With all the discussion of Charles Darwin's bicentennial over the last year, we kept hearing about the conflict between evolution and religion. It sometimes seems that the entire question of whether religion is reasonable turns on whether evolution happened, and the entire question of whether to accept that evolution happened depends on whether one wants to reject the existence of God. In these polarized discussions, it is worth asking why, if he believed evolution happened, wasn't Darwin an atheist?
When he first embarked upon understanding the origin of species, ""that mystery of mysteries,"" as he called it, Darwin was still a mainstream Anglican Christian. And, while he eventually adopted an agnostic stance, there is no evidence that this was a result of his scientific work. Indeed he was explicit in stating that he saw no way in which the truth of evolution would have any relevance to the question of the existence of God. When asked to advise a correspondent, Mrs. Mary Boole, who was struggling with her religious beliefs, Darwin replied: ""But I cannot see how the belief that all organic beings, including man, have been genetically derived from some simple being, instead of having been separately created bears on your difficulties.""
Given all the suggestions that Darwinism is incompatible, with religion, it is a shame more people do not understand the underlying motivations that led Darwin to develop his theories. In seeking a natural explanation for biological diversity, Darwin was no more seeking to disprove God than was Isaac Newton when he proposed his laws of motion. Given that Darwin and Newton had basically the same mission, it is somewhat mysterious that Darwinian evolution, but not Newtonian physics is seen as being at odds with religion.
Newton and the other participants in the scientific revolution sought natural, law-like explanations for phenomena. Prior to Newton there were no unified explanations for motions of different objects. All one could conclude was that each moving object, whether a planet or cannonball, was doing so through the intervention of God. Newtonian physics was not intended to replace God but merely to provide a medium through which God acts: the laws of motion.
By positing descent from common ancestry and proposing a natural mechanism of change over time, Darwin offered for biology what the physical scientists had already largely achieved. And Darwin was fully aware of the parallels, as is clear in his 1844 essay: ""For my own part I could no more admit the former proposition [that different Rhinoceros species were separately created] than I could admit that the planets move in their courses, and that a stone falls to the ground, not through the intervention of the secondary and appointed law of gravity, but from the direct volition of the Creator.""
Why is evolutionary biology but not physics painted with the brush of anti-religion? In each case one can either hold that God created natural laws to do much of the work of running the universe, or alternatively that the natural laws just ""are."" While there may be other good reasons why Darwin might have chosen the latter, atheistic path, the impetus could not come from the science of evolutionary biology per se. Darwin's scientific discoveries did not lead directly to atheism any more than did Newton's. The perception of a mismatch between evolution and religion is actually not a conflict between evolution and religion, but between evolution and one way of interpreting a few passages of ancient Hebrew. Equally the lack of perceived conflict between Newtonian physics is not because it is any more compatible with beliefs in the existence of a deity, but due to the Bible's lack of any discussion of the physics of motion.
In this week of celebration of the 201st birthday of Charles Darwin, let's not forget that evolutionary biology is just one small corner of the scientific edifice and that, while endlessly fascinating and challenging, it should bear no special place in the broader debate over science and religion.
David Baum is a professor of botany, chair of the botany department and director of the J.F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution. We welcome all feedback. Please send all responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
