The Evolution of the West: How Christianity has shaped our values by Nick Spencer

Author:Nick Spencer [Spencer, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780281075218
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2016-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

‘No doubts as to how one ought to act’: Darwin’s doubts and his faith

1

In the year before Charles Darwin married Emma Wedgwood, the two cousins discussed religion. In a short chapter entitled ‘Religious Belief’ in his autobiography, written many years later and intended only for immediate circulation, Darwin located his loss of Christian faith within precisely this period, ‘from my return to England [from the Beagle on] Oct. 2, 1836 to my marriage Jan. 29, 1839’. In it he highlighted three concerns in particular that caused him to lose his religion.

Darwin had growing doubts about the reliability of Scripture, both Old Testament and New (‘the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events … [and] they differ in many important details, far too important … to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses’). He had moral qualms with some of the teachings and stories of the Old Testament (the Old Testament ‘attribute[d] to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant … [and] was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian’), and scepticism concerning the philosophical coherence and scientific credibility of the biblical world view (‘The more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become’).

Darwin’s account of his loss of faith is overly schematized. Indeed, his biographer, Janet Browne, describes the entire autobiography as ‘just as much an exercise in camouflage – a disguise – as it was a methodical laying out of the bare bones of his existence’. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that, by 1839, Darwin came to realize that his heretofore ‘orthodox’ Christian faith was nothing like the case.

And this was a problem for Emma. Emma Wedgwood was an intelligent, sincere and devout believer. Religion had been a point of tension between her family and his, ever since his grandfather, Erasmus, had mocked Emma’s, Josiah, for his Unitarianism, which Erasmus had called ‘a featherbed to catch a falling Christian’. Darwin’s own father knew something of his son’s growing scepticism, which he probably shared, and had advised caution, but Charles was nothing if not an honest man, and confided his doubts to Emma on a visit to her in July 1838.

There is no record of what Darwin actually said to her or what her immediate reaction was, but it clearly caused some difficulties and occasioned a series of letters and notes from Emma to Charles. These offer an important and often moving counterpart to Darwin’s own much later and resolutely factual account, with Emma, in her gentle and tentative way, encouraging her fiancé to open himself up to the evidence for and, more importantly, an experience of the Christian faith.

The last of the letters dates from a few weeks after their marriage and constitutes Emma’s fullest note on the subject. Unable to ‘say exactly what I wish to say’, she put her thoughts on paper. In doing so, she revealed a telling detail from one of their early marital conversations on the topic.

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