I am not the first to pose that question.¹ Two decades ago John Angus Campbell of the University of Memphis asked the selfsame question, attributing many persons’ acceptance of Darwinian postulates to the author’s rhetorical and persuasive arts laced with his accessibly folksy analogies with agricultural practices familiar to most of his first readers from Britain’s pre-industrial past:

No more than Plato did Darwin have positive knowledge about the origin of species. What he did have was a sense of what seemed to him (after years of study) likely, and of how to make his ideas seem at least less unlikely to others by turning seemingly small concessions from the reader into larger ones [Campbell is here referring to persuasion by small but ascending steps]. Further, he repeatedly reminds his reader that his case is simply an application on a grander scale of principles everyone recognizes in stock breeding [the analogy, it may be noted in passing, denounced by Alfred Russel Wallace and other contemporaries for being an invalid comparison].²

There is much to be learned from Campbell’s dense argumentation about Darwin’s PR tactics, but my approach will address what I believe to be the deeper issue of how Darwin appeals to, exploits, and ultimately endorses the changing religious mindset of his Victorian readers. This was a subject about which Darwin knew much from his own wrestling with the Christian faith and with the closely related issue of whether the Bible should be read literally or not. Darwin shared with his readers a sense of disquiet about traditional creeds and appears to have identified that disquiet as a factor which he could instrumentalize to give him an advantage in gaining acceptance for his naturalistic views.

The German Challenge 

For by the later 1830s educated people in England and far beyond its borders had experienced some truly convulsive existential tremors beneath their feet. The German Higher Criticism was undermining literalist beliefs and trampling on many conventional pieties. Darwin in company with many of his intended readers — such being literate persons capable of reading and understanding the arguments of Origin — were beginning to harbor doubts about the literal veracity of the books of the Bible. Even as Darwin wrote, the Garden of Eden and with it Adam and Eve, the Temptation and Fall of Man and his Redemption, were being sharply interrogated as to their veridical status.

The upshot of such questioning was that those who could not find it in their hearts and minds to reinterpret the more rationally rebarbative parts of the Bible symbolically and allegorically via that process a later generation would dub “demythologization” found their faith sorely tested. Such was the case for instance with Sir Leslie Stephen whose lapse of faith in the 1860s was reportedly due to his inability to accept all the narrative minutiae surrounding the tradition of the Noachian Deluge. Darwin too, still bound by the literalist perspective, 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 concluded, should be regarded as unbelievable in the light of what science had discovered about the unvarying laws of nature. 

Divine Creation? Heaven Forfend! 

It was that viewpoint which he presupposed from and occasionally attempted to enforce upon his readership. A notable instance of the latter occurs in the context of Darwin’s confessing to a lack of evidence for intermediate forms in the fossil record (which alone could prove an evolutionary trajectory). Even if transitional grades are entirely absent, however, Darwin insists that they are at least conceivable. This was no easy sell and, as Campbell commented, “when the going gets particularly tough, Darwin will set up a sudden-death choice between his theory — the transitions must have existed — and the idea that science itself is at an end, since the only alternative is immediate divine creation.”³

That of course is not rhetoric but bullying. The zero-sum game Darwin was playing with his readers, though couched in more oblique and courteous terms than those favored by his latter-day disciple, Richard Dawkins, essentially amounted to a similar challenge to them to either accept Darwin’s naturalistic explanations (absent fossils or no) or remain behind the curve — marooned in the “Pentateuchal” theology of Genesis, so to speak. The Biblical version, as we know, describes the etiology of each and every species as the product of special Creation. Darwin on the other hand was administering a heavy hint that he was providing an up-to-date and superior explanation more consonant with the intellectual requirements of a secularizing age, his softly spoken but firm exhortation being that his readers should simply get with the program.

Who Is God?

No chivvying or haranguing was required of Darwin, however, in the case of another factor of Victorian experience which may have inclined his readers in the author’s direction. That was the growing mood of disaffection for the Bible or more precisely the Old Testament on moral grounds. No few persons had begun to feel repulsed by Old Testament ethics, finding them impossible to reconcile with the true spirit of Christianity as they construed it.

Tellingly, a decade before Darwin eventually published Origin, historian James Henry Froude wrote The Nemesis of Faith (1849) in which he raised similar troubling questions such as, How could anyone worship a God who sanctioned the massacre of the Canaanites? What was to be made of a God who commanded child sacrifice, only to retract the command, as exemplified in the Abraham/Isaac story? It was doubtless against such a backdrop that Darwin would rather starkly confide to his diary that he was not sure why anybody would even wish Biblical religion to be true.⁴ It seems probable that at least a portion of his readership would have been tempted to think along similar lines.

Classical Coincidences 

By an initially surprising historical quirk of fate, some disaffected Victorian Britons were beginning to find themselves living mentally and emotionally in an existential world uncomfortably reminiscent of that inhabited by the ancient philosophers Epicurus and his Roman disciple, Lucretius. Both those philosophers are conventionally grouped within the “atomist” school of ancient thinking, best known for its spinning the somewhat far-fetched materialist fantasy that life had come about by chance by dint of nothing more than serendipitous collocations of atoms. For Epicurus and Lucretius, the answer to the world’s awe-inducing complexity was to be sought not in a once-and-for-all divine creation but in different shapes and objects generated at random. Plants and animals had simply emerged via an extended process of trial-and-error reminiscent of what Darwin would later term natural selection. Darwin’s largely random process of evolution had in fact long before 1859 been posited as being responsible for the appearance of all Earth’s sentient species. In some cases, speculated the ancient authors, that evolutionary journey had been unsuccessful, resulting in creatures not properly equipped to compete for resources or to produce offspring. Such creatures were destined to extinction, in contradistinction to vigorous and perfectly formed specimens able to adapt and reproduce — a contention which seems for all the world like an Urtext for Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

In later antiquity the Lucretian explanatory model found itself pitted against the Aristotelian/Christian conception of ultimate reality. It is therefore no coincidence that the atomist position has been taken up by modern cosmologists such as Lawrence Krauss who defend the counterintuitive “universe from nothing” thesis.⁵ And they do so for precisely the same reason as the ancient atomists. As classical historian David Sedley observed, atomism as instrumentalized by Epicurus and his successors was “a vital weapon against divine creation.”⁶ Truly, there does not seem to be anything new under the sun.

Battling the Gods

Why did the ancient philosophers feel such animosity towards the gods? A large hint in that direction can be found in Homeric epic where, notoriously, the gods and goddesses are represented as little more than fallible humans writ large. They had the same vices as their mortal counterparts and had little enough to do with the later human tendency to project moral ideals into the non-finite and unconditioned realm imagined to be that of the divine. Lucretius contended that the gods inspired fear rather than allegiance and were more to be propitiated than venerated. Such was for instance the infamous case in Homeric tradition of Agamemnon, whose fear of the goddess Artemis caused him to sacrifice his own daughter at the goddess’s whim in order to secure a favorable wind for his fleet’s sea voyage to Troy. 

Epicurus was then an atheist in the original sense of the word of being an “anti-theist,” one who rejected the baleful and destructive values of the Greek pantheon. His was more a declaration of war against the flawed moral nature of the gods (technically termed “theomachy”) than it was a statement of outright disbelief (a-theism). Nobody “channeled” or gave a better snapshot of the Epicurean mindset than Richard Dawkins when he paid to have the following message emblazoned on London buses some two decades ago: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Many Londoners at the time were bemused and prompted to ask themselves what precisely they might have to be “worried” about. The sentiment seemed more than a little anachronistic.⁷ It is as if we were all living in the time of Epicurus where conceptions of the gods as capricious, amoral, and even hostile to humankind were commonly held. 

Victorians and the Prehistoric Past

When standing next to the dolmens and menhirs at Stonehenge, Avebury, Pentre Ifan in Wales or Skarra Bray and the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands, it is natural for us moderns to wonder about these ancient peoples and their belief systems. When 17th-century antiquaries such as John Aubrey (1626-97) began to suggest theories for Stonehenge, the floodgates of speculation were truly opened. Evidence is obviously not plentiful in the case of preliterate settlements, so that it would seem rather too much like a case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread to claim any certainty on this issue. But from what some archaeologists have deduced, the attitude of our remote ancestors to their god(s) could be negative and essentially placatory rather than worshipful. Pastor Adrian Bailey has this to state about anti-theodicean sentiments simmering in what he terms the megalithic world,

Was God a monster to have allowed life to develop with all its attendant suffering? Megalithic religion had a very simple answer to this question: Yes.⁸

Cambridge professor Tim Whitmarsh once complained that our modern ignorance of the classical heritage has allowed a “modernist mythology” to take hold which has led to the mistaken belief that 18th- and 19th-century Europeans were the first to ponder evolutionary matters or “do battle” with the gods.⁹ However, and to add to Whitmarsh’s point, it appears to me that prehistoric peoples too are equally important witnesses in the development of religious consciousness, and the albeit tenuous clues we have about them indicates that some of their attitudes must have predated those arising in ancient Greece by some millennia.

What we refer to as atomism, then, was clearly no isolated philosophical interlude in world history. As historian of world religions Mircea Eliade noted, “in many cases the customs and beliefs of European peasants represent a more archaic state of culture than that documented in the mythology of Classic Greece.”¹⁰ This point was in fact well documented in Dorothy Carrington’s classic study of mores and folkways on the historically isolated island of ancient Corsica.¹¹ Even after the belated penetration of Christianity as the official religion there, Carrington records, there was a tendency to incorporate older beliefs into the new, official religion. Such a syncretic system typically “retains a cosmic structure that has been almost entirely lost in the experience of urban Christians.”¹²

Prehistoric and ancient Greek conceptions alike were of course eventually superseded by the Judeo-Christian view of God as being supportive of humankind — although it was a slow process and the Old Testament itself appears to me in historical terms to have been something of a transitional document. For it seems there are many instances of a “megalithic” view of God there as being capricious or even malevolent and the newer, more positive view of the divine only makes its full appearance in the books of the prophets. Even today we have only to scratch beneath the surface to find evidence of older ways of thought. Bailey puts the matter as baldly as this:

Why should megalithic religion be so hard to extirpate? Essentially because people feel it is true to their experience, that there is no inbuilt justice in the universe or natural world.¹³

That the theodicean hurdle is still a significant challenge for us today is shown in the recent dialogue between Jack Symes and Stephen Law on the subject of Law’s controversial “symmetry thesis,” meaning that the evidence for a benign God is more or less equal to that which would point to a malign one.¹⁴

Polygenesis

It was noted above that for Epicurus external nature amounted to little more than a series of emergent combinations and recombinations driven by contingent occurrences (that fuzzy and ill-understood process even today described entirely nebulously as “complexification”). It was further noted that such notions antedate by millennia Darwinian conceptions of spontaneous generation (abiogenesis)¹⁵ and the survival of the fittest. It should, however, be stressed that Darwin did not “plagiarize” such ideas of classical philosophy because by his own admission he was no scholar and he had no access to those writings in the original Greek and Latin. It might therefore be fairer to claim, with Rebecca Stott, that if Darwin had read the ancients, “he might have recognized in parts of Aristotle’s writings and in corners of Epicurus, Democritus and Empedocles the glimmerings of thoughts and questionings that were remarkably similar to his own.”¹⁶ It is more than possible that Darwin could have been innocent of ancient sources altogether, especially since history tells us that ideas in different times and cultures can arise independently or polygenetically to use the term favored by anthropologists.

It goes without saying that the ancient peoples of Stonehenge, Carnac, the Ring of Brodgar, and others could have known nothing of the Greek and Latin authors. It seems then that what Whitmarsh refers to as battling the gods (theomachy) is to a much greater extent than is commonly acknowledged a phenomenon which is consubstantial with the human condition itself. No “influences” need be sought by the deployment of laborious scholarship and research. By the same token it appears that a growing number of persons in Victorian Britain, like many of their far distant ancestors in times out of mind, were often tempted to close their account with the divine, so to speak. It was because Darwinism appealed to that growing mindset of disaffection and uncertainty that people were tempted to try to understand the world by the use of exclusively secular criteria. This resigned cessation of a quest for a First Cause may help to explain why an evolutionary theory at first judged by most competent science reviewers to be scientifically unviable¹⁷ was nevertheless able to achieve the status of shibboleth it later acquired and still largely enjoys to this day.

Lost Belief and Half Belief

It seems clear that neither Victorians nor their present day successors “believe” Darwin in anything like the full-on evangelical sense. Their lukewarm assent might better be described as a form of half-belief, to borrow the term chosen by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to describe 17th-century people’s attitude to the witch craze of their day.¹⁸ For when people have professed to believe in Darwin it has sometimes been on the “rebound” from a disappointed faith. This resigned acceptance of Darwinism points to a pervasive cry of dereliction — the cri de coeur of many persons prepared to accept the accumulated improbabilities of Darwinism only after losing faith in religious avenues of explanation and consolation. If this left out of account any final-cause thinking and so offended the strict logic of cause and effect, “So be it” seems to have been many Victorians’ way of thinking.

People had despaired of being able to solve the proverbial mystery of mysteries and simply decided to quarantine it or “kick it into touch” to use the sporting metaphor, falling back on agnosticism as an albeit unquiet refuge. Perhaps after some two centuries of that absentee landlord form of religion termed deism, few had any more faith in the possibility of an interventionist God. So for lack of any better choices, they found themselves with no other option than to accept an unsatisfying placeholder explanation, however rationally flimsy or even unbelievable it appeared. Better a pseudo-explanation than blank ignorance: it was only in this heavily caveated form that people “believed” in Darwinism. Essentially it was an instance of Trevor-Roper’s “half-belief.” Hence with hindsight we might say that Darwin played only the somewhat ambiguous role of minor catalyst in a larger European trend towards what is blandly termed secularization but which in truth amounted to people’s traumatizing loss of the faith cherished by their immediate ancestors. 

Notes

1. “Why Was Darwin Believed? Darwin’s Origin and the Problem of Intellectual Revolution,” Configurations 11 (2003), pp. 203-237. My title uses the terms has been to prevent electronic retrieval systems experiencing confusion with Campbell’s title.
2. Campbell, p. 225. Wallace pointed out to Darwin that selection by breeders was a matter of intelligent design whereas “selection” by nature itself could not in the very nature of things be so intelligent. Darwin subsequently climbed down to concede that what he had really meant was only “natural preservation” rather than an actively discriminating force (a concession which all but annulled his initial argument).
3. Campbell, “Why Was Darwin Believed?” pp. 225-6.
4. The Life of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), p. 87.
5. See Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
6. David Sedley, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (California: California UP, 2008), p. 134.
7. As Oxford mathematics professor John Lennox noted, “I do not associate the existence of God as much with worry but with joy.” See Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2011), p. 12.
8. Adrian Bailey, Why Darwin Matters to Christians (Shrewsbury: Youcaxton, 2011), p. 43.
9. Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (London: Faber and Faber, 2016), pp.11-12.
10. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1959), p. 164.
11. Dorothy Carrington, Granite Island: A Portrait of Corsica (London: Penguin, 1984), especially Chapters 3 and 4.
12. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, p. 166.
13. Bailey, Why Darwin Matters to Christians, p. 43.
14. Stephen Law, “The Evil-God Challenge” in Philosophers on God: Talking about Existence, edited by Jack Symes (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 103-118.
15. Darwin once fantasized about this matter in a letter concerning a small, warm pond which he thought might (theoretically) be able to give rise to life forms by unknown chemical combinations.
16. Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (London: Bloomsbury), p. 40.
17. See David L. Hull, Darwin and his Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the Scientific Community (Chicago; Chicago UP, 1973).
18. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch Craze of the Seventeenth Century (London: Penguin, 1967).