In the Country of Asa Gray

When William Jennings Bryan waged his battle against evolution in the 1920s, he was motivated not so much by any real scientific objection, but by his disgust at the thought of a world given over to Darwin. For Bryan, evolution threatened the notion of a moral universe created by God, with humanity created specifically in his image. All that was left was a brutal struggle for supremacy with no purpose whatsoever.

Bryan may have confused evolutionary biology with some of the social movements of his day, but he raised a fundamentally important question, one that no amount of evidence in favor of evolution can ever obscure: Is there a place for God in a world where evolution operates, where natural selection plays the role once given to the designer?

God and evolution are not mutually exclusive. Evolution is a scientific phenomenon, one that scientists can study because it is observable and predictable. But digging up fossils does not disprove the existence of God or a higher purpose for the universe. That is beyond science’s power. Asa Gray put it best when he said that claiming that Darwinism is a religious belief “seems much the same as saying my belief is Botany.”

The United States has been home to a long line of religious evolutionists ever since Gray, an evangelical Christian, introduced the country to Origin of Species. Gray once commented that Darwin’s theory “can be held theistically or atheistically. Of course, I think the latter wrong & absurd.” When the Kansas State Board of Education tried to eliminate evolution from high schools in 1999, one of the leading critics of the decision was another evangelical Christian, Kansas State University geologist Keith Miller. “God is the creator of all things, and nothing would exist without God’s continually willing it to be,” Miller declares, but he nevertheless accepts the evidence for evolution. “If God used and providentially controlled evolutionary mechanisms in the creation of plants and animals, I see no reason to reject an evolutionary origin for humankind.”

For Kenneth Miller, a biochemist at Brown (and no relation to Keith Miller), evolution affords plenty of room for the God of his Catholic faith. In his 1999 book, Finding Darwin’s God, he points out that the mutations that make evolution possible take place on a quantum level, and as a result we can never know with perfect certainty whether a particular mutation will take place. When a cosmic ray whistles into the inner sanctum of a cell’s nucleus and collides with DNA, it may or may not transform one of the bases. “Evolutionary history can turn on a very very small dime–the quantum state of a single subatomic particle,” says Miller. And thanks to the uncertainty of quantum physics, if God influences evolution by mucking with mutations, His effects will be scientifically undetectable.

But even if God does influence mutations, that doesn’t mean that He controls life like a micromanager. Miller points out that many Christians have long accepted that human history is influenced by chance and contingency, although it may indeed have an overall purpose we cannot fully comprehend. Nature, he argues, is no different. And thanks to that chance and contingency, life itself can evolve. “A God who presides over an evolutionary process is not an impotent, passive observer,” says Miller. “Rather, He is one whose genius fashioned a fruitful world in which the process of continuing creation is woven into the fabric of matter itself.”

Miller suspects that evolution has a destiny embedded within it, and we are part of it. “Sooner or later it would have given the Creator exactly what He was looking for–a creature who, like us, could know Him and love Him, could perceive the heavens and dream of the stars, a creature who would eventually discover the extraordinary process of evolution that filled His earth with so much life.”

Because God constructed the universe to follow certain natural laws, He made it possible for us to comprehend His creation, but thanks to chance and contingency, we have the freedom that Christianity demands. “God stands back from His creation not to abandon His creatures but to allow His people true freedom,” Miller writes. “He used evolution as the tool to set us free.”

Edward O. Wilson, the champion of sociobiology, has offered a very different vision of God in his writings. He grew up in a Southern Baptist family, and at age 14 he chose to be baptized. In a Pensacola, Florida, church a pastor dipped him into a tank of water, “like a ballroom dancer,” he later recalled, “backward and downward, until my entire body and head dipped beneath the surface.”

The baptism affected Wilson deeply, but in a physical way rather than in the spiritual way he had expected. He wondered if everything–the world itself–was only physical. “And something small somewhere cracked. I had been holding an exquisite, perfect spherical jewel in my hand, and now, turning it over in a certain light, I discovered a ruinous fracture.”

Wilson abandoned what he calls “a biological God, one who directs organic evolution and intervenes in human affairs.” Instead, he now leans toward Deism, the belief that God set in motion the universe and did not need to tinker with it afterward. But Wilson is not disheartened by the thought of living in such a universe:

The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined. The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times as old as that conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realize that Homo sapiens is far more than an assortment of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved.

These three scientists, one an evangelical Christian, one a Catholic, one a Deist, cannot speak for all scientists, let alone all people. Science is the business of finding theories that explain the natural world and generating hypotheses that can be tested with evidence from our senses. It is up to all of us–nonscientists and scientists, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, believers and agnostics and atheists–to ponder what the world actually means.

Darwin’s Silence

Some readers may not be happy to be plunged into such a cacophony of opinions at the end of this book. It might be more comforting to be guided to some single gleaming truth. But this ending is probably as Darwin would have wanted it.

Darwin wrestled with his spirituality for most of his adult life, but he kept his struggles private. When he boarded the Beagle at age 22 and began his voyage around the world, he was a devout Anglican. As he read Lyell and saw the slow work of geology in South America, he began to doubt a literal reading of Genesis. And as he matured as a scientist on the journey, he grew skeptical of miracles. Nevertheless, Darwin still attended Captain FitzRoy’s weekly services on the ship, and on shore he sought churches whenever he could find them. While in South Africa, he and FitzRoy wrote a letter together in which they praised the role of Christian missions in the Pacific. When Darwin returned to England, he was no longer a parson in the making but was certainly no atheist.

In the notebooks Darwin began keeping on his return, he explored every ‘implication of evolution by natural selection, no matter how heretical. If eyes and wings could evolve without help from a designer, then why couldn’t behavior? And wasn’t religion just another type of behavior? All societies had some type of religion, and their similarities were often striking. Perhaps religion had evolved in our ancestors. As a definition of religion, Darwin jotted down, “Belief allied to instinct.”

Yet these were little more than thought experiments, speculations that distracted Darwin every now and then from his main work: discovering how evolution could produce the natural world. Darwin did experience an intense spiritual crisis during those years, but science was not the cause.

At age 39, Darwin watched his father Robert slowly die over the course of months. He thought about his father’s private doubts about religion, and he wondered what those doubts would mean to Robert in the afterlife. At the time Darwin happened to be reading a book by Coleridge called Aids to Reflection, about the nature of Christianity. Nonbelievers, Coleridge declared, should be left to suffer the wrath of God.

Robert Darwin died in November 1848. Throughout Charles’s life, his father had shown him unfailing love, financial support, and practical advice. Was Darwin now supposed to believe that his doubting father was going to be cast into eternal suffering in hell? If that were so, then many other nonbelievers, including Darwin’s brother Erasmus and many of his best friends, would follow him as well. If that was the essence of Christianity, Darwin wondered why anyone would want such a cruel doctrine to be true.

Shortly after his father’s death, Darwin’s health turned for the worse. He vomited frequently and his bowels filled with gas. He turned to hydropathy, a Victorian medical fashion in which a patient was given cold showers and steam baths and wrapped in wet sheets. He would be scrubbed until he looked “very like a lobster,” he wrote to Emma. His health improved, and his spirits rose even more when Emma discovered that she was pregnant again. In November 1850 she gave birth to their eighth child, Leonard. But within a few months death would return to Down House.

In 1849 three of the Darwin girls–Henrietta, Elizabeth, and Anne–suffered bouts of scarlet fever. While Henrietta and Elizabeth recovered, 9‑year‑old Anne remained weak. She was Darwin’s favorite, always throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him. Through 1850 Anne’s health still did not rebound. She would vomit sometimes, making Darwin worry that “she inherits, I fear with grief, my wretched digestion.” The heredity that Darwin saw shaping all of nature was now claiming his own daughter.

In the spring of 1851 Anne came down with the flu, and Darwin decided to take her to Malvern, the town where he had gotten his own water cure. He left her there with the family nurse and his doctor. But soon after, she developed a fever and Darwin rushed back to Malvern alone. Emma could not come because she was pregnant again and only weeks away from giving birth.

When Darwin arrived in Anne’s room in Malvern, he collapsed on a couch. The sight of his ill daughter was awful enough, but the camphor and ammonia in the air reminded him of his nightmarish medical school days in Edinburgh, when he had seen children operated on without anesthesia. For a week–Easter week, no less–he watched her fail, vomiting green fluids. He wrote agonizing letters to Emma. “Sometimes Dr. G. exclaims she will get through the struggle; then, I see, he doubts–Oh my own it is very bitter indeed.”

Anne died on April 23, 1851. “God bless her,” Charles wrote to Emma. “We must be more & more to each other my dear wife.”

When his father had died, Darwin had felt a numb absence. Now, when he came back to Down House, he mourned in a different way: with a bitter, rageful, Job‑like grief. “We have lost the joy of our household, and the solace of our old age,” he wrote. He called Anne a “little angel,” but the word gave him no comfort. He could no longer believe that Anne’s soul was in heaven, that her soul had survived her unjustifiable death.

It was then, 13 years after Darwin discovered natural selection, that he gave up Christianity. Many years later, when he put together an autobiographical essay for his grandchildren, he wrote, “I think generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.”

Darwin did not trumpet his agnosticism. Only by poring over his private autobiography and his letters have scholars been able to piece together the nature of his faith after Anne’s death. Darwin wrote a letter of endorsement, for example, to an American magazine called The Index, which championed what it called “free religion,” a humanistic spirituality in which the magazine claimed “lies the only hope of the spiritual perfection of the individual and the spiritual unity of the race.”

Yet when The Index asked Darwin to write a paper for them, he declined. “I do not feel that I have thought deeply enough [about religion] to justify any publicity,” he wrote to them. He knew that he was no longer a traditional Christian, but he had not sorted out his spiritual views. In an 1860 letter to Asa Gray, he wrote, “I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”

While Haeckel and others tried to use evolution to overturn conventional religion, Darwin stayed quiet. In private he complained about the way social Darwinism twisted his own work. Once, in a letter to Lyell, he wrote sarcastically, “I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather a good squib, showing that I have proved ‘might is right’ and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is also right.” But Darwin decided not to write his own spiritual manifesto. He was too private a man for that.

Despite his silence, Darwin was often pestered in his later years for his thoughts on religion. “Half the fools throughout Europe write to ask me the stupidest questions,” he groused. The inquiring letters reached deep into his most private anguish.

To strangers, his responses were much briefer than the one he had sent to Gray. To one correspondent, he simply said that when he had written Origin of Species, his own beliefs were as strong as a prelate’s. To another, he wrote that a person could undoubtedly be “an ardent theist and an evolutionist,” and pointed to Asa Gray as an example.

Yet to the end of his life, Darwin never published anything about religion. Other scientists might declare that evolution and Christianity were perfectly in harmony, and others such as Huxley might taunt bishops with agnosticism, but Darwin would not be drawn out. What he actually believed or didn’t, he said, was of “no consequence to any one but myself.”

Darwin and Emma rarely spoke about his faith after Anne’s death, but he came to rely on her more with every passing year, both to nurse him through his illnesses and to keep his spirits up. At age 71, he looked over the letter she had written to him just after they married, urging him to remember what Jesus had done for him. On the bottom he wrote, “When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed & cryed over this.”

Two years later Emma caught him in her arms when he collapsed at Down House. For the next six weeks she cared for him as he cried out to God and coughed up blood and slipped into unconsciousness. On April 19,1882, he was dead.

Emma planned to have her husband buried in the local churchyard, but Huxley and other scientists thought the nation should honor him instead. When Darwin had started as a scientist, the word scientist did not even exist yet. Natural history was butterfly collecting in the service of piety. Fifty years later scientists were society’s leaders, looking deeper every year into the workings of life itself. Westminster Abbey was not only for kings and clergy–the explorer David Livingstone was buried there, as was James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine. Colonies and industry had made England great, and so too, it was agreed, had Darwin.

A few days later Westminster Abbey filled with mourners, and Darwin’s coffin was brought to the center of the transept. A choir sang a hymn adapted from the Book of Proverbs.

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.

She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.

Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honour.

Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

Darwin was lowered into the floor of the abbey, close to Newton. Now he would be silent forever about his faith. He had left us behind, in the natural world he had unveiled. It is an ancient world, in which we are an infant species; a braided river of genes flows around us and through us, its course altered by asteroids and glaciers, by rising mountains and spreading seas. When Darwin wrote Origin of Species, he promised his readers “a grandeur in this view of life,” and life now displays far more grandeur than even Darwin appreciated. He began the exploration of this remarkable world, and he left us to walk deeper into it, without him.