QJM Advance Access published online on October 6, 2009
QJM, doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcp130
‘There's probably no God; now stop worrying and enjoy yourself’
The above advertisement has appeared on the sides of about 800 national buses. It is sponsored by the Atheist Society, Richard Dawkins, and others. One bus driver in Southampton, who is a committed Christian, refused to drive his bus bearing the advert. Ron Heather said: ‘I felt I could not drive that bus. I told my managers, and when they said they had not got another I thought I better go home. So I did.’ He did not lose his job for making this stand.
Perhaps two scientists who have most directly led to the views in this advertisement are Galileo (1564–1642) and Darwin (1809–82). Both made discoveries that directly contradicted the fundamental teachings of the Bible. Galileo obtained evidence that the geocentric (or Ptolemaic) view of the universe was wrong and that the heliocentric view was probably correct. Darwin obtained strong evidence that man evolved from the primates and was not created by God in his own image as the Bible affirms. Galileo under duress recanted his views and died a faithful son of the Catholic Church. Did Darwin, coming under duress from the Church, modify his views?
Charles Darwin was brought up an orthodox Christian. His father, although himself a free thinker, considered the Church as a possible vocation for his son. Charles wrote in his autobiography that he liked the thought of becoming a country clergyman and read with great care Pearson on the Creeds and other books on theology. He did not doubt in the least the strict and literal truth of every word of the Bible. He duly entered Christ's College, Cambridge in 1828, where he was to take a preparatory degree for Ordination as a minister of religion. His travels interrupted this plan. At the time of the voyage of the Beagle (1831) his opinions were still orthodox and he sometimes quoted the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.
But his views changed after the publication of2,5 Origin of Species in 1858. The book drew a long line of distinguished clerics that stretched to the Pope himself who attacked Darwin's views.
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-–73) of Oxford was one of the first. The Bishop published much of his invective against Darwin from the famous Oxford debate of 1860 in the Quarterly Journal of July 1860. A few quotations will give some flavour of the article: ‘the world has seen no such specimens of insolence from a shallow pretender to science as this’; and that Darwin's ‘endeavors to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guesses and speculation by a fanciful tissue of lies’ and ‘whose mode of dealing with nature is reprobated as utterly dishonorable to the Natural Sciences’.
To give the Bishop his due, he never held any hard feelings or malice towards Darwin. Later, in 1873, Bishop Wilberforce unfortunately fell off his horse onto his head and was killed. T.H. Huxley (1825–95), who was an ardent defender of Darwin, gave a characteristic response: ‘Poor dear Sammy! His end has been all too tragic for his life. For once reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal’.
Cardinal Manning (1808–92) joined the attack and declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature describing it as ‘a brutal philosophy - to wit there is no God and the ape is our Adam’. He violently opposed Darwin's view that man had descended from ‘a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, and probably arboreal in its habits’. Dean Burgon (1813–88) of Chichester, in a sermon preached before the University of Oxford, warned the students that ‘those who refuse to accept the history of creation of our first parents and are for substituting the modern dream of evolution in its place, cause the entire scheme of man's salvation to collapse’. The Reverend Father Bayma, a Professor at the Jesuit College of Stonyhurst, wrote in the ‘Catholic World’ that ‘Mr. Darwin is, we have reason to believe, a mouthpiece or chief trumpeter of that infidel clique whose well known object is to do away with all idea of God’. And Cardinal Wiseman (1802–65) having read Origin of Species declared that: ‘it is one of the most detestable theories I have ever come across. The purely mechanistic explanation as to our origins is a personal affront. It repudiates final causes and all he seems to be saying is that man is no more than a transmuted ape’.
European theologians were equally vociferous. Monseigneur Segur (1820–81) referring to Darwin and his followers as impersonating God's Will, went into a form of mild hysteria: ‘These infamous doctrines have for their support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions. They come from Hell, and return there, taking with them the gross creatures who blush not to proclaim and accept them.’ Eventually, Pope Pious IX (1792–1878) felt impelled to join the attack and thanked a French Catholic physician (Dr Constantin James) for his book that: ‘refutes so well the aberrations of Darwinism ...’, his Holiness adding; ‘... which is so repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all people, to exact science, to observed fact, and even to reason herself, and would seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning towards materialism eagerly seek to support everyone in this tissue of lies ...’
Not all the criticism was in the form of invective1,4 by the clergy. Professor Richard Owen 1804–92 (the paleontologist and comparative anatomist) wrote that: ‘the facts seem to tell me that animal species have been constant for thousands and thousands of years, and will never change so long as conditions remain constant. Change the conditions and I agree old species may disappear, and new species may appear in their place and flourish. But how; and by what mechanism? I say by creation. This is an operation quite beyond the powers of a pigeon –fancier or animal breeder like Mr Darwin. There is a mystery here about a force that I cannot imitate or comprehend – but there is a design and purpose working in the world which I can attribute to a power which by one name I can call God.’ All these attacks no doubt pained Darwin quite strongly in their blatant disregard for the evidence that he had painstakingly amassed over 30 years.
More hurtful to Darwin was his beloved wife Emma who became very distressed by his opinions and their implications for Christianity. She was brought up by her family in the Christian Faith and she firmly adhered to it all her life. Their religious differences remained throughout their married life and became even wider after their daughter Annie's death. Charles was grief-stricken at the death of their eldest daughter Annie aged 10 years. As a little girl, her joyousness and animal spirits had enlivened them all. She was so full of life and vigour that it was always delightful and cheerful to behold her. In 1850, she caught a chill and fell ill with fevers, night sweats and loss of weight. She probably died of tuberculosis; and from then on Darwin gradually drifted further away from Christianity—how can a beneficent God cause the needless suffering of young children?
In Emma's own words:
I pointed out to Charles that his mind and the time he spent was full of the most interesting subjects and thoughts of the most absorbing kind, viz. following up his own discoveries about the descent of Man etc. – but which made it very difficult for him to avoid casting out as interruptions other sorts of thoughts which have no relation to what he was pursuing or to be able to give his whole attention to both sides of the question. May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence one's mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way and which if true are likely to be above our comprehension. I should say there is a danger in giving up revelation and prayer which is not taken into consideration on the scientific side; there is the ingratitude in casting off what has been done for your benefit as well as for that of all the world and which ought to make you still more careful, perhaps even fearful, lest you should not have taken all the pains you could to judge things truly. I must confess I found the modern course of evolutionary thought quite desolating as removing God even further off. I asked Charles whether his evolutionary views on the moral sense would exclude spiritual influences that were not included in his theory - so he might have considered me as a traitor in the camp. I know Charles was deeply moved by my somewhat incoherent arguments but he once told me that Christianity was a damnable doctrine if it eternally punished his father, his brother, and almost all his best friends for the one simple fact of their unbelief.6With time Darwin completely rejected Christianity. He also came to believe that the whole subject of the nature of a First Cause or God was beyond the scope of man's intellect. In his own words: ‘But as you ask, I may state that my judgment often fluctuates. ... In my most extremes 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 as I grow older) that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.’3 Indeed the logical position of the atheist who denies the existence of God is in the same logical category as the theist who affirms the existence of God, since it is only a meaningful proposition (God exists) that can be significantly contradicted. The agnostic who maintains that his comprehension is insufficient to argue rationally on the subject in any way appears the most prudent position. So Darwin would probably have been happy to ride in Ron Heather's bus; but perhaps not to drive it.
References
1. Appleman P. Darwin: a Norton Critical Edition. (1970) New York: W W Norton & Co.
2. Burkhardt F. Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection, 1825–1859 (1996) Cambridge, UK: CUP.
3. Darwin C. Autobiograhy (with Essays on Everyday Life and Religion by F Darwin) (1937) London: Watts & Co.
4. Darwin F. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters. (1958) New York: Dover Publications.
5. Desmond A, Moore J. Darwin (1992) London, UK: Penguin Books.
6. Healey E. Emma Darwin: The Inspirational Wife of a Genius. Headline (2001).
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||