Conclusion
If we arrange in chronological order the various statements Darwin made about God, creation, design, plan, law, and so forth, that I have discussed, there emerges a picture of a consistent development in Darwin's religious views from the orthodoxy of his youth to the agnosticism of his later years. Numerous sources attest that at the beginning of the Beagle voyage Darwin was more or less orthodox in religion and science alike.78 After he became a transmutationist early in 1837, he concluded that the doctrine of secondary causes must be extented even to the history of life and that after the first forms of life were created, there was no further need for divine intervention, except where man was concerned. Man's body, he thought, was produced by the process of transmutation, but he believed for a time that man's soul was “superadded.” By mid-1838 he had become convinced that nothing, after the creation of life, was due to miracles. God works only through laws, which are capable of producing “every effect of evey kind which surrounds us.” The existence of man, the idea of God in man's mind, and the harmony of the whole system were in his eyes prearranged goals of deterministic laws imposed by God. Such a conception excludes the miracles on which Christianity depends; but it is not possible to say whether Darwin's loss of Christian faith, which occurred at about this same time, preceded and made possible his “materialism” or was rather caused or hastened by it.79 In the weeks after his reading of Malthus, Darwin's belief in a plan of creation gave way to the belief that God created matter and life and designed their laws, leaving the details, however, to the workings of chance. This remained his view until the 1860s.
There is no exact parallel between this development of Darwin's religious views and the development of his ideas on evolution, but there is a general correspondence. When he believed in a plan of creation, Darwin's theory of transmutation did not depend on struggle or the selection of chance variations. Adaptation was, for him, an automatic response to environmental chance. From late 1838 to 1859 he believed in designed laws and chance, and this belief, too, has its parallel in his theory. The element of chance in natural selection meant that there could be no detailed plan,in which even man's idea of God would be a necessary outcome of nature's laws (man himself is not a necessary outcome of the working of natural selection).80 But Darwin still believed nature was programmed to achieve certain general ends. We might say that he believed in a general, though not a special, teleology. Natural selection was for him a law to maximize utility, creating useful organs, retaining vestiges for future use. For many years it was a law designed to produce organisms perfectly adapted to their environments. Only later did Darwin come to doubt even this sort of design in nature.81 One way of describing the development of Darwin's evolutionary thought is to say that it shows a gradual abandoning of his “theistic” assumptions, so that by the late 1860s his theory was informed to a slighter extent by notions of purpose and design than it was in 1838 or 1844 or 1859.
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References
Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 92–94. Following Darwin's usage, I will throughout employ the word theist to describe his pre-1859 views, meaning by it: belief in a “First Cause” that has established the laws of nature. In the same way, I will describe Darwin's view of nature in this period as “theistic.”
The most important recent and forthcoming additions are Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), which includes Barrett's transcriptions of Darwin's M and N notebooks and his “Old and Useless Notes”; Robert Stauffer, ed., Charles Darwin's Natural Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); and the complete correspondence of Darwin, now in preparation under the editorship of Frederick Burkhardt, David Kohn, William Montgomery, and Sydney Smith.
John Greene, “Reflections on the Progress of Darwin Studies,” J. Hist. Biol., 8 (1975) 246; also John Greene, The Death of Adam (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1959), esp. pp. 10–13, 284; Maurice Mandelbaum, “Darwin's Religious Views,” J. Hist. Ideas, 19 (1958), 363–378; and Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 85–87. Since this paper was written, a book by James R. Moore has appeared in which Darwin's theology is treated with insight and sympathy: The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 307–326.
Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), pp 208–213, 314; Edward Manier, The Young Darwin and His Culture Circle (Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston: D. Reidel, 1978), pp. 68, 204n13; Silvan Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 233–234, 297, 304–308.
See, e.g., Francis Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), I, 274–286; hereafter cited as LLD.
On some possible sources of the current belief among evolutionists in something like perfect adaptation, see Richard Lewontin, “Adaptation”, The Encyclopedia Einaudi (Turin, 1977); see also J. Maynard Smith, “Optimization Theory in Evolution,” Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst., 9 (1978), 31–56. (I owe these references to Malcolm Kottler.).
Stauffer, ed., Natural Selection, p. 224. John Greene (“Reflections,” pp. 246–247) has called attention to this passage as particularly good evidence that Darwin believed in God when he wrote the Origin.
LLD, II, 105.
Quoting William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics (London: H. G. Bohn, 1862; first published, 1833), p. 307.
In the second and subsequent editions of the Origin Darwin used three quotations, each of which in different ways affirmed the doctrine of secondary causes. Mandelbaum, who has especially insisted on Darwin's use of secondary causes as evidence of his theism, has discussed all three in History, Man, and Reason, pp. 85–86. A tentative title page sketched in 1859 indicates the quotation from Whewell was originally to stand alone, beneath the title of the book (which was to be “On the Mutability of Species”); Darwin MSS, 205.1, Cambridge University Library (hereinafter CUL). There are numerous other passages in Darwin's published and unpublished writings in which he invoked the doctrine of creation by secondary means. The best known is in the Origin: “To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes”; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 488.
On Whewell's views, see John H. Brooke, “Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observations on the Brewster-Whewell Debate,” Ann. Sci., 34 (1977), 221–286.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 490.
Cf. William Paley, Natural Theology, ed. Henry Brougham and Charles Bell, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1839), II, 155–156; Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1806), II, 498–499. As the passage just quoted suggests, Darwin believed that progress, not merely some vague “good,” was a necessary general result of evolution by natural selection, though progress would not occur in every line of descent (see Greene, “Reflections,” p. 256n). Mandelbaum has argued that this belief was a necessary consequence of Darwin's early theological convictions (History, Man, and Reason, p. 86). I agree that progress was probably in part a theological idea for Darwin, but for one in his social, economic, and cultural setting, there were obviously a good many nontheological incentives for seeing nature as progressive.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 490; also p. 484.
Morse Peckham, ed., “The Origin of Species”, by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 759.
Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason, p. 86.
I have in mind especially Gruber, Manier, and Schweber (see note 4), all of whom are especially concerned with the young Darwin, rather than the Darwin of the Origin.
LLD, II, 202–203.
[Richard Owen], review of Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera, by William B. Carpenter, Athenaeum, no. 1848 (March 28, 1863), 418; [Richard Owen], “Darwin on the Origin of Species,” Edinburgh Review, 111 (1860), 510–515.
Darwin MSS, 205.5, CUL. See also Stauffer, ed., “Natural Selection,” p. 255.
Francis Darwin, ed., Foundations of the Origin of Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), pp. 52, 254.
See, e.g., Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), p. 276 (M notebook, p. 57; subsequent references to the M and N notebooks, for which I am using Barrett's transcription, will be cited by notebook letter and page number: e.g., M, p. 57).
Darwin's Library, CUL.
Gavin de Beer, ed., “Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species,” Bull. Brit. Mus. (Nat. Hist.), Hist. Ser., 2 (1960), 41–183; 3 (1967), 131–176 (excised pages). De Beer's “First,” “Second,” “Third,” and “Fourth” notebooks correspond to Darwin's B, C, D, and E notebooks. Thoughout I will cite them by Darwin's letter and page number, followed by a lower-case e in the case of excised pages: here, B, pp. 101–102.
Darwin MSS, vol. 71, fols. 53–58, CUL (a fairly accurate transcription of these notes is published in Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), pp. 416–420); see also D, p. 74e.
D, pp. 36–37, M, p. 136.
See Manier, Young Darwin, pp. 68, 131; see also Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, “Old and Useless Notes,” p. 392n, where Darwin refers to “two great systems of laws in the world, the organic & inorganic.”
Francis Darwin, ed., Foundations of the Origin of Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), pp. 51, 253; Darwin, Origin, p. 488. Since this point occurred to me I have not had an opportunity to examine at first hand the 1842 manuscript.
There are some Darwin notes that indicate he may have thought matter itself had “powers” — and, perhaps, that the laws of life and matter are coeval. Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), “Old and Useless Notes,” pp. 394, 396–398; see also Manier, Young Darwin, pp. 220–225.
LLD, II, 45.
Baden Powell, Essays on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, the Unity of Wolds, and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), p. 399.
Richard Owen, “Address,” Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1858, p. xc. The meaning of “creation” and Darwin's response to Owen's definition are discussed in W. F. Cannon, “The Bases of Darwin's Achievement: A Revaluation,” Vict. Stud., 5 (1961), 131.
LLD, II, 6.
It ought to be observed that even if Darwin was in 1838 questioning the existence of God (and the evidence does not seem to me to support this interpretation), this would not be grounds for concluding he then became an agnostic. Many have doubted and then decided their faith was well-founded. Darwin's conclusion seems to have been that it is impossible to believe the universe is the result of chance.
The M notebook was filled and the N begun on October 2, 1838. The last dated entry in N is April 3, 1839 (N, p. 75).
Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), “Old and Useless Notes”, pp. 393, 396; Manier, Young Darwin, p. 223 (a transcription of Darwin's comments on John Abercrombie, Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth; from Darwin's Library, CUL). On Darwin's Lamarckism and its relation to his speculations on behavior, see Sandra Herbert, “The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin's Theory of Transmutation, Part II”, J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 204–205; and Robert J. Richards, “Influence of Sensationalist Tradition on Early Theories of the Evolution of Behavior”, J. Hist. Ideas, 40 (1979), 85–105.
Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, p. 21.
C, p. 166; see also C, pp. 171–173.
B. p. 232. W. Faye Cannon has offered one possible reason for Darwin's undertaking this task; see “The Whewell-Darwin Controversy”, J. Geol. Soc., 132 (1976), 381.
Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), pp. 208, 212, 314; Manier, Young Darwin, p. 204n13; Schweber, “Revisited”, pp. 308–309. See also, Stephen J. Gould, Ever since Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 25; and Ernst Mayr, “Darwin and Natural Selection”, Amer. Sci. 65 (1977), 323.
M, p. 151 (Sept. 23–Oct. 2, 1838); see also M, pp. 135–136; N, p. 4; N, pp. 11–13.
John Macculloch, Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God, 3 vols. (London: James Duncan, 1837), I, 95.
John Macculloch, Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God, 3 vols. (London: James Duncan, 1837), I, 94–95.
N, p. 35.
To be fair to Manier I must point out that he says Darwin was not an atheist. He also says he was not a theist. He seems to suggest he was a pantheist (Young Darwin, p. 186). In the M and N notebooks and the “Old and Useless Notes” I have seen two explicit references to atheism. At one point Darwin said that Comte's ideas on free will “would make a man a predestinarian of a new kind, because he would tend to be an atheist” (M, p. 74). Later he wrote, following William Kirby, “this materialism does not tend to Atheism” (Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, “Old and Useless Notes”, p. 394n).
E, p. 58, which is sometimes taken to be a condensed statement of the theory of natural selection, makes no mention of the crucial element of chance variations. The first passage that clearly does so is E, pp. 111–112 (March 1839), but other references to chance make it probable that Darwin had fully recognized its importance by early December 1838 (E, pp. 68–69). Schweber has asserted that chance variation was recognized by Darwin by July 1838 (Schweber, “Revisited”, pp. 235, 264), but I have seen no evidence for this in the notebooks. The best statement of the view that Darwin's pre-Malthus theories did not involve chance is David Kohn, “Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection”, in press.
M, p. 154 (Sept. 23–Oct. 2, 1838). This was written a few days after the passage quoted in the preceding paragraph (note 41). Darwin's view at this time was the traditional view of Boyle, but without, probably, Boyle's notion of God's “general concourse”. See Robert Boyle, The Works, ed. Thomas Birch, new ed., 6 vols. (London, 1772), V, 413–414.
William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics (London: H. G. Bohn, 1862, pp. 310–311; E. pp. 48–49: “Man is one great object, for which the world was brought into present state” (Nov. 1–7, 1838).
In addition to the passages cited just above, see D, pp. 36–37, 74e, 135e; M, pp. 135–136 (quoted below); Darwin MSS, vol. 71, fols. 53–58, CUL (Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, pp. 418, 419).
C, p. 166. Cannon justly remarks, with reference to this passage, that Darwin thought his materialism “made God grander than other ways of thinking did” (“Whewell-Darwin Controversy”, p. 379.
M, pp. 135–136 (September 8–13, 1838). Moore interprets this and related passages as I do, Post-Darwinian Controversies, pp. 319–320.
D, p. 74e (September 9–11, 1838).
Kohn, “Theories to Work by”. D, p. 175, together with the discussion of which it is a part, is among the best instances of Darwin's pre-Malthus belief that variations are themselves accommodations to changing conditions; i.e., they are adaptive.
E, pp. 111–112.
E, pp. 68–69 (Dec. 4–16, 1838); E, pp. 48–49 (Nov. 1–7, 1838).
Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (London: William Pickering, 1834), pp. 42, 153–161, 280. This attitude was sanctioned by Cuvier, who also insisted on functional explanation. On Cuvier, see William Coleman, Georges Cuvier, Zoologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 38–43; E. S. Russell, Form and Function (London: John Murray, 1916), pp. 31–44, 76.
The contrast between these two modes of explanation is treated at greater length in Dov Ospovat, “Perfect Adaptation and Teleological Explanation”, Stud. Hist. Biol., 2 (1978), 33–56.
Richard Owen, On the Nature of Limbs (London: John van Voorst, 1849), p. 84.
Richard Owen, On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London, 1848), pp. 171–172.
Darwin MSS, 205.5, CUL.
Richard Owen, On the Nature of Limbs (London: John van Voorst, 1849), inside back cover, CUL.
Darwin MSS, vol. 100, following letter no. 64, J. D. Hooker to Charles Darwin, Sept. 28, 1846, CUL (my italics). In the margin of one page of the “Essay of 1844” Darwin wrote, “Best way of accounting for presence of organs evidently useless to the animal are retained for future modifications, perhaps infinite”; Darwin MSS, vol. 113, fol. 190 (F. Darwin, ed., Foundations, p. 218).
E.g., M, p. 57; F. Darwin, ed., Foundations, pp. 6–7.
I would argue that when Darwin wrote in 1838 (M, p. 70), “M. le Comte argues against all contrivance — it is what my views tend to,” he was not rejecting all design; he was merely saying that adaptation is produced by law, not specially contrived in each case.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), p. 61; quoted in Mandelbaum, “Darwin's Religious Views,” p. 378, and in Robert Young, “Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” Monist, 55 (1971), p. 468.
LLD, II, 105.
Ibid., II, 96–97, 145–146, 247; Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, ed., More Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), I, 190–194.
Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols. (New York: Orange Judd, 1868), II, 514–516.
Darwin and others used “perfection” in many senses, only one of which is relevant here. As an instance of a usage that is not relevant, Darwin often spoke of the “perfection” of the eye, meaning merely that the eye is admirably suited for its function. By “perfect adaptation,” however, I mean the doctrine that orgnisms are constructed in the best possible manner for the situation in which they live. In Darwin's day there were two principal variants of this doctrine. One was that organisms have, in effect, the best conceivable form for their conditions. Each is designed expressly for a particular place in nature, and every organ is constructed solely in reference to its function. This is the doctrine of Paley and Charles Bell; it is incompatible with the doctrine of evolution. The second was that organisms have the best possible form within the limits imposed by their basic typical or hereditary structure. This was the view of the leading biologists of Darwin's generation, including Owen, William B. Carpenter, Louis Agassiz, and Darwin himself until the 1850s. See Ospovat, “Perfect Adaptation,” pp. 33–39.
Camille Limoges has shown that in 1837 Darwin rejected the first variant of the doctrine of perfect adaptation (see preceding note), but Limoges does not discuss the second. La séléction naturelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 76–77.
B, p. 210e. David Kohn in his careful study has shown that before Malthus adaptation was for Darwin an absolute matter: organisms are well-adapted or they are not; “Theories to Work by.”
Darwin MSS, vol. 71, fol. 53–58, CUL (Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, p. 417).
Charwin Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), pp. 111–126; Stauffer, ed., Natural Selection, pp. 227–250. The development of the principle of divergence is recorded in notes, many of them dated, in Darwin MSS, 205.5, CUL. I have been studying these in order to work out the relationship between the principle of divergence and relative adaptation, and Janet Growne has already made good use of them in her article “Darwin's Botanical Arithmetic and the ‘Principle of Divergence,’ 1854–1858,” J. Hist. Biol., 13 (1980).
Stauffer, ed., Natural Selection, pp. 224, 380, 386. Like many of Darwin's mature ideas, relative adaptation is hinted at in one or two early notes (Darwin MSS, 205.9, CUL), but Darwin's theory long continued to operate on the assumption of perfect adaptation.
This point is discussed more fully in Dov Ospovat, “Darwin after Malthus,” J. Hist. Biol., 12 (1979), 211–230.
Francis Darwin, ed., Foundations of the Originof Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), pp. 91, 94–96, 185, 196.
E, pp. 71, 122e; Darwin MSS, vol. 16ii, fol. 303 (July 1846), CUL. On the need for external change to produce variation, see F. Darwin, ed., Foundations, pp. xxviii–xxix, 78, 83–84. On the theological implications of this view of variation, see Ospovat, “Darwin after Malthus.”
Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 85.
Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 85–87. See Herbert's perceptive comment in “Man, Part II,” p. 202n85.
Aslong as he wanted to, Darwin could have continued to use his early explanation of the origin of the idea of God, in the following way: an intellectual being, whether man or some other, that happened to be produced by natural selection would, in thinking about causation, inevitably conceive of a first cause. In the Descent of Man, pp. 95–98, however, he employed a very different argument.
As late as 1870 Darwin wrote Hooker, “I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance;” F. Darwin and A. C. Seward, ed., More Letters, I, 321.
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Ospovat, D. God and natural selection: The Darwinian idea of design. J Hist Biol 13, 169–194 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00125743
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00125743