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Religious History
of Western Europe, 1500-Present
Reactions to Darwin
Darwin and Evolution--Darwin grew up an orthodox Christian although he did not realize until
late in life that his father was an agnostic or a skeptic. He recalled while on the Beagle the sailors
laughing at him for quoting the Bible as an unanswer-able source for moral questions. The people he
had read and studied with at Cambridge, Henslow, Sedgwick, Lyell and Whewell all held to creation of
world with fixed species. Darwin pro-bably abandoned Christianity two years after returning to
England from South America, in part because he lost faith in the histor-ical reliability of the Old
Testament, and in part because he abandoned arguments from design for the mechanism of natural
selection to explain adaptation and diversity. So he dispensed with the eighteenth-century "watchmaker" of deism and natural theology. His wife and close friends remained theists throughout their
lives, but Darwin merely said "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us, and I for
one must be content to remain an agnostic." In 1868 Darwin said flatly that either one must believe in
natural selection or "an omnipotent and omniscient creator" who ordains "everything and forsees
everything." It is a problem, Darwin said, as insoluable and difficult as free will and predestination.
Beagle Conversion Perspective--Frequently, it has been assumed that Darwin adopted evolution
and natural selection while on the Beagle voyage, but most scholars of Darwin now reject that notion.
It is now known that the left the Galapagos Archipelago in October 1835 without fully understanding
or accepting the observations he had made with regard to evolution. He failed to collect certain
Galapagos tortoises which are now regarded as quite valuable, mistook certain species of finches for
the ones they imitate or "mimic," and messed up his bird collection so badly that after he returned to
England he had to borrow the collections of shipmates to try out his evolutionary hypothesis. In short
the evidence for evolution when Darwin finished his voyage was sketchy and ambiguous at best. In
fact other biologists had to sit down with Darwin and to rectify errors he made in classification, so his
"evidence" was certainly not overwhelming to him or others. So, Darwin came to believe in the
mutability of the species on the basis of biological observations about whose validity he continued to
doubt for nearly ten more years.
Darwin becomes an Evolutionist--Apparently, Darwin came to believe in species
transformation in the period 1837-39, although he thought and wrote about it for the next twenty-years
and added new ideas and discarded some of his early notions right up until the publication of Origin of
Species in 1859 and thereafter. It appears that Darwin considered and then rejected four possible
mechanisms for species mutability before adopting natural selec-tion. They were adaptation,
extinction, reproduction and geogra-phic distribution. From a manuscript written on the Beagle voyage it is evident that in 1835 Darwin considered himself a disciple of geologist Charles Lyell who was
committed to the immutability of species. Their capacity for inherited variabil-ity was strictly limited,
and species could not deviate from their type. Darwin also accepted Lyell's ideas about local extinction
of species and local creation of types as opposed to catastrophism. At this point he was a creationist
who was very reluctant to challenge Lyell's ideas and assumptions.
Transformationist--In the Spring of 1837 it is evident that Darwin was moving beyond a
Lyellian position, staking out posi-tions seemingly contrary to Lyell and Lamarck. Specifically,
Darwin wondered about the varieties of ostriches and llamas that he found in Latin America and how
different varieties of the same species could exist in the same place or versions of them be extinct. He
suspected that Lyell might be wrong that changes in circumstances or geographic isolation explained
these differ-ences, since the ostrich range overlapped around the Rio Negro river. Darwin leaned to the
idea of "saltation," or that one species produced another and then died out. This led Darwin to think
about the origins of all species and the possibility that some aspects of reproduction could explain
species mutability. Next by July 1837 Darwin seems to have embraced transmutation to the point that
the question is no longer did it happen but exactly how. Extinction had come to be his primary concern
as it had been for Lamarck. He finally decided that only by sexual reproduction which incorporated
adaptation, heredity and variabi-lity could species be transformed.
Pre-Malthusian Darwin--Yet, Darwin held on to a belief that nature operated through some sort
of benign harmony. He framed transmutation as a sexually reproducing system responding to changing
external circumstances that in turn produces variation adapted to the altered circumstances. The cause
is always exter-nal, which the change itself is produced by and expressed through reproductive
systems. In this respect Darwin still had not devi-ated much from his contemporaries. Naturalists such
as Cuvier upon whom Darwin depended a great deal had never thought that plants and animals
remained absolutely constant and invariable. They generally thought species varied a little or alot to
accomo-date themselves to circumstances. Darwin differed from Lyell in that Darwin thought the
capacity for accomodation could continue indefinitely as long as changing conditions required it, while
Lyell thought the accomodation was limited by the original speci-fic character of the organism.
Darwin's mechanism here remains fairly traditional: it adapted organisms to changes in condi-tion.
Darwin, however, moved on to his theory of natural selec-tion, even though it was not as fully
developed as it appeared some years later in Origin of Species. Natural selection claims that variations
are hereditary; organic beings produce more off-spring than nature can support; and last, this inevitably
means a struggle for existence which preserves favorable variations and adapts species to changing
circumstances.
Natural Selection and Perfect Adaptation--Having read Thomas Malthus' Essay on the Principle
of Population, Darwin became con-vinced by 1844 that nature was marked by struggle and conflict.
Further, Darwin started to move from a natural system marked by harmony to one governed by just a
few laws whose outcome was wholly by chance. He gradually became unconcerned that adjust-ment to
change preserve some pre-existing harmony in nature. By 1844 he was more concerned with the
process itself, and the idea of a self-adjusting harmonious system is not mentioned. By 1859 Darwin
proposed that variations in organisms can occur at any time, not just intermittently as adjustments to
changing condi-tions. Natural selection was potentially a continuous operation that daily scrutinized
variation for possible improvement of a species. This was Darwin's sweeping vision of the
evolutionary process which was possible only after he abandoned the idea of perfect adaptation.
Scientific Reactions to Darwin--There were four distinct parts to Darwin's ideas over which
nineteenth-century scientists argued: transmutation, naturalism, branching adaptive evolution and
natural selection. The situation is made complicated by the fact that attitudes towards these four
changed constantly, though not necessarily in a consistent fashion. For example, recent surveys of the
period indicate that with regard to transmutation (trends in the fossil record which seemingly show
some genetic relationship between successive forms of organisms), by 1869 about three-fourths of the
scientists queried accepted the idea of gradual change of species. Further, outside science there seems
to have been widespread acceptance of the concept. Among scientists, even rapid supporters of
Darwin like T.H. Huxley, instead of looking philosophically to Platonic archtypes they assumed
common ancestry explained the similarities between var-ious species. But acceptance of transmutation
meant little in practical terms of how they named and described forms.
Naturalism--Some contemporary observers felt that Darwinism was successful because of it
symbolized the spirit of naturalis-tic inquiry that demanded that science have access to all ques-tions.
Naturalism in the context of Darwinism meant explaining everything, the development of life in
particular, through natural processes. No outside agent(s) or intervention were allowed. Although a
few people like the Dule of Argyll held on to a compromise between theism and natural selection,
arguing that natural selection was part of the creator's design or that it showed regularity in the
development of life, most scientists conceded this was an illigitimate conceptual marriage. However,
the naturalistic triumph was in some respects hollow, for aspects of the pre-Darwinian heritage quickly
crept back into biological theory superficially adapted to a new outlook. Supporters of Larmack, for
example, successfully persuaded the scientific com-munity that it was acceptable to postulate
evolutionary trends, provided the apparently goal-directed nature of the trends could be ascribed to
some hypothetical ordering principle in the behav-ior or growth-pattern of organisms. This suggests
that Darwin's idea of constantly branching evolution which was intimately con-nected to natural
selection received only limited acceptance. While by 1850 most naturalists accepted some sort of
branching arrangement of species, various branches supposidly explaining adaptation or specialization
to various ways of life, they still held to a quasi-teleological belief that within each branch there was
some force ensuring a degree of orderly development in a particular direction.
For and Against Darwin--Some young scientists like T.H. Huxley and J.D. Hooker were
looking for a specifically natural explanation of life processes and welcomed Darwin's ideas as a
plausible solution to their problem. Some biologists believed that certain details of nature were a direct
expression of the Creator's will and could never be explained in terms of ordinary law. This was
consonant with their belief in the "argument from design" so that certain natural phenomena could be
set aside as examples of God's higher purposes. These biologists could never accept a theory of natural
selection which was purely naturalis-tic and based on random variation. Conservative thinkers like
Adam Sedgwick and Richard Owen and more sympathetic observers such as Charles Lyell and Asa
Gray stubbornly held on to ques-tions of design when dealing with natural selection. To them to accept
Darwin was to admit that there was no way of proving a higher purpose in nature. Some critics argued
that Darwin's theory could never be "proved," and as such was not a part of the ranks of truly scientific
studies. Others claimed natural selec-tion was inadequate to do what Darwin proposed. In either case
the critics could continue to insist that species were fixed entities within a purposeful divine plan and
that some super-natural power had to boost natural processes to bring about the appearance of new
living forms, although some felt this could be accomplished by a supernatural agency working through
transmuta-tion of existing forms--theistic evolution rather than pure crea-tion. However, theistic
evolution had weaknesses itself. Once advocates like St. George Jackson Mivart accomodated
themselves to evidence allegedly showing a genetic relationship between the succession of forms in a
particular area, they had admitted that some evidence could be explained in natural terms. It then
became more plausible to suppose that further refinements would produce a natural explanation of the
whole process. Perhaps Darwin's most dubious accomplishment was persuading people that science
"hoped" to explain the evolution of life, even if his own theory was not satisfactory. This suggests, of
course, that ultimately what one struggles with in the matter of science and religion are ultimate
questions and philosophical presupposi-tions, more so than some alleged overwhelming body of
evidence supposidly proving the claims of science.
Religious Reaction (France)--Reaction to Darwin varied between Protestants and Roman
Catholics and from one country to the next. In France for example there had been much general
scientific concern in the nineteenth century on the origins and development of man, but there was no
immediate conversion of the biological community to the Darwinian paradigm after the publica-tion of
Origin of Species in 1859. The clerical rejection of Darwin was based initially on the belief that he
violated current scientific knowledge. A good example of a dozen or more trea-tises taking this
position is Le Monde et l'homme primitif selon la Bible (1869) by Msgr. Guillaume-Ren_ Meignan,
bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne and later cardinal-archbishop of Tours. After pointing out how the
Mosaic account of creation did not conflict with contemporary scientific theories, Meignan turned to
the question of the origins of man. He expressed the traditional Judeo-Christian anthropology in
classic fashion under the banner of the concept of the "unity of the human species" as opposed to a
Darwinisn view of the plurality of the human species. Man, Meignan, argued was created in God's
image, although he had fallen into sin and would only be rehabilitated by a long and costly moral
process. Meignan identified positivism and mater-ialism as false philosophies of the nineteenth
century that had destroyed human dignity by opposing Biblical truth. Like so many Catholics Meignan
blamed the Enlightenment for this state of affairs. Clearly, in Meignan's opinion Darwin in his Origin
(1859) had contradicted Biblical teaching. The result, Meignan argued, would be to reduce man to an
ancestor of the apes.
Abb_ Lecomte--Abb_ Alphonse-Joseph Lecomte published in 1873 Le Darwinisme et l'origine
de l'homme in which he declared Darwin's bestial origins of man were contrary to Catholic doc-trine on
the state of the physical, intellectual and moral per-fection of man's first parents. However, some
Catholic writers declared that even if Darwin was true, it had no signficance for religion. FranzHeinrich Reusch argued in his Bibel und Natur (1867) that even if Darwin was true, there would still
be no contradiction between the Bible and science. Lecomte claimed he wrote Reusch and pointed out
the consequences of man's descent from paes, that Reusch removed all favorabel references to Darwin
in the third edition of the book.
Catholic Scientists--These opponents of evolution could also draw upon serious scientific work
done by Catholic scientists. Joachim Barrande (1799-1883) rejected Darwinism on the basis of his
extended and for the nineteenth century famous scientific work. His study of ancient fossils, for
example, demonstrated very little species variation of the type postulated by Darwin to illustrate the
formation of distinctly new and permanent forms of life. Barrande did not try to put forward any
substitute theories. The harmony of the old world demonstrated to him a transcendent order of things.
Anti-Darwinians could also call upon Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777-1850), a Parisian
professor and former assistant to the famous Georges Cuvier. Blainville believed that the animal world
demonstrated a unity, and any gaps in it were those left by species which had disap-peared. Blainville
insisted there had been only one creation, from which all animals, living or fossil remains, had come.
If one examines Catholic journals in France, one finds that almost all of them rejected Darwinism until
the first decade of the twentieth century. Most of the initial reaction in the Jesuit Etudes, for example,
concerned the fixity or immutability of species. One Etudes author, I. Carbonnelle coldly dissected
Darwinism and found it to be completely hypothetical and incap-able of supporting the same level of
work and research that the theory of fixed species had elicited. P.A. Bellynck in a book review of
Milne-Edward's Rapport sur les progres r_cent des sciences zoologiques en France (1868) emphasized
that the issue of the definition of species was fundamental. While rejecting Darwin in general, he
claimed that Darwin had not proposed ape ancestors for man.
Suspicions about Darwin--The persistence of a strong Anti-Darwinian element in French
Catholicism can be explained only by recognizing the existence of a strong anti-teleological and antireligious outlook by many leading Darwinists. For example, when the French translation of the Origin
of Species came out in 1862, the translator Cl_mence Royer contributed a shocking preface bristling
with provocative notes. Royer, who advertised herself as a disciple of Lamarck and a former royalist
Catholic Bretonne, flaunted her secular and scientistic humanism in the first edition. Catholics also
looked to the Ecole d'anthropologie, founded in Paris in 1875 by the Protestant Paul Broca (1824-80)
as a prolific source of anti-religious thought and anti-clericalism. Gabriel de Mortillet (1821-98), an
associate of the school, a notoriously anti-clerical mayor of Saint-Germain, extreme leftist deputy for
the Seine-et-Oise and militant freethinker, became famous for his brutal attacks on religion and the
clergy in the context of his studies about prehistoric man. Catholic intellectuals felt, then, that
Darwinism was attractive because it provided a philosophical not a scientific or demonstrable
explanation of nature which as A. Proost remarked made it possible for materialists to jettison the "God
hypothesis." It should be noted, of course, that not all scien-tists thought the materialist implications of
Darwin were of any importance, and further, that some scientists who were known not to be
materialists embraced Darwinism merely as a useful and workable hypothetical and explanatory
framework.
Anti-Religious Factors--Consequently, in 1910 the Jesuit biologist Robert Sin_ty argued that
the philosophical overtones of Darwinism nearly guaranteed its success. Its effort to explain evolution
without recourse to final causes was its chief attraction. Biology's only interest now, Sin_ty said, was
in efficient determinism of phenomena. Natural selection and adaptation ended all interest in the
purpose of an organ. In fact it was anti-scientific to define an organ by its function. An intimate union,
Sin_ty said, existed between Darwinism and anti-finalism and teleophobia. Having embraced a general
theory of causality in nature, Sin_ty commented, man was obligated to contruct conceptions of the
world which presupposed no miraculous act of creation or creation from nothing. Sin_ty also
underscored the strong alliance in France between Darwinism and the anti-clerical parties of French
politics. French Catholics, then, like Sin_ty believed Darwin had put science and revealed religion in
opposition to one another, and had given anti-religious and anti-Christian groups a poweful weapon.
Sin_ty could point if had wanted to, to the enormous international success of Ernst Haeckel's Riddle of
the Universe, showing that in the hour of its triumph Darwinism found support from the anti-clerical
and anti-religious ranks of Germany.
Science and Explanation--Obviously, Catholic intellectuals like Meignan and Sin_ty were not
in the vanguard to switch scien-tific paradigms, particularly when old paradigms could so easily be
harmonized with conventional interpretations of the Bible. Very slowly opposition to Darwinism in
France subsided. By 1910 even among the newer clergy there was a noticeable willingness to use
evolutionary derivatives in historical and theological writings. Meignan's generation thought of science
in the same terms as religion, as a set of eternal truths comparable to the Bible, when in fact science
was a set of paradigms that could be jettisoned or modified once their usefulness had been outlived. To
the clerical community of Meignan's day seemed philosophically absurd. In deriving the more perfect
from the less perfect, Darwinism in effect was deriving being from nothing. Like atheism Darwinism
assumed an effect without a cause, as Meignan interpreted chance selection. Catholic intellectuals
viewed man as a creature who had self-awareness with the intellectual powers that made him master of
nature and led him to knowledge of God, distinctions between good and evil, hope for immortality and
belief in punishments and rewards. Thus, these Catholic thinkers regarded man as occupant of a
special place in nature because he was a free moral being who alone could know God. There did not
have to be any conflict between science and religion, since science led to truth and revelation emanated
from truth. Perhaps Meignan was echoing a Catholic dream to be worked out in the writings of Jesuit
Teilhard de Chardin, a future symbiosis of science and religion. It was a symbiosis, that in the French
context under consideration, that only be achieved by accepting the current evolutionary paradigm of
Darwin and of a new genera-tion of Catholic intellectuals who would eventually accomodate
themselves to transmutation and mutable species.
Popular Reception in Germany--Darwin's narrow biological ideas had enormous social,
religious and political implications which fascinated his proponents in Germany. They lived in a
favorable period to explain these implications to laymen, for the nineteenth century was the great age
of reading. Popular works of all sorts rode the crest of increased literacy and the mass production and
circulation of newspapers, magazines and books. Furthermore, Germany not England was the main
center of biolog-ical research and speculation in the late nineteenth century, and Darwin's ideas caught
fire in Germany faster than anywhere else among the scientific community. Darwinism took advantage
of a plethora of professional popularizers who hoped to communicate the results of this research to a
vast reading audience unusually receptive to such ideas. Germany after all was the most literate nation
in Europe, so it offered the richest environment for Darwinism to spread outside the classroom and
laboratory. Both political liberalism and then in the 1880s proletarian Marxism found in Darwinism
pseudopolitical ideological tool to advance their beliefs, since science commanded almost universal
public respect as an inexorable agent of progress. Surprisingly, Darwin's works themselves were rarely
read, but through a host of popularizers such as Ernst Haeckel, his thought was mediate in a flood of
magazine articles, books for mass consumption and lectures.
Religious Implications--While I do not have any reliable information to share with you about
institutional religious response to Darwinism, other than the obvious comment that since Darwin's
ideas were banned in German schools, the Lutheran church and many local bodies opposed them, the
anti-religious bias of the popularizers tells us something from the other side of the coin about the
religious or rather anti-religious uses to which Darwin's ideas might be put while they were being
integrated with social, political and philosophical ideas in a broader context than just biology. The
conflict between religion and science was one of the favorite themes of Ernst Haeckel, the most wellknown of the Darwinian popularizers in Germany and author of the Riddle of the Universe. Bible
critic David Strauss in The Old Faith and the New said "honest, upright men" could no longer call
themselves Christians because they had accepted science, above all Darwinism, as the sole legitimate
path to truth. The scientific attack on Christianity had reached substantive and rhetorical peaks during
the eighteenth-century Englightenment, and surfaced again with the popularity of materialism in the
1850s. Materialists argued that organic evolution implicitly banished God from the earth and demoted
man back into the animal world which was a direct attack on the core of Christian doctrine.
Seemingly, the Church aided in this attack. Pius IX issued an encyclical Syllabus of the Principle
Errors of Our Time (1864) which explicitly rejected modern science and culture, while the
proclamation of papal infallibility followed in 1870 rebuffing those who thought experimentation was
the path to truth.
Reconciliation ?--Not everyone on either side of the controversy agreed with these conclusions.
They thought assuming a non-literal interpretation of Genesis and a teleological version of Darwinism
that religion and science could be reconciled. Obviously, this required a theological retreat in a noman's land of ambiguous allegory and philosophy. Darwin himself had avoided religious
confrontations, though his strong supporters like Huxley and Haeckel loved confrontation and had
great reputations for vehement godlessness. They often absorbed the brunt of harsh criticism leaving
Darwin, who had many private doubts about religion and certainly was not a believing Christian by
1836, though he may have been a theist of some sort, to be buried in Westminster Abbey and eulogized
by both religious and nonreligious admirers. Not everyone was equally cautious particularly among
Darwin's admirers in Germany. Frederich Rolle, one of the first Germans to write a book on Darwin
(1863), was adament that scientists were concerned only with natural explanations and that religious
was consequently irrelevant and childish. Friedrich Ratzel in his Sein und Werden der organischen
Welt (The Existence and development of the Organic World, 1869) made it clear that God and the
Bible had pushed from the center of man's concerns, and that the shocking "truth" now was that man
was simply part of a mechanistic system of nature. Ratzel thought this was good, however, since it
meant man was on the verge of appreciating his true potential! (Like WWI I guess??). Atheist Ludwig
Buchner in his lectures and his popular and perennially best-selling book Force and Matter (Kraft und
stoff, Leipzig, 1855) said Darwin had missed the obvious religious implications of his theory. Natural
selection was the working of inexorable natural law, a point Buckner thought should be put to speedy
use for atheism. The notion that man was the center of the universe Buchner ridiculed as a childish
fantasy. Man, he said, was a product of the animal world, and there was no qualitative difference
between him and other animals. Science and culture, Buchner argued, would lift man into the realm of
supreme happiness and harmony.