Evolution
Faith & Science
Darwin and the Problem of Pain

The common perception of the effect of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species on the Victorian public has been that 19th-century readers felt their previously held convictions about a providential cosmos to have been rudely threatened by Darwin’s materialist ideas. The locus classicus for that interpretation was a famous 1888 bestseller on the subject of a clergyman’s loss of faith, Robert Elsmere, by Mrs. Humphry Ward (née Mary Arnold).1 Ever since the publication of Ward’s novel, much has been written on the subject of how the theodicean certainties of the many were disturbed by the promulgation of Darwinian theory.2
However, the notion that there was a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the publication of Origin and people’s loss of their Christian faith, whilst true in some cases,3 was anything but a universal experience. Modern historical and theological scholarship has pointed to alternative avenues of understanding, one of which I wish to pursue in what follows. This involves a consideration of the largest question of all in Christian apologetics, that of theodicy: how to justify the ways of God to humankind. To re-use the classic formulation: accepting that God is infinitely powerful and infinitely benevolent, why should He allow evil to thrive in this world (a question which of course endures to the present day).4 Darwin at first blush might seem to be the very last person apt to tackle this supremely sensitive issue, but I will explore ways in which, either consciously or unconsciously, he engaged with just that theme in the course of writing his Origin of Species, albeit not in the formal terms of a philosopher or theologian.
Victorian Beginnings
Perhaps the most obvious point to make at the outset is that in 1859 our forebears did not live in some Pollyanna-ish world of sancta simplicitas where faith went unquestioned. The first half of the 19th century had witnessed a notable pincer movement where Sir Charles Lyell’s geological researches had directly contradicted the accepted chronology of Genesis and where the German Higher Criticism had queried the literal veracity of some Biblical miracles and mythological features. However, there remained an underlying issue even more profound than Lyell’s unsettling dating of the earth in millions rather than thousands of years and one which dwarfed the matter of whether theologians in Marburg were according only an allegorical status to certain supernatural events narrated in the Bible. That profounder issue concerned nothing less than people’s questioning of the very nature of God himself and the problems of suffering and evil — age-old issues with resonances going back as far as the Book of Job and ones which have continued to haunt humanity ever since.
Theodicy
In the post-Reformation world this theme was most famously treated by John Milton in 1667 in his Paradise Lost. At the outset of the first book, Milton explicitly undertakes to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.”5 According to some readers and critics, however, Milton did not deal with the theme satisfactorily since God’s ways remained anything but justified. Late 18th-century poet William Blake felt that Milton was “of the devil’s party” without knowing it and mid-20th-century critic William Empson went so far as to describe Milton’s Satan figure as the de factohero of the epic in a cosmic revolt against divine repression.6 Fast-forwarding two centuries, ecclesiastical historian David Newsome summed up the same theodicean crux as it continued to disturb Milton’s Victorian successors:
If the impact of Darwinism after 1859 was to rock the boat of orthodoxy more alarmingly than anything encountered before, it was because the revelations of the Origin of Species came at a time when the accepted authority of Scriptures was already being challenged — ironically, by the calling into question of that very aspect of Victorian religious teaching that had been so confidently regarded as the most essential message of to be absorbed and put into practice by all Christians: the moral content of the Word of God in the Scriptures.7
The particular issue Newsome refers to here is the lack of moral harmony, as he saw it, between the God of Love of the New Testament and the God of Wrath of the Old Testament. This was to become a thorn in the side of many Victorian intellectuals and Churchmen such as Thomas Carlyle, Connop Thirlwall (Bishop of St. Asaph in Wales), Richard Hurrell Froude (author of The Nemesis of Faith), and Francis Newman, younger brother of Cardinal John Henry Newman. The nub of the issue as it struck the younger Newman has been succinctly described in the following terms:
Newman possessed a lively sense of the moral problems besetting Christianity, especially as understood by Evangelicals. He was, for instance, deeply disturbed by the perfidy of Jael’s murder of Sisera. Pretending to offer him refuge from his enemies, she crept into his tent and “smote a nail into his temples and fastened it into the ground” (Judges IV.22-3). To make matters worse, her dastardly deed was represented as God having “subdued the Canaanites before the children of Israel.” How could anyone seriously believe [asked Newman rhetorically] that such deplorable behaviour was exemplary, or that the Book of Judges, in which the story is related, makes edifying reading for the young?8
Darwin Weighs in on the Controversy
One intriguing aspect of Darwin’s Origin is that, read critically, it is not simply the monochrome materialist tract many have been led to expect. As Abigail Lustig has shown, both in the thought patterns and in the structuring of his “one long argument,” Darwin would show himself to be in implicit dialogue with William Paley whose Natural Theology (1802) was the foremost work of Christian apologetics of the 19th century (and which Darwin is on record as having greatly admired in his student years).9
Like Paley’s Natural Theology, Darwin’s Origin offered a (somewhat unusual) answer to the theodicy question which came in a number of parts. To begin with, Darwin made it abundantly clear that he made no claim to be able to shed light on the absolute origin of life on Earth, hence he could assure his readers that he had no designs on dislodging God from his firmament, as it were. Although he would later privately entertain a materialist fantasy about life possibly having originated by unknown chemical reactions in a small warm pond, he reserved that flight of fancy for a personal letter and certainly did not risk offending his wife, Emma, or his wider readership with any such irreligious speculation. As far as the first readers of Origin were concerned, Darwin’s peroration to the Origin clearly stated that life had been “breathed” into existence by the Creator (this being the time-honored, conventional doctrine of the divine pneuma). In this way Darwin effectively shielded himself from any and every accusation that he was constructing a tendentious tract to support the atheist cause. For his theory of natural selection claimed only to explain the processes that led to life’s progressive differentiation after the Creation.
Darwinian Apologetics
Coming now to the theodicy problem, Darwin in his Autobiography addressed this issue in terms which are perhaps not initially crystal-clear but whose meaning can nevertheless be teased out well enough,
That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with all the other sentient beings and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost all endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one, whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.10
Darwin appears to be stating in the initial parts of the above paragraph that the problem of pain had commonly been used as a sufficient reason to disqualify God from respectful consideration, and even to register doubt as to His bare existence (as the primary exemplar of loving kindness, at any rate). And yet that reproach against God then suddenly changes into one of exoneration. Darwin’s latter words may be glossed as an implicit form of theodicy in that he claims God cannot be held accountable for the imperfections of the human/animal estate. This is because, after the moment of Creation, all imperfections must necessarily be chalked up to the hit-and-miss workings of natural selection, the process which Darwin claimed was responsible for humankind’s entire evolution.
John Herschel, son of the famous astronomer William Herschel, once memorably referred to natural selection as “the law of higgledy-piggledy.” Herschel did not make the remark kindly or even humorously, but his slight must have come as something of a disguised blessing to Darwin since “higgledy-piggledy” could clearly not be arraigned for any omission or malfeasance. In Darwin’s mind, apparently, his theory of autonomous natural selection provided a biological exculpation which let God off the hook morally.
Natural Theology
One notable irony of the Darwinian intervention is that it might have been viewed by many deists as a more effective form of natural theology than William Paley’s dedicated volume on the same subject. Paley had great difficulty in addressing some of the world’s most besetting imperfections because it was no easy matter to explain away the cruelty and profligacy of nature. Darwin, by contrast, could afford to rejoice in such imperfections with total impunity because he took them as proof that such features were not designed by God. As Lustig put it, “Darwin was able to construe predation and superfecundity as the natural outcomes of the struggle for existence which has profligacy as its very premise.”11
In purely tactical terms, Darwin’s exculpation of God for the shortcomings of evolution would then have garnered credibility from substantial sections of contemporary thinking. A common opinion amongst the leading men of science in the first half of the 19th century tended towards a discreet form of Deism, the acceptance of divine law as the initiator of life on Earth. Although often vilified as an “absentee landlord” form of theology, educated opinion by the 1830s had at length become comfortable with the notion of a remote God in ancient time having acted indirectly through laws of His own design. Darwin’s announcement of a process of natural selection working on random variations to create terrestrial life without the continuing need for a Creator might have struck such persons as being eminently conformable with their deist tenets. They might well have seen themselves as being in Darwin’s debt for having conferred on them the boon of supplying chapter and verse in precise biological terms for previous scientists’ inchoate or otherwise unformed speculations.
Darwin’s Sacred Cause
Darwin tended to become defensive and protective of the self-standing status of natural selection when it would be suggested to him by close associates such as Sir Charles Lyell or Harvard’s Louis Agassiz that an admixture of theistic supervision should be added to his theory to make it logically complete. Darwin immediately recognized that their suggested addition would fatally injure the integrity of his idea when judged by scientific criteria, and stuck firmly to his guns on this issue. But why did the Darwin who would in a letter sent to a friend in 1879 describe himself as a “theist” remain so intransigent on this issue? Was it simply to uphold the absolute and exclusive primacy of the principle of methodological naturalism, or was there some undisclosed reason? It was noted above that Darwin derived considerable solace from the fact that what John Herschel had called his law of higgledy-piggledy was a process mercifully distant from divine jurisdiction. Darwin’s reaction to Herschel suggests that he may have been driven not so much by doctrinaire atheism as much as by the desire to preserve the benign image of God he held (or wished to hold) in his own heart. Natural selection for Darwin had become not only a scientific cause but a sacred one — and for a very good, logical reason which can be mapped on to the development of post-Enlightenment thought in Europe.
For many Enlightenment Age Europeans and their immediate successors, the death-knell for belief in an omnipresent, interventionist God had been sounded by the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (depicted in the image at the top of this article). That disaster resulted in uncountable numbers of deaths since it also resulted in a tsunami which affected vast swathes of the Lisbon hinterland in addition to the city itself. Even more destructive than the physical carnage was the toll it took on people’s hearts and minds. Voltaire was to exploit the notorious event first in his Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne, written in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, and again in his famous anti-clerical satire, Candide; and some decades later the German writer and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, writing only a few years before Darwin was born, devoted one of his short stories to an unsparing account of a comparable earthquake in Santiago in which the tone of metaphysical protest is overwhelming (Das Erdbeben in Chili, 1807).
The timing of the Lisbon earthquake was significant, and not just because it had begun in the middle of a church service. The more important issue was that its chronological epicenter, so to speak, lay at the heart of the Enlightenment project (which previous disasters, such as the Great Fire of London of 1666, did not). By contrast with the preceding century, the critical timing of the Portuguese disaster within the European march of thought resulted in something of a pan-European cry of dereliction. All of which would explain why Darwin was loath to accept that divine finger prints could have been traced back to Lisbon or indeed to other locations of disaster such as cities decimated by plague infestations. For such misfortunes, in terms of human jurisprudence, represented little less than crime scenes if God were thought to be able and willing to intervene. There is in fact in the annals of European literature a precise example of such an arraignment of the Deity in the 14th-century German Death and the Ploughman (Der Ackermann aus Bőhmen) where a lowly ploughman takes the personified figure of Death to court for having taken his beloved young wife from him prematurely. The conclusion to the court case is ultimately fudged but contemporary listeners would have been left in no doubt about whose negligence allowed Death’s unforgivable depredation.
Echoes of Paley
One may then readily understand the reasons behind the upsurge in deistic thinking in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Any notion of divine-hands-on evolution could in the minds of many Europeans have inculpated the Deity in inexcusable acts of avoidable tragedy — which is why Darwin will have been prompted to divert blame towards the impersonal and morally blunt forces of autonomous nature itself. Assuredly not blind to nature’s abundant cruelties, Darwin nevertheless took it upon himself in his chapter “The Struggle for Existence” to conclude that section of the Origin with some would-be uplifting words. Referencing cruelties of the natural world, he labors to assure us that we must
keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio; and that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each season or at intervals, has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply.12
How does one begin to gloss that curious paragraph? In sentiment it matches that purple patch of Darwin’s famous concluding paragraph where he writes of the grandeur of his vision of life:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.
Both passages are very clearly euphemistic; the first in particular strikes the present reader as not only over-sentimental but disingenuous. Furthermore, Darwin must have known this because in the year following the publication of the Originhe wrote to an associate in the following, much less “prettified” terms:
There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice (…) On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. 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 (…) I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence.13
The Origin of Species as Theodicy
I suspect that the letter of 1860 cited immediately above may give us an important clue as to what Darwin’s motive might have been in peddling the patently bowdlerized and false representations of nature that we witness in his two purple passages from the Origin. That clue leads us back inexorably to the unresolved tension between theism and atheism which Darwin would carry with him to his grave. Abigail Lustig remarks with regard to the first passage cited above, “Darwin echoes Paley in the rather abrupt and incongruous conclusion to the otherwise bleak chapter on ‘The Struggle for Existence.’”14
I concur. Darwin will have had recourse to a distinctively “up-beat,” Paleyite linguistic register because at some level of apprehension (one might speculate on an influence from his youth where he “got Paley by heart”) he shared with the archdeacon the desire to justify the ways of the Almighty. His use of incongruous euphemism in the passages cited above represents what literary critics might call generic markers or, in popular parlance, “tells” or “giveaways.” Such markers are typically used by writers to signal their affiliation with a specific genre of writing, in Darwin’s case that of theodicy which had been a popular genre in England since the time of John Ray in the 1690s.
It has been fairly observed that “some of Paley’s examples are daft and his confidence that ‘it is a happy world after all’ can seem naïve,”15 and Darwin, as noted, could sometimes fall back on a like sentimentality. At a verbal and stylistic level this appears to have been a signature of Darwin’s sense of identification with the exclusively affirmative tone constitutive of the genre of theodicy. The otherwise incongruous ruptures in his normal writing style connote a telling echo of the theodicean genre. Hence the great curiosity of the Origin is that a work which was ostensibly written to draw swords with Paley seems to have imported so much of the archdeacon’s thought world as to have muddied the waters of the message Darwin had purportedly wished to convey.
For this reason, the Origin stands out a curiously hybrid book, part implicit materialist plea, part idiosyncratic theodicy. When the sentiments Darwin expresses become most plainly Paleyite in moral tone, it may even appear to readers that Darwin is metaphorically resheathing his fencing sword out of respect for a dueling opponent whom as a student at Cambridge he had all but venerated. At the very least, there seems to have existed a hidden affinity between the two men that few might have suspected: Darwin’s legacy looks to be more complex than many modern-day neo-Darwinists suppose.
Notes
- See John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian (Oxford: OUP, 1991), especially pp. 106-31.
- See for example the compendious volume by Giles St Aubyn, Souls in Torment: The Conflict between Science and Religion in Victorian England (London: New European Publications: 2010).
- One documented historical example is that Sir Leslie Stephen was thought to have lost his faith after reading Darwin.
- See Stephen Law, “The Evil-God Challenge” in Philosophers on God: Talking about Existence, edited by Jack Symes (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp.103-18.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1989), Book I, lines 24-26.
- William Empson, Milton’s God, second, revised edition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965). On Satan as the “true” hero of the work, see especially pp. 36-90.
- David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture (London: John Murray, 1997), p. 198.
- Giles St Aubyn, Souls in Torment, p. 240.
- Abigail Lustig, “Natural Atheology” in Darwinian Heresies, edited by Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), pp. 69-83.
- The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow (New York: Norton 1958), p. 90.
- Lustig, “Natural Atheology,” p. 74.
- On the Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 62.
- Written from Down on 22 May 1860, downloaded from the Darwin Correspondence project under https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2814.xml.
- Lustig, “Natural Atheology”, p.74, note 13.
- Jonathan Conlin, Evolution and the Victorians: Science, Culture and Politics in Darwin’s Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 25.