Abstract
Proponents of Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against Naturalism (EAAN) often quote Charles Darwin’s 3 July 1881 letter to William Graham to imply Darwin worried that his theory of evolution committed its adherents to some sort of global skepticism. This niggling epistemic worry has, therefore, been dubbed ‘Darwin’s Doubt’. But this gets Darwin wrong. After combing through Darwin’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, the author maintains that Darwin only worried that evolution might cause us to doubt (a) particularly abstruse metaphysical and theological beliefs, and (b) beliefs arrived at by ‘intuition’ rather than evidence-based reasoning. He did not worry that unguided evolution should lead us to doubt all of our beliefs in the way Plantinga and others have implied that it does.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Change history
20 August 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00458-8
Notes
See, for example, James Beilby’s (2002) volume, Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, which includes Plantinga’s exposition of the original argument, essays by eleven of the argument’s critics, and then a section in which Plantinga responds to each of them in turn.
For an in-depth summary and analysis of the Darwin/Gray correspondence, see Browne (2010).
The comparison of sincerely held religious belief to the primal instincts of monkeys and snakes was particularly distressing to Emma Darwin, Charles’s wife. In a letter to her son Francis, Emma writes: “There is one sentence in the Autobiography which I very much wish to omit, no doubt partly because your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me; but also because where this sentence comes in, it gives one a sort of shock—and would give an opening to say, however unjustly, that he considered all spiritual beliefs no higher than hereditary aversions or likings, such as the fear of monkeys towards snakes.” (Barlow 1958, 93n2).
The text of this letter was kindly made available to me by the Darwin Correspondence Project. As of yet, this letter hasn’t been published, digitally or in print, by the Darwin Correspondence Project. The Darwin Correspondence Project is under no circumstances responsible for any errors still remaining in the transcription.
“[C]an we doubt”, Darwin wrote in the Origin, “…that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind?” (Darwin 2008, p. 63). Clearly, the answer to this rhetorical question is meant to be a hard ‘no’.
This is not meant to be a dig at Plantinga’s argument. Indeed, I find it quite persuasive. Whether or not Darwin’s half-baked philosophical views lend credence to EAAN is immaterial. EAAN should be judged on its own merits, regardless of what Darwin might or might not have thought.
Funnily enough though, there has been a move in recent years to reformulate EAAN so that it calls into question only the reliability of human cognitive faculties in the production of abstruse, metaphysical beliefs—similar to ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ as Darwin himself understood it. For example, Tyler McNabb argued in a 2015 paper that Plantinga’s EAAN could be made impervious to certain types of objections by narrowing the scope of the argument so that it only targets metaphysical beliefs (McNabb 2015).
Later, in 2016, when Naturalism got its own Blackwell Companion, one of the contributors, Thomas M. Crisp, took a fairly similar tack to McNabb (Crisp 2016). Crisp’s approach starts by pointing out that abstruse metaphysical beliefs (e.g. string theory, relativity, Naturalism, etc.…) are produced by abstract, abductive reasoning. But, argues Crisp, given naturalism, this cognitive capacity was likely retained because it was adaptive for humans living in the Pleistocene era—an era in which beliefs about things like string theory, relativity, and naturalism couldn’t have been less relevant to human survival. Given this, we have reason to doubt that our cognitive faculties are reliable at forming true metaphysical beliefs, and we should therefore judge the probability of our cognitive faculties having evolved naturalistically to give us reliable metaphysical-belief-forming capacities as being inscrutable (meaning we don’t know what it is). In an on-camera interview with YouTube apologist Cameron Bertuzzi, McNabb admits to preferring Crisp’s approach over his own (Capturing Christianity 2017).
(My anonymous peer-reviewer pointed out to me, quite rightly, that another modern-day analogue to this kind of skepticism about abstruse metaphysical beliefs is Mysterianism—the position that human minds are cognitively unequipped to solve the hard problem of consciousness [see McGinn 1989]).
References
Barlow, N. (Ed.). (1958). The autobiography of Charles Darwin. Edited with appendix and notes by Nora Barlow. London: Collins.
Beilby, J. (Ed.). (2002). Naturalism defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bradley, B. (2020). Darwin’s psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Browne, J. (2010). Asa Gray and Charles Darwin: Corresponding naturalists. Harvard Papers in Botany, 15(2), 209–220.
Capturing Christianity. (2 July 2017). Tyler McNabb Interview (Part 2 of 3) Evolutionary argument against naturalism. Retrieved from 24 August 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DlsoZZ5q68.
Chidester, D. (2009). DARWIN’S DOGS: Animals, animism, and the problem of religion. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 92(1/2), 51–75.
Crisp, T. M. (2016). On naturalistic metaphysics. In K. J. Clark (Ed.), The blackwell companion to naturalism (pp. 61–74). Chichester: Wiley.
Darwin, C. (1906). The descent of man and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray.
Darwin, C. (2008). On the Origin of Species. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Darwin Correspondence Project. Letter no. 2814. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2814.xml. Accessed 24 August 2020.
Darwin Correspondence Project. (2020). Letter no. 13230. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-13230.xml. Accessed on 24 Aug 2020.
Darwin Correspondence Project. (2020). Letter no. 13298. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-13298.xml. Accessed 24 Aug 2020.
Darwin Correspondence Project. (2020). Letter no. 13299. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-13299.xml. Accessed on 24 Aug 2020.
Fales, E. (1996). Plantinga’s case against naturalistic epistemology. Philosophy of Science, 63(3), 432–451.
Graham, W. (1884). The Creed of Science: Religious, Moral, and Social (2nd ed.). London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.
Kraemer, E. R. (2002). Darwin’s doubts and the problem of animal pain. Between the Species, 13(2), 1–16.
McGinn, C. (1989). Can We Solve the Mind—Body Problem? Mind, 98(391), 349–366.
McNabb, T. D. (2015). Defeating naturalism: Defending and reformulating plantinga’s EAAN. Eleutheria, 4(1), 35–51.
Peters, R. A. (2010). Naturalism, Knowledge, and Nature: Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism in Relationalist Cosmological Perspective. PhD. Diss., Order No. 3430428, Boston University. https://search.proquest.com/docview/763639804?accountid=6724.
Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plantinga, A. (2002). Introduction. In J. Beilby (Ed.), Naturalism defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (pp. 1–12). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Turner, F. M. (1974). Between science and religion: The reaction to scientific naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
Ethics approval
My permission form for the use of DCP-LETT-13268 is hyperlinked here: Use of Project materials (002).doc.
Availability of data and material
DCP-LETT-13268 is currently unpublished. I was given access to, and permission to use, the text of this letter by the Darwin Correspondence Project.
Consent for participation
I consent to participation.
Consent for publication
I consent to the publication of this manuscript in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
The original online version of this article was revised: This article refers to the letter from Charles Darwin to William Graham 22 April, 1881. This should have been the letter from Charles Darwin to William Graham 3 July, 1881.
Amos Wollen: The author is not affiliated with any accredited higher education institution. He is currently a secondary school student at Bedales School (Hampshire, United Kingdom).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wollen, A. Darwin’s “horrid” doubt, in context. HPLS 43, 22 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00378-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00378-7