The tension Charles Darwin felt between his views on evolution and the record of the Bible is well enough known, this having been a symptom of a mind more generally troubled by self-doubt, a feature which over time was to become a settled personality trait. In his Autobiography Darwin writes of the “fluctuations” in his mind occurring when he pondered religious matters. When writing the Origin of Species, he confides, his belief in the Christian God had been “strong” but then he adds,

But then arises the doubt — can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such large conclusions?¹

This shows a profound skepticism about the abilities of humankind which may ultimately have derived from his grandfather’s reductive conception of humans as having “evolved” from small aquatic creatures on the seabed.² Philosophically it deserves the label “pyrrhonist” after the ancient Greek thinker Pyrrho, who saw no adequate grounds for claiming any knowledge or belief with any degree of certainty. In what follows I pose the question of how and why Darwin fell subject to such wide “fluctuations” in his convictions and beliefs and how he came to resolve those tensions. 

Genesis

It is something of a best kept secret (so seldom is it adverted to officially) that Darwin’s evolutionary thinking was vitiated from the start by the insuperable obstacle that he had no idea about how life on earth first appeared — beyond notoriously vague musings about mysterious chemical reactions in a small, warm pond. Yet this guess hardly represented any advance on ancient Greek speculations by Anaximander (611-547 BC) and his follower Anaximenes (588-542 BC) who both conjectured that life must have emerged from primeval slime.³

The lack of evidence for this conjecture might seem like a hard-to-ignore elephant lying on the floor of the evolutionary laboratory, yet Darwin succeeded in turning a blind eye to such disabling difficulties — proceeding straight to omega without knowing anything about alpha, so to speak. In his trans-Atlantic exchange of letters with theistic evolutionist Asa Gray at Harvard, for instance, Darwin claimed that his theory of natural selection could satisfactorily explain the entire development of terrestrial life without the need to invoke any supernatural agency. All was held to be readily explicable in purely material terms. However, this was not to be quite the end of the story. Darwin’s later doubts about his own theory of natural selection (he would latterly even invoke a form of supplementary Lamarckism) would give rise to a rumor which began to swirl about Darwin some four decades after his death.

The Legend of Darwin’s Deathbed (Re)Conversion

As noted above, Darwin’s biography reveals him to have been a retiring and diffident personality, and his second thoughts on the subject of evolution may have encouraged the legend of his ultimate reconversion to the Christian faith. Thirty years ago, James Moore made a special study of the legend⁴ which began to circulate only in 1915. Its originator was one Elizabeth Cotton, an evangelical Christian known as Lady Hope after her marriage to a minor Scottish aristocrat. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1913 and settled in California. 

The story she told in America did not concern a deathbed conversion as such but rather her purported claim to have met Darwin at Down House in his later years. In her reported interview with him she claimed that Darwin had uttered pious words about the Bible and regretted the intellectual follies of his earlier years. In his magisterial work of sleuthing, Moore (in tandem with Darwin’s own descendants) found little merit in Lady Hope’s account, yet my sense is that her reminiscences, whether fabricated or not, might still point towards a larger truth. For we do not need to depend on urban legends of dubious veracity to perceive that some of Darwin’s earlier convictions underwent extensive modification over time (the five revisions of his Origin of Species alone bear witness to that fact).

Darwin Versus the Secularists         

One result of the publishing success of the Origin of Species was that its author had come to appear to some militant secularists as a tacit supporter of their cause. On one occasion in the late 1870s two representatives of the developing British secularist movement came to solicit Darwin’s support for their cause, but Darwin turned them down.⁵ In fact it appears that he maintained to the end of his days a significant residue of his earlier Christian faith and it is significant that in later years he was capable of calling himself a theist.⁶ Scholars have of course noted this divided outlook. Neal Gillespie once referred to Darwin’s “epistemological double vision.”⁷ Yet I would query the explanatory sufficiency of even that striking phrase since it seems a little too binary to do justice to the complexity of Darwin’s philosophical thinking. It seems to me that more “unpacking” needs to be done; for a closer analysis reveals that Darwin was wont to view his world through the prism of a curiously triple epistemological understanding, this of course being a fractured way of looking at the world which often made a unitary understanding of life difficult for him.

A fundamental problem with what even Darwin himself admitted were his sometimes-confused musings on the larger issues of life was that he typically derived his philosophical viewpoints not by dint of independent analysis but from the thinking of others. This inevitably made it awkward for him to integrate divergent intellectual influences into a consistent interior narrative which might afford him clarity of mind. We can identify a trio of major influences on Darwin’s thought. First was his professional preoccupation with evolution as mediated to him by his grandfather. Secondly, the Christian Bible in which he was instructed in his youth and from which he was still wont to quote liberally to fellow mariners aboard the Beagle in the 1830s. And finally, in contradistinction to those first two influences, his third mode of engaging with reality was personal to himself. It concerned what might be termed the still small voice of his innate spirituality, that which Darwin himself, versed in the work of William Paley,⁸ might have termed natural theology. Many confusions arose when Darwin tried to square these deeper insights with the derivative truth-claims laid down for him by others.

The Triple Perspective

If we go back two generations we find the ingenious grandsire of the author of the Origin of Species speculating on the same subject, and almost in the same manner with his more daring grandson.⁹

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce

The first of these influences may be dealt with summarily since the kinship of ideas on evolution between Darwin and his grandfather was already known to many educated persons in the 19th century. Evolution, it was waggishly suggested at the time, was something of a cottage industry for the Darwin family.¹⁰ Somewhat counterintuitively, Charles did not derive any ideas of his own on the subject of evolution in the course of his extensive fieldwork on his famous South American odyssey. As the editors of his Journal of Researches point out, “Darwin was not an evolutionist during his time on board the Beagle, and it would be incorrect to say that Darwin first thought of evolution as he explored the Galapagos Islands or as he travelled across the Pacific.”¹¹ He was simply the legatee of the Erasmian intellectual inheritance, and his later hitting upon the idea of natural selection was essentially intended to bolster the grandfather’s ideas on evolution by providing a vera causa or functioning mechanism to undergird his grandfather’s speculations.

The second major influence on Darwin, the Christian Bible, is also well enough known. In earlier life it was a source which he cherished, and in his twenties aboard the Beagle he would often have recourse to “proof-texting,” that is, using the Bible to prevail in debate with various disputants on board the ship. Fellow mariners were even inclined to think Darwin a trifle bibliolatrous for his absolute adherence to the letter of the Bible. Given his conservatism in these matters, it was hardly surprising that Darwin was sorely affected when it was suggested to him that the Bible was no straightforward historical narrative. He found himself more than commonly vulnerable to the encroaching zeitgeist of the German Higher Criticism. For it was the letter of Scripture which he was more often prompted to foreground than the spirit as defined by the German theologian Hermann Reimarus, the dramatist Lessing, and others in later 18th and early 19th century theological thought in Europe.¹²

Favoring a literal rather than allegorical or “demythologizing” perspective, Darwin thought the miracles related in both Old and New Testaments must simply have been a false representation of world history, quite at variance with what 19th-century science had discovered about the unvarying laws of nature. Furthermore, on purely moral grounds, he became offended by the idea of eternal hellfire and in such various ways did his doubts increase to encompass the credibility of Christian revelation in the wider sense.¹³ That Darwin found himself behind the times on such subjects is reflected in the fact that many of his friends and colleagues, even the pious skipper of the Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, were open to metaphorical readings of sundry Biblical miracles and myths. However, despite all his literalness, Darwin did experience shafts of spontaneous inner illumination when, all unbidden, the spirit of Scripture took its turn in guiding his thoughts. It was at such times that his thinking aligned itself more easily with modern notions of religious and Biblical understanding — a subject to which I now turn.

Darwin’s Bible Reconceptualized

The advent of the German Higher Criticism in the middle of the 19th century was a revolutionary moment in theological thinking, and understandings of the Bible have clearly changed since Darwin’s day. The roots of such changes can even be traced back to the middle of the 18th century. The idea of the Bible as a form of poetic (as opposed to literal) communication¹⁴ is held to have had its historical origin in a course of Oxford lectures given by Robert Lowth on The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753). For Lowth the prophets and poets of the Old Testament were one and the same. He glossed the Hebrew word “Nabi” as a prophet, poet, or musician under the influence of divine inspiration.¹⁵ When Lowth’s ideas were translated into English at the end of the century (the original lectures had been in Latin) this gave the emerging wave of Romantic poets license to define themselves as de facto prophets or, in Shelley’s immodest phrase, “unacknowledged legislators of humanity.” Poets such as Wordsworth and Blake were certainly emboldened to define themselves as the present-day heirs of the prophets and psalmists.

Building on the changes wrought by the Reformation, the Bible was appropriated by a greater number of lay readers, studied not only by specialist scholars versed in Aramaic, New Testament Greek and the other relevant languages in which the Biblical corpus was originally written down, but also by literary critics and cultural commentators in a wider sense. Such scholars and commentators, reinforcing the approach of the original Higher Criticism, have made the Bible as it was understood by Darwin almost unrecognizable. Distinguished Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye explains that “the Bible is more like a small library than a real book” and yet a library which has been “compelled to exist as a book.”¹⁶This view is not without its credentials.¹⁷

Biblical Canon-Formation

In the second century of the modern era the theologian Marcion wished to drop the Hebrew scriptures altogether from the Christian canon,¹⁸ believing that the Old Testament betrayed an archaic understanding of God as a vengeful and sanguinary tribal deity. It may be noted in passing that, had Marcion been heeded, there would have been no need for so much 19th-century soul-searching by many (including Darwin) whose ideal of a God of loving kindness was affronted by the more violent depictions of the God of the Old Testament. Marcion was opposed (and indeed anathematized) by more powerful figures of the Patristic period. St. Paul had proclaimed that Jesus was the predicted messiah referred to in the Hebrew accounts, hence both Testaments must be read in tandem. In the third century Irenaeus of Lyon assembled an inclusive canon, and this was the canon of writings finally approved by Eusebius at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The status of the canon established at Nicaea was, however, questioned in the post-Enlightenment world. As the result of the increasing trend towards minute philological enquiry and the rhetorical function of Biblical myth and miracle, many liberal theologians (who have set the tone for much modern understanding) tended to regard the Bible as an important spiritual guide but one to be consulted critically and selectively with regard to its seemingly mythological features and with an appropriate awareness of the human fallibility of its original compilators.

Hence the growing belief that religious feeling has its origins in a subjective apprehension of the sacred, which in turn encourages the idea that the genesis of religion lies in an essentially mystical form of apprehension. This was certainly the sense conveyed by the BBC’s go-to cultural commentator, Melvyn Bragg, on the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. Most religions, he contended, were initially based on intuitions and intimations:

What happened was that in many cases these imaginations and guesses and profound longings for an answer became institutionalized. The faith system which was often the spine of the knowledge system became the body of the state, the principality or the monarchical system. The Church turned consoling convictions into stone.¹⁹

It was precisely this kind of intuition which conveyed itself to Darwin in the midst of the massive rainforests of South America in the early 1830s. He concluded in what he termed his Journal of Researches (now referred to more commonly as The Voyage of the Beagle) with the following thought:

Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Terra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions 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.²⁰

Those words are a perfect illustration of what historian of religions Mircea Eliade terms a “hierophany” — an apprehension of the sacred in Nature. Darwin in his later Autobiography did to be sure “row back” from that interpretation when he reported that “now the grandest scenes would not cause such convictions and feelings to arise in my mind.”²¹Yet that statement represented only post hoc rationalizing when his memories were (in Hamlet’s phrase) “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” It is surely no coincidence that in Darwin’s youth Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) was the prescribed university text for which he expressed so much affection and admiration (even claiming to know it by heart!). Hence the passage cited above gives us an informative snapshot of Darwin’s unfiltered frame of mind, a mind revealing itself to have been at that stage what the Church Father Tertullian once referred to as an anima naturaliter Christiana — a naturally Christian mind/soul. For there his apprehensions remain untrammeled by the Biblical proof-texting he indulged in with his fellows aboard the Beagle and, significantly, those same apprehensions also precede the time in the later 1830s when he took it upon himself to search for some vera causa which would give credible substance to his grandfather’s ideas on evolution (widely regarded as subjective and eccentric before 1859). 

Lady Hope’s account of Darwin’s deathbed reconversion is almost certainly an historical chimaera but, in any case, we have no need of that good lady’s fantasies when we have Darwin’s own words just three years before his death. Those words took the shape of a letter he wrote to a correspondent in 1879. There he revealed (in words which now appear prophetically opposed to those of Jacques Monod a century later)²² that he could not accept that “chance and necessity” accounted for all things. Here he points to

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.²³

Here Darwin frees himself from the logical contortion of having to defend the contra-logical “universe from nothing” thesis by aligning himself with the more convincing logic of “nothing comes from nothing.” At such moments of lucidity, when either inward intimation or simple logic supervene, he was able to free himself from his “epistemological double-vision” and report on his unmediated perception of reality in tones which strike the present writer as those of an inner liberation. In short, he shifts from a passive acceptance of the absolute imperatives enjoined by written revelation (whether Biblical or Erasmian) towards one involving a dialectical synergy, meaning an active response to inner illumination. It is then perhaps a final irony of history that the name of Charles Darwin should have been selected by many of the present cohort of atheist biologists to support a rigidly materialist worldview.

Notes

1. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, edited by Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 93.
2. It was Erasmus Darwin who for a time had the provocative words “Ex conchis omnia” (“We all descend from seashells”) embossed on the side of his coach.
3. For further discussion of the near-identity of ancient and modern views see the present author’s Taking Leave of Darwin (Seattle: Discovery, 2021), pp. 39-43.
4. James Moore, The Darwin Legend: Are Reports of his Deathbed Conversion True? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).
5. See Moore, The Darwin Legend, esp. pp. 25-30.
6. 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.
7. Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979).
8. Wiliam Paley, Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature, edited by Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight (Oxford: OUP, 2006).
9. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, review, “On the Origin of Species,” Quarterly Review (1860), pp. 225-264, here p. 237.
10. This preoccupation went all the way back to the year 1719 when a forebear of Darwin’s located the remains of a plesiosaur (now housed in the British Museum).
11. Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, edited by Michael Neve and Janet Browne (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 2.
12. Already in the previous century the German dramatist Lessing had opposed Biblical literalism and drawn a firm distinction between the letter and spirit of the Bible (“Der Buchstabe ist nicht der Geist”). See Henry Chadwick, Lessing’s Theological Writings (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1957).
13. See Nick Spencer, Darwin and God (London: SPCK, 2009), pp. 42-4. 
14. A. N. Wilson judges, “The Bible is itself a work of the imagination. It is not all written down in poetry, but is much more like poetry than it is like any other form of literature” (The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible (London: Atlantic Books, 2015), p. 194).
15. For Lowth’s influence I am indebted to David Jasper and Stephen Prickett, The Bible as Literature: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 26-7.
16. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (San Diego, New York, London 1982), Introduction, p. xiii.
17. A full account of early canon formation is given by John Barton, A History of the Bible. The Book and its Faiths (London: Penguin, 2019).
18. See The Very First Bible 144 A.D. by Saint Marcion of Sinope, translated with reference and study guide by the Marcionite Christian Church (London: Amazon, 2020).
19. Melvyn Bragg, The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), p. 200.
20. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, edited by Janet Browne and Michael Neve (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 374.
21. Darwin, Autobiography, edited by Nora Barlow, p. 93.
22. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York: HarperCollins, 1972).
23. 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.