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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.