In the first decade of the 19th century the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley threw down the gauntlet for what was effectively to become the great Victorian dispute about religious faith. In 1808, whilst still an Oxford undergraduate, he circulated a short pamphlet destined to become a succès de scandale entitled “The Necessity of Atheism,” there concluding that “every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.”¹ When the Origin of Species was published a half century later, it was widely understood as a properly detailed and footnoted form of support for Shelley’s youthful effusions.

Such a reading of Origin as a vindication of the atheist argument did not seem an unreasonable inference because Darwin habitually opposed those around him who argued for the theory of theistic evolution. Some, like Harvard’s Louis Agassiz and geologist Sir Charles Lyell argued that a conception of God as the first cause behind adaptation and variation was no less theistic than it was to suppose that that a supreme power had created an immutable world in an original spurt of creation. But such a view of evolution clearly did not correspond with the kind of natural selection postulated by Darwin, and so he would not countenance it. To any dissenters he would say that if it were to be worthy of its name, natural selection must work autonomously without requiring any divine engagement.

To Believe or Not to Believe

Darwin’s youthful faith seems to have been undermined by what he saw as the non-directed and godless processes of geological and biological evolution. Hence, like French cosmologist Laplace before him, Darwin had at length come to have no more need of the God hypothesis. Or had he? There are indications that the matter is not so cut-and-dried. At a number of stages throughout his life Darwin revealed himself to be a rather irresolute figure much given to the practice of what the French call double esprit. His frequently divided state of mind could even give him the appearance of a latter-day Pyrrho, the ancient Greek philosopher who doubted whether mankind had adequate grounds for claiming any knowledge with absolute certainty. So for instance in his later decades he even began to harbor doubts about the efficacy of his proud pièce de résistance, natural selection, with its claimed capacity to create the whole spectrum of the world’s life forms autonomously. Could such a positive and creative process, he asked himself, have been set in train by such a negative phenomenon as natural selection, an entity which Darwin, at the behest of many well-intentioned friends, unwillingly consented to revise downwards to reconceptualize in more modest terms as “natural preservation”? 

The trouble with the latter revision was that notions of evolutionary innovation in terms of improved or new body parts seemed now to be logically indefensible since mere preservation, by definition, cannot produce the kind of physiological innovation which could spawn a host of different species. Darwin would have had to conclude that by making this concession he was being obliged to abandon what he had always thought of as the limitless creative force of his theory and being forced into a resigned acceptance that natural selection might have little or no motive force at all. It was simply not a true vera causa. That conclusion must have been found devastating by him since it absolutely annulled his whole theory — a conclusion often tactfully (or evasively) overlooked in most present-day discussions. It is then hardly surprising that, after publication of the Origin in November 1859, Darwin began casting around for supplementary theories to bolster natural selection, even reverting to once anathematized evolutionary ideas such as the Lamarckian/Erasmian idea of the relative use/disuse of organs as a co-determinant of biological development. For Darwin, it seemed, there was no such thing as a last word.

Darwin’s Christian Legacy 

A similar ambivalence can be observed in his attitude towards his Christian upbringing where he often exhibited what has been well described as an “epistemological double vision.”² In his earlier years Darwin’s faith had been unexceptionably orthodox, firmly rooted in the dogmas and externals of the Christian faith.³ In modern parlance that form of faith might be termed literalism or fundamentalism in contradistinction to that variety apt to listen attentively to the still small voice within. Hence in his twenties, when aboard the Beagle on his South American expedition, he would routinely have recourse to what was termed “proof- texting” (seeking quotable support from the Bible) in disputes with his shipmates — some of whom thought he came over as rather tediously bibliolatrous on account of this habit. Yet on his return to dry land his mindset appeared to change. For in the later 1830s when the German Higher Criticism was beginning to percolate into Britain and undermine literalist beliefs, he started to be assailed by doubts about the veracity of the very Scripture from which he had once so confidently quoted in defense of his views.

At this middle stage of his life, still clinging to the literalist perspective, he thought the Old Testament with its Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign of future hope and other such marvels were simply presenting a false picture of the historical record. Miracles of any sort, he was beginning to conclude, should be regarded as unbelievable in the light of what science had discovered about the unvarying laws of nature. In this regard his attitude was conspicuously at variance with many of the intellectual elite in British society who noticed the same Biblical anomalies as Darwin but interpreted them very differently. As Church historian Nick Spencer has observed, “Doubting the veracity of the Bible was almost a pastime of Victorian intellectuals,”⁴ but the more sophisticated among their number were able to decode and “demythologize” Biblical miracles, essentially reframing them and interpreting them in a rhetorical and allegorical light. Such was certainly the case with Darwin’s geological mentor and inspiration, Sir Charles Lyell, a staunch Anglican parishioner who remained serenely unperturbed that his geological researches did not align with the Biblical record. Darwin himself, on the other hand, remained behind the curve of such developments in theological thinking, rather like Sir Leslie Stephen who lost his faith in the 1860s when he was no longer able to accept as literal truth the Biblical account of the Flood and Noah’s Ark.⁵

Of Floods, Arks, and Myths

The Biblical account of the deluge had once been viewed literally by Bishop Ussher of Armagh⁶ in the very early 18th century when — with some preternatural precision — he dated it to 2349 BC by using numbers in Genesis at face value. In the early decades of the 19th century, on the other hand, few British naturalists and geologists believed in the story of a universal flood because they had begun to interpret Genesis allegorically. It was for instance well known that a flood in lower Mesopotamia was a common event when the Euphrates river in spate would overflow the land towards the lower Tigris, which also often broke its banks. There were known to be numerous flood stories in the ancient Near East circulating orally in travelers’ tales along the great caravan routes of Asia.⁷ A Noah-like figure was present under the name of Atrahasis in other versions and when the tablets which constitute the Epic of Gilgamesh were discovered in 1872⁸, it was discovered that the flood-surviving patriarch in the Sumerian version was named Uta-na’ishtin. 

Although the geological record does not throw up evidence of a universal flood, that does not of course mean that such a phenomenon could not be very convincingly evoked to further the unknown narrator’s moral and homiletic purposes. This was essentially the sophisticated understanding of the account held by those with “advanced opinions” in the mid 19th century. Darwin, by contrast, remained caught up in old ways of thinking opposed by the progressive trend which would eventually lead to Rudolf Bultmann⁹ and the 20th-century trend towards demythologization. Darwin’s laggardness in this regard was in fact gently pointed out to him by his wife, Emma, when she counselled him not to expect the same standards of literal truth in religion as he sought in science — but to no avail. 

Myth and Mythography

Demythologization was not the unheralded conception of the 20th-century German theologian Rudolf Bultmann that it is sometimes thought to be. In fact, it had a very ancient pedigree. The first-century Biblical scholar Philo of Alexandria was an early practitioner of such an allegorical method of Biblical exegesis. Philo and other Alexandrians believed that seemingly unremarkable everyday events or narratives might nevertheless contain a deeper, symbolic meaning expressive of an eternal, Platonic idea. Such narrative events contained within themselves a hidden dimension of meaning which transcended their historical and chronological situation.¹⁰ In Darwin’s own day there were even lively debates on the question of a possible universal mythology complementary to and possibly supportive of the Christian faith, as Colin Kidd has documented in a volume devoted to what he terms Britain’s Wars of Mythography.¹¹

In the course of that debate there emerged many surprisingly latitudinarian instances of ecumenical outreach. Some scholars and divines were even inclined to see in aspects of paganism a form of “encoded Christianity “which could be usefully appealed to as a form of “collateral apologetics.” Samuel Horsley, Bishop of St. Asaph (Wales), contended that sometimes paganism was not simply false but rather a worthy but distorted version of Biblical truth. There also grew up a tendency to see the ancient Greek Pandora story and classical myths of a Golden Age of innocence as “distorted” memories of the Fall. The Garden of Eden, meanwhile, was respectfully placed in apposition with the Garden of the Hesperides. For many there even arose the hope that pagan mythology might be able provide oblique corroboration from a once unanticipated quarter for the threatened truths of Christianity by showing that Scripture had a supportive hinterland of supplementary evidence. Many in their enthusiasm were prepared to overlook the fact that “collateral apologetics lacked any defining litmus test which distinguished between reliable evidences and mere whimsy.”¹²

Whatever the precise truth of such mythographic parallels, it is clear that open-minded 19th-century thinking had a liberating effect on theological thought at the approach to the 20th century by increasing the potential number of pathways which might lead people to knowledge of God. Hence in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)¹³, American philosopher William James defended the position that religious experiences, not creeds, were the more important factor in people’s spiritual lives. All else he deemed to be supererogatory outgrowths — theologies, philosophies, ecclesiastical organizations, and the like. In Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917),¹⁴the German theologian defined God as an awe-inducing, “numinous” power, something ganz andere (wholly different) from normal categories of human experience — a presence which can be apprehended but not defined in precise conceptual terms. 

Such a conception of what is essentially natural theology was not unfamiliar to Darwin himself following his study of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) in his university days. There is even evidence that the younger Darwin’s explorations in South America aboard the Beagle produced in him a more directly mystical awareness of Nature’s divine disclosures. On one occasion he was moved to describe a primeval forest as “a temple filled with the varied products of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”¹⁵ His response to the boundless tracts of untamed nature in South America seems remarkably similar to the recent response elicited by Pastor Adrian Bailey in his book Why Darwin Matters to Christians. Bailey there describes a questionnaire distributed to his parishioners from which he received the following response to one of the questions asking people when they felt closest to God. What emerged was that the world of nature was far more significant in their feeling close to God than more obviously religious things such as attending church services, receiving Holy Communion, praying, or reading the Bible.”¹⁶

Oedipal Conflicts

In view of his unprompted and positive response to his experience of the numinous in the primeval forests of South America in the early 1830s, it cannot be completely surprising that the Darwin who to all appearances set so much store by his theory of naturalistic creation/evolution was nevertheless capable of writing to a correspondent towards the end of his life of

the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.¹⁷

But why did Darwin remain so riven on matters to do with religion? The early biography shows that the young Darwin proved himself rather feckless by the demanding standards of his stern but indulgent father, Robert. Robert Darwin was naturally disappointed when his son threw up the possibilities of careers both in medicine and the Church, fearing his son might become a mere loafer interested only in countryside recreations. Yet the greater tension Charles experienced was not on account of having let down his father but rather a nagging feeling of rivalry with his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a larger-than-life figure who was both physician, scientist, poet and — despite an unprepossessing appearance — prolific ladies’ man. The priapic Erasmus Darwin was undoubtedly what we would call an alpha male, not just sexually but, more significantly, philosophically, where he had developed a particularly arrogant and aggressive position derived from Enlightenment thinking. As the late Roy Porter observed, it was Erasmus Darwin whose “man-centered view of man making himself” resulted in his “Promethean vision of infinite possibilities. God had become a distant cause of causes; what counted was man acting in Nature.”¹⁸

It was Erasmus Darwin who had first put forward the idea of evolution, but he was unable to prove it. This was why, out of a spirit of family piety and/or emulation, Charles was so delighted to be able to identify (or confabulate) the supposed mechanism of natural selection. This discovery, he hoped, would justify and support what his grandfather had been able to advance only as theory. The trouble was that for Erasmus Darwin, evolution and atheism were indissolubly linked. The boisterous Erasmus was far more prone to gratuitous displays of atheistical dissent than was his retiring grandson. This was clearly shown in a minor controversy caused in his home town of Lichfield which arose from the grandfather’s provocative inscription embossed on the exterior of his coach. The offending words, E Conchis Omnia (everything comes from seashells) suggested rather too unambiguously to many orthodox believers that humans had originally developed from creatures crawling along sea beds¹⁹ (and public pressure forced him to erase the offending words).

The younger Darwin (who, it may be recalled, decisively resisted the embraces of atheist freethinkers in the 1870s) was not of the same stripe as his grandfather in that regard. To be sure, he had striven to fulfil and complete his grandfather’s philosophical program but never seemed totally at ease with the atheistical entailments that this implied.Towards the end of his life he had to acknowledge that he was not completely convinced of his own theory and that behind natural selection, he obscurely suspected, might lie something that Thomas Huxley termed a “wider teleology” hidden from humankind. He seems finally to have come to commit himself to what I would term a form of pious agnosticism, and eventually died with that unresolved tension still plaguing him.

The Debate Updated

Finally, let us turn back to the debate about God. In the last few weeks a symposium on the subject of theism and atheism has been published in an agreeably accessible viva voce format. It takes the form of essays and questions-and-answers put by theists and non-theists alike with contributors as diverse as Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.²⁰ In line with that general format, one of the questions posed by the editor to Richard Swinburne (emeritus professor of theology at Oxford) goes like this:

According to many atheists, the universe is a brute fact. There is no God and we’re extremely lucky that the laws of nature provide the conditions for the development of intelligent life. Why is it, Richard, that you think your explanation of the universe is more appealing?

Viewing that as an open question (and of course leaving Swinburne to answer for himself in the advertised volume) I would put forward the following answer not exclusively on formal theological grounds but on the basis of a number of points made above.

After the invention of the electron microscope in 1944, microbiological research has been able to show us that Nature’s generative programs are constructed in a subtly coded web of what are transparently purposeful (not chance) biological imperatives. Those imperatives (and their genesis) remain almost entirely resistant to human fathoming. Darwinism’s unavailing attempts to explain away these huge complexities — to the extent of denying that the mysteries of life are mysteries any longer — serve only to show up more starkly the intractable nature of the problem they fail to solve. When put together with the curveball thrown at us by what is routinely termed quantum weirdness (i.e., Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), there seems precious little hope of solving the proverbial mystery of life, the universe, and everything. In the face of the last century of decidedly counterintuitive scientific discoveries at the quantum level, we have come to realize that over-ambitious expectations stemming from the Enlightenment’s rationalist dream of encompassing the whole of reality in some grand materialist theory of everything is now dispelled.²¹ 

The Enlightenment has without doubt given us incalculably valuable boons to the extent that we may be tempted to idolize it as the very crown of civilization’s slow advance over millennia, but it would surely be wrong to indulge its would-be alpha-male fantasies of omnipotence and its conviction that it had found or at least would presently find all the answers. On the contrary, the ultimate answer, whatever it may be, seems to lie way outside logical, anthropomorphic categories of understanding altogether — and to pretend otherwise contradicts common observation and experience. Such a circumstance points, pace Shelley, more towards the necessity of theism than to that of atheism, a truth of which Darwin was always aware at some profounder level of his apprehension.

Notes

1. https://archive.org/details/thenecessityofatheismbyperceybyssheshelley, p. 3
2. The phrase is that of Neal Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979).
3. Nick Spencer, Darwin and God (London: SPCK, 2009), p. 43.
4. Spencer, Darwin and God, p. 42.
5. See Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen, the Godless Victorian (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 45. 
6. The same cleric who dated the beginning of the world to 4004 BC.
7. See Stephanie Dalley’s Introduction to Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh and Others, revised version (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
8. David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
9. Cf. Jesus Christ and Mythology (reprint, London: SPCK, 1970).
10. See Karen Armstrong, The Bible: The Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), pp. 47-8.
11. Colin Kidd, The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography 1700-1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 2016).
12. Kidd, World of Mr Casaubon, p. 69.
13. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, edited by Martin S. Marty (London: Penguin, 1982).
14. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. J. Harvey (Oxford: OUP), 1958.
15. This point was noted and discussed by A. D. Martin in his The Religion of Wordsworth (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936), pp. 14-16.
16. Adrian Bailey, Why Darwin Matters to Christians (Shrewsbury: YouCaxton, 2011), p. 5.
17. Charles Darwin to John Fordyce, May 7, 1879, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 12040, University of Cambridge, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCPLETT-12040.xml. 24.
18. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 445.
19. One is here reminded irresistibly of Richard Dawkins paying to have atheistic messages emblazoned on the sides of London buses a couple of decades ago.
20. Philosophers on God: Talking about Existence, edited by Jack Symes (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).
21. See on this point Marcus du Sautoy, What We Cannot Know: From Consciousness to the Cosmos (London: Fourth Estate, 2017) and Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey To Quantum Gravity (London: Penguin, 2016).