Abstract
This chapter discusses the intensity of Darwin’s rupture with the religious worldview of his time, presenting some characteristics of this nineteenth-century conception. Differences in the English naturalist’s own thinking on religious themes are then addressed: at least two distinct moments can be identified in Darwin’s work on the topic. The first corresponds roughly to the view presented in On the Origin of Species. This book contests the so-called special creation theory, as it resolutely affirms the transformation of different species of plants and animals over time. Even so, Darwin’s worldview of 1859 admitted a particular form of religiosity, marked by a conception of nature as a progressively improving entity. The second moment identified corresponds to the naturalist’s Autobiography of 1876 (in addition to some of his later correspondence) where the rupture with the religious worldview is more forceful. Having traveled this path, the conditions are given for a better understanding of the plane of immanence established by Darwin for understanding the natural world: natural phenomena should not be approached from a normative parameter that is projected onto them.
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Notes
- 1.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 62–63. Translation revised according to the French original.
- 2.
“[…] la dose d’immanence qu’il injecte dans le monde,” in the quoted words of Deleuze and Guattari.
- 3.
Charles Darwin, ‘Letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 11 January 1844’, in Darwin Correspondence Project (University of Cambridge, 2021), http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-729.xml.
- 4.
Charles Darwin, ‘An Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species, Previously to the Publication of the First Edition of This Work’, in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xiii–xiv.
- 5.
Darwin, “Letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 11 January 1844.” The “means of change” affirmed by Darwin certainly do not refer to a Lamarckian “slow willing of animals,” but to the fundamental Darwinian concept of natural selection.
- 6.
Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1887), 197.
- 7.
At the beginning of his work, Darwin refers to descent with modification. The word evolution, in relation to species, only became stabilized after 1859, notably after the sixth edition of The Origin of Species.
- 8.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
- 9.
It is fitting to recall that even creationists of the twenty-first century continue to invoke the flood of Noah in their texts. This is the case of the mathematician William Dembski, in his book The End of Christianity.
- 10.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 50.
- 11.
Ibid., 49.
- 12.
As is known, it was only when Darwin received Wallace’s text—which presented an argument analogous to his own—that he decided to publish what became his magnum opus. It should be properly registered here the importance of Wallace’s contribution to the theory that is usually associated, perhaps with a bias, only with Darwin’s name.
- 13.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 425.
- 14.
Ibid., 416.
- 15.
Ibid., 420.
- 16.
Ibid., 427.
- 17.
I emphasize that Darwinism includes man in the natural order, because this was precisely a fundamental difference with religious thinking. However, once this necessary note is made, it must be immediately added that Darwin was quite conscious of the differences—which are actually quite evident—between human beings and other species (such as the capacity for specialized labor, the use of language, the decisive interferences of education, culture). Moreover, he even came to point to the limits of the concept of natural selection for addressing complex human societies. That is: it is not necessary to oppose Darwinism to an anthropological or sociological approach, because its founder was not interested—unlike some more recent sociobiologists—in compressing the singularity of the human species to its natural origin, but only to point to the foundational character of the latter. For a Darwinist criticism of sociobiology, see Patrick Tort, ‘Darwin Lido e Aprovado’, Crítica Marxista 11 (2000): 109–22.
- 18.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 427.
- 19.
As can be seen in Bertrand Russell’s commentary on the position of Francis Bacon about the relation between reason and religion: “He [Bacon] accepted orthodox religion; he was not the man to quarrel with the government on such a matter. But while he thought that reason could show the existence of God, he regarded everything else in theology as known only by revelation […]. He was thus an advocate of the doctrine of ‘double truth,’ that of reason and that of revelation.” Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Touchstone, 1967), 542.
- 20.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 429.
- 21.
Charles Darwin, ‘Letter to Asa Gray, 8 or 9 February 1860’, in Darwin Correspondence Project (University of Cambridge, 2021), http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2701.xml.
- 22.
Ernst Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 214.
- 23.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 289.
- 24.
It is enough to recall Darwin’s supposition about the necessarily gradual and continual character of the becoming of species, critically debated in 1972 by the theory of punctuated equilibrium presented by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould.
- 25.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 297.
- 26.
Ibid., 428.
- 27.
Newton Aquiles von Zuben, ‘Filosofia e Educação: Atitude Filosófica e a Questão da Apropriação do Filosofar’, Pro-Posições, Revista da Faculdade de Educação da UNICAMP 3, no. 2 (July 1992): 15–16.
- 28.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Ethics’, in The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) I, Appendix, 443. The English translator opted for “sanctuary of ignorance.”
- 29.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 422.
- 30.
“For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1982), 102. As I mentioned in the Preface of this book, Hegel himself assumed explicitly his religious beliefs.
- 31.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1.
- 32.
In terms of the question of the origin of life itself—which was not the object of Darwin’s research—only in the twentieth century was a more satisfactory scientific explanation found, one that was entirely compatible with biological evolutionism. Examples of this are the hypotheses, developed independently, by Alexander Oparin and John B. Haldane.
- 33.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 355.
- 34.
Sigmund Freud, ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981), 141.
- 35.
Charles Darwin, ‘Letter to John Fordyce, 7 May 1879’, in Darwin Correspondence Project (University of Cambridge, 2021), https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12041.xml.
- 36.
Chapter 5 of this book, Materialism and subjectivity, discusses the inconsistencies of the so-called holism at greater length.
- 37.
Cf. Oliver Tolle, ‘Um Herói da Subjetividade’, Revista de Filosofia Moderna e Contemporânea 5, no. 2 (2018): 107–22.
- 38.
The details of the polemic between Ghiselin and Lennox can be found in: James Lennox, ‘Darwin Was a Teleologist’, Biology and Philosophy 8 (1993): 409–23, and in the response by Michael T. Ghiselin, ‘Darwin’s Language May Seem Teleological, but His Thinking Is Another Matter’, Biology and Philosophy 9 (1994): 489–92.
- 39.
Henry Kettlewell, ‘A Survey of the Frequencies of Biston Betularia (L.) (Lep.) and Its Melanic Forms in Great Britain’, Heredity 12 (1958): 51–72. By all indications, Darwin was not aware of the specific case of these moths, which strongly corroborated his theory of descent with modifications.
- 40.
Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 412.
- 41.
Ibid., 429.
- 42.
Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 (London: Collins, 1958), 92–93.
- 43.
Ibid., 87.
- 44.
Ibid., 87.
- 45.
Francisco Ayala and Theodosius Dobzhansky, Estudios sobre la Filosofía de la Biología (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1983).
- 46.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996).
- 47.
Apud Cecilia Valenzuela, ‘Dr Francisco Ayala, Doctor Honoris Causa de la Universidad de Chile’, El Pulso, 6 October 2010, http://elpulso.med.uchile.cl/20101006/noticia2.html.
- 48.
Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique?, 39–66.
- 49.
Ibid., 58. And a bit further on: “natural selection is an optimization process, but it has no definite goal, and, […], it would be most misleading to call it teleological.” Ibid., 62.
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Vieira Martins, M. (2022). Philosophical Consequences of Darwin’s Polemic with Religious Thinking. In: Marx, Spinoza and Darwin. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13025-0_7
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