranged the American edition, was a believing Presbyterian who wrote three essays for the Atlantic Monthly in 1860 arguing that the new theory left natural theology standing. Natural theology, in that sense, is not a book of Paley’s but a whole line of work: the attempt to reason from the world as we find it up to the God who made it, without appealing to Scripture at any point in the argument. Darwin thought so well of those essays that he paid out of his own pocket to have them reprinted in England as a pamphlet, Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology, and pressed copies on his friends. Charles Kingsley, an Anglican clergyman, wrote to Darwin on 18 November 1859, after reading an advance copy, that it was just as noble a conception of God to believe he had made primal forms able to develop themselves as to believe he had to intervene afresh to fill the gaps he had left. Frederick Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, preached the same idea at Oxford on 1 July 1860, before the university and the British Association meeting in the town. Some fought it. Charles Hodge of Princeton, the most formidable systematic theologian in America, published What is Darwinism? in 1874 and answered his own title in three words: it is atheism. His reasoning was precise and is often misreported: he was careful to say that this did not mean Darwin and those who followed him were atheists, but that a theory which excludes design from nature is atheistic in its logic. The most famous fight of the whole controversy belonged to that side as well, though what actually happened at it is far less clear than the legend. At the Oxford meeting of 1860 Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, crossed swords with Thomas Henry Huxley, and the encounter has passed into folklore as the moment religion lost. The contemporary reports are thin and contradictory, both sides claimed victory at the time, and the famous exchange about the bishop’s grandmother comes from recollections written down decades afterwards. And some, at Princeton of all places, simply absorbed it. B. B. Warfield, who took Hodge’s old chair at Princeton in 1887 and was the great defender of biblical inerrancy, the position that Scripture does not err in what it affirms, held that evolution could be received as an account of the method of God’s providence, and lectured to that effect for years. The lines were never as tidy as either side’s slogans.

(†) The design argument did not die with Paley; it moved to ground Darwin’s mechanism does not reach. + Paley’s version was an argument from adaptation: this creature fits its way of life so well that a mind must have fitted it. Darwin gave an alternative account of the fitting, and after 1859 that particular argument could no longer be run in that particular way. What happened next is that Christian philosophers stopped arguing about the hinge of the shell and started asking about the conditions the whole process presupposes. - Why is there anything to evolve? Natural selection is a rule for what happens to living things that already reproduce and vary. It says nothing at all about why there is a universe, or matter, or laws for matter to obey. The cosmological arguments, which reason from the existence of the world to a cause of it, run entirely upstream of Darwin and are untouched by him. - Why do the laws permit it? Twentieth-century physics found that the constants and the starting conditions of the universe fall in an extraordinarily narrow band, one of the few settings that permits chemistry at all, and the fine-tuning argument works on that band. Natural selection cannot speak to it, for the plain reason that natural selection has no work to do until there are self-reproducing things for it to sort. - Why is there life to start with? Darwin was candid that the origin of the first reproducing thing lay outside his theory, and he said so more than once. It is still an unsolved problem. - Why can we trust our own minds? This is the one Darwin handed over himself. C. S. Lewis built the argument from reason in Miracles on the point that if our reasoning is fully explained by non-rational causes, we have no ground for thinking it tracks truth. Alvin Plantinga later put the same doubt into the language of probability as the evolutionary argument against naturalism, naturalism being the view that the physical world is all there is. Selection rewards useful behaviour rather than true belief, and the two can come apart, so a naturalist who accepts evolution has a reason to doubt his own faculties and therefore a reason to doubt naturalism itself. Both arguments are, in substance, the horrid doubt of the letter to Graham, taken seriously by people who thought Darwin was right to raise it. None of that makes Darwin’s biology false, and Christians who use these arguments are not offering them as replacements for it. The point is narrower and worth keeping straight: Darwin explained the fit between creatures and their world, which is a real explanation of a real thing, and he did not thereby explain the world.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the image of God, the authority of "ought", and a page in the Descent he never took back. + Darwin was a careful and humane man, and the ledger ought to be kept accurately. There are four places where what he taught and what Scripture teaches genuinely part company. - What a human being is. Darwin concluded that the difference between our minds and an animal’s is one of degree and not of kind, and that man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. Scripture agrees about the lowly material and disagrees about the status: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27) On the biblical account a human being is a creature of dust who has been addressed by God and made answerable, and that standing does not come from the dust (Psalm 139:13-14). - Where "ought" gets its authority. Darwin traced the moral sense to inherited social instincts, and he drew the consequence himself: a species reared like hive-bees would have had different duties and would have felt them just as strongly. If that is the whole story, then conscience is reporting what our ancestors needed rather than what is actually owed, and a man who ignores it is out of step with his ancestors rather than in the wrong. Scripture treats the same inner voice as evidence of a law we did not write and cannot repeal (Romans 2:14-15). - What to do with the suffering. The wasp and the caterpillar are a real difficulty, and no honest Christian pretends otherwise (T4). But Scripture does not present a world that is currently as it should be. It says the creation was subjected to futility and groans, and it promises an end to that in the resurrection rather than a denial of it now (Romans 8:20-22). Darwin took the suffering as a fact about God’s character; the Christian answer takes it as a fact about a world under judgment and awaiting rescue, and points at a cross rather than at a hedgerow. - A page in the Descent. In chapter five Darwin observed that civilised societies keep alive, through asylums and poor laws and doctors and vaccination, those whom nature would have removed. The weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind, he wrote, and no breeder of animals would doubt that this is highly injurious to the race of man. Then come the sentences that are nearly always left off when the passage is quoted. We could not check our sympathy even at the urging of hard reason, he said, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature, and we must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind. In chapter six he made a prediction, offered as anthropology rather than as policy, that the civilised races would within centuries exterminate and replace the savage races. • That is Darwin’s own record, in his own book, and it is fair to say what it is: a scale on which some human lives count for less than others. • It is fair also to say the rest of it. He had built his moral reputation on the opposite conviction. He hated slavery with a passion that nearly cost him his place on the ship, and he put in print that he thanked God he would never see a slave country again. • Scripture allows no scale at all. God made from one man every nation of mankind (Acts 17:26), and the neighbour who counts is simply the one in front of you, which is the whole point of the story Jesus told when a lawyer asked him to narrow the word down (Luke 10:29-37). He is worth reading closely for the same reason he is worth answering. Darwin did not sneer, did not overclaim, published the objections to his own theory in his own book, and said honestly that he did not know. Christians who argue with him should try to deserve the comparison.