What did Darwin believe?

What did Darwin really believe about God? the Christian revelation? the implications of his theory of evolution for religious faith? These questions were asked again and again in the years following the publication of Origin of species (1859). They are still asked today by scholars, scientists, students, and religious believers. The questions have taken on a new relevance in light of controversies over the teaching of evolution and intelligent design in schools, the resurgence of fundamentalism as a political force, and the combative rhetoric of crusading secularists, many of whom take Darwin as an icon.

But Darwin was very reticent about his personal beliefs, and reluctant to pronounce on matters of belief for others. His published writings are particularly reserved or altogether silent on religion. His Autobiography contains a short discussion of his religious views, presented as a gradual migration from Anglican Christianity to agnosticism. But this was written toward the end of his life, and intended for the highly select audience of his family and immediate social circle (see Barlow ed. 1958, preface). It should not therefore be read (although it often is), as a neutral account of the development of his thought, or of his innermost beliefs and feelings. A far more revealing source is his correspondence.

Letters became an important medium through which Darwin’s readers sought to draw him out on matters of personal belief, and to explore the religious implications of his work. Letters written to Darwin by persons unknown to him became more frequent from the late 1860s onward, as his international fame grew. Young naturalists, sceptical writers, clergymen, and educators wrote to him about his religious views, often seeking direction for their own.

In December 1866 Darwin received a letter from Mary Boole, a spiritualist writer who was supporting her five daughters as a librarian after her husband, the mathematician George Boole, died in 1864.

Dear Sir

Will you excuse my venturing to ask you a question to which no one’s answer but your own would be quite satisfactory…

Do you consider the holding of your Theory of Natural Selection to be inconsistent … with the following belief:

That God is a personal and Infinitely good Being …

That the effect of the action of the Spirit of God on the brain of man is especially a moral effect.

My own impression has always been … that you had supplied one of the missing links,—-not to say the missing link,—-between the facts of Science & the promises of religion.

See the letter

Boole, like a number of Darwin’s readers, found a way of reconciling the theory of evolution by natural selection with some form of religious belief. But when Boole asks Darwin about specific points of belief, such as a personal and beneficent God, he is not very helpful. His reply is polite and brief. He writes, ‘It would have gratified me much if I could have sent satisfactory answers to yr. questions….’ He reiterates the view, suggested in Origin of species, that to regard the pain and suffering of the world as an outcome of universal laws, rather than of the direct will of God, is for him a source of consolation. But he also insists that he is not an authority on religion, and so should not be called upon to comment on matters of belief for others:

My opinion is not worth more than that of any other man who has thought on such subjects … I thank you for your Judgement & honour you for it, that theology & science should each run its own course & that in the present case I am not responsible if their meeting point should still be far off.

See the letter

In his response to Boole, Darwin implies that certain questions are beyond the scope of scientific investigation: ‘These as it seems to me, can be answered only by widely different evidence from Science, or by the so called “inner consciousness”’. Darwin does not dismiss different forms of evidence, or the dictates of private feeling. But he does not venture into such territory in this letter to a stranger.

In what is perhaps his most revealing response, a letter in 1879 to John Fordyce, an author of works on scepticism, Darwin writes:

[My] judgment often fluctuates…. Whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term … In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. — I think that generally (and more and more so as I grow older), but not always, — that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

See the letter

In this letter, Darwin is quite clear that he has never been an atheist. Does he believe in a Creator? Is he a theist? Such terms, he suggests, are so vague and variable that they might mean almost anything. Is he then an agnostic? Yes, but not all of the time. His judgment, he says, is often in a state of flux.

What did Darwin mean by the term “agnostic”? The word does not suggest disbelief so much as a fundamental uncertainty about questions such as the existence and nature of God. For Darwin, it also seems to imply that there are limits to scientific knowledge, that there are certain questions that can be answered by science, and other questions that can not. Darwin had made this point in his response to Boole. He had also discussed some of these matters many years earlier with his cousin and fiancée, Emma Wedgewood. In their correspondence, shortly after their engagement in 1838, we find an early expression of Darwin’s religious doubts.

Darwin’s own letters have not survived, but we gain a sense of what the couple discussed from Emma’s words to him:

My reason tells me that honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us. I thank you from my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from the fear of giving me pain … my own dear Charley we now do belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you.

See the letter

We know from Darwin’s scientific notebooks from this period that his views regarding the Christian revelation were extremely heterodox.

An extract from notebook C, p. 166 reads: ‘Thought (or desires more properly) being heredetary). — it is difficult to imagine it anything but structure of brain heredetary, analogy points out to this.–love of the deity effect of organization. Oh you Materialist!’

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It is clear from other correspondence that one of Emma’s most cherished beliefs was in an afterlife. When she writes of them “belonging” to each other, she means so in eternity. There is a marked tension in Emma’s letter between reason and feeling, and between the feared separation caused by differences of belief, and the desired closeness that requires these differences to be shared.

The tendency amongst Darwin scholars has been to assume that mutual affection between the couple, together with a strong sense of propriety on Charles’s part, sustained their marriage. If not deeply religious, Darwin was at least not disrespectful to religion. He kept his views largely to himself, and allowed his differences of belief with Emma to remain for the most part submerged. Scholars have also presented Emma as playing the traditional role of Victorian wife, supportive of her husband. Her religious piety and wifely devotion have appeared only as a background to Darwin’s own life and intellectual struggles.

Some private documents, recently made available to the Darwin Correspondence Project by members of the Darwin family, offer a fuller perspective on Emma’s religious beliefs. The documents show the importance of Unitarianism, with its emphasis upon inner feeling over Scriptural or doctrinal authority, as a foundation for Emma’s views. They also show that Emma’s beliefs were not simple and unwavering, but a product of intensive study and questioning.

Alongside respectable Anglicanism, Unitarianism was another important religious tradition in the Darwin and Wedgwood families. Josiah Wedgwood, who was grandfather to both Charles and Emma, was a Unitarian, and this religious background helped to bring the provincial families, the Darwins and Wedgwoods, together in the first place. Darwin had attended a Unitarian school in Shrewsbury. The circle with whom he and Emma socialised when in London included several leading Unitarian clergymen, James Martineau and John James Taylor, as well as the religious writer Frances Power Cobbe. All were regular guests of Darwin’s brother Erasmus, and of Emma’s brother, Hensleigh Wedgwood and his wife Fanny.

In the early years of their marriage, Charles and Emma read a number of works by Unitarian and liberal Anglican authors, including Martineau, Taylor, and Francis Newman. Newman’s Phases of faith was a religious autobiography, charting his spiritual journey from Calvinism to theism. Many of these writings were widely read in the period, and formed part of a heated debate on the authority of the Anglican creed. Sworn belief in the thirty-nine articles of the Anglican church was then a requirement for students, fellows and teachers at Oxford and Cambridge, and of anyone taking holy orders.

Lay members of the church were not required to profess belief in any particular doctrine, only to recite the liturgy. But we know, from Francis Darwin’s comments, that Emma used to make the family turn round in silence to face the rest of the congregation when all stood to recite the creed, with its Trinitarian formula.

Emma’s copy of the New Testament, extensively annotated during the early years of her marriage, contains notes on passages judged by various Biblical scholars to have been inauthentic, or added by later authors.