This part of the Darwin Correspondence Project website is intended to be an ongoing work in progress. Areas of the site are being created by the Project to address major topics in Charles Darwin’s life and work. The first subject area, which is concerned with the relationship between Darwin and religious belief, is now partially available. New subject areas will be made available periodically.

Darwin and religion: general introduction

I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose.

Charles Darwin to N. D. Doedes, 2 April 1873 See the letter

Darwin is more famous, and more notorious than ever. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing controversies over science and religion. Today’s debates, from the teaching of intelligent design in schools, to questions of free will and human values in light of modern research in genetics, have deep roots in the nineteenth-century controversies surrounding Darwin’s work on evolution. Yet Darwin is most often used in ways that distort or oversimplify his views. He is misquoted or misrepresented in order to support a particular position. Whose Darwin is the true Darwin, and what are the implications of his theory for the present?

To help address this question in an informed way, the Darwin Correspondence Project at the University of Cambridge is producing a new web resource. Our aim is to provide a unique, complete, and reliable source of information on Darwin and religion. Darwin’s letters provide a unique resource for recovering the complexities of discussion in his own day, and for studying the impact of his theories on people from a wide range of backgrounds. The picture that Darwin’s letters present of his personal beliefs, and of the implications of his theory for religious belief generally, is much richer than that given in his published works, or indeed in most modern scholarship.

Darwin exchanged letters with nearly 2000 correspondents in the course of his life, including professional scientists, schoolteachers, colonial settlers, missionaries, and plant and animal breeders. At least 200 of his correspondents were clergymen, some of whom were personal friends and many of whom provided Darwin with data for his publications. He often relied on information and support from scientific colleagues who had strong religious convictions, and he was approached for advice on the implications of his work for morality and religious belief. The letters show that Darwin’s work could mean many different things to different people. Some saw Darwinism as a threat to religion, but many found ways of reconciling their beliefs with an evolutionary view of nature.

The Darwin and religion site is also unique in providing primary historical sources, together with explanatory and interpretive material from experts in a wide range of fields. This material is provided in three forms. Detailed footnotes to the letters make Darwin’s private discussions with his contemporaries understandable to general readers. Specially commissioned essays and interviews with scientists, theologians, philosophers, and historians provide commentaries on the historical material and its relevance to current debates. A dramatisation of the correspondence between Darwin and the American botanist Asa Gray, brings the Victorian debate about science and religion to life.

The material is organised thematically, with sections on design, personal belief, ethics and society, the boundaries of science and religion, and the conduct of debate. There is considerable scope for the future development of specifically targetted educational materials at all levels. Users will eventually be able to sign up to use a work group space on the website which will allow exploration and discussion of the material with the option of making their work public.

Our intention is to provide an authoritative, durable, multi-media resource that will lay to rest some misunderstandings and misrepresentations that have found currency on the web and in popular culture generally, to promote well-informed debate, and to arrive at new insights through the engagement of the present with the past.