Tag: Higher Criticism
With “Fluctuating” Convictions, Darwin Faced a Threefold Challenge
In what follows I pose the question of how Darwin fell subject to such wide “fluctuations” in his beliefs and how he came to resolve those tensions.
Why Has Darwin Been Believed?
By the later 1830s educated people in England and far beyond its borders had experienced some truly convulsive existential tremors beneath their feet.
Shelley, Darwin, and the 19th-Century God Debate
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley threw down the gauntlet for what was effectively to become the great Victorian dispute about religious faith.
William Wordsworth’s Posthumous Challenge to Darwinian Nihilism
Paradoxically, Wordsworth’s theology may have formed a more effective counterforce to Darwin’s ideas than Biblical orthodoxy itself.
Darwin and the Swinging 1860s
The threat which such thinking posed to theistic beliefs was not lost on the Roman Catholic Church when Pope Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council of 1869.