Date: 17 September 2002
Subject: Other

Introduction

This is an essay about Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882). He is a man about whom vast amounts (of very varying quality) have been published. There are some good detailed biographies of Darwin,[1] and this will not attempt to parallel them. Rather it seeks to sketch some of the scientific and religious backgrounds against which Darwin came, and to explore his own changing views on religion (including his oft reputed "death-bed conversion"). Various sections will deal with useful background (scientific and religious) against which Darwin must be seen. His own scientific and personal development will be very sketchily dealt with, and the focus kept on his religious development.

Geology and Timescales

Scientific Development

Our first task will be to outline the history of the development of geology, and assess Christian reactions to it. After this we will return to consider alternative models suggested today to fit what happened.

There were ancient questions about fossils and strata. Fossils had been known for a long time (e.g. Xenophanes (c570-480BC), Avicienna (980-1037) etc. - but there was no obvious means to tell that they were organic in origin. (To earlier ages in fact the word 'fossil' meant anything dug up). It is not obvious that a fossil differs in kind from a mineral vein or crystal. There is no obvious reason: (i) why or how organisms should turn to stone (ii) how they could become buried in solid rock (iii) why fossils like shells should be found up mountains (though some, after Tertullian, suggested Noah's flood). Ussher's famous date of 4004BC in 1650 was more recent than earlier commentators (who put it around 6000 or so BC), but there was no evidence to contradict such a view in 1650, and Isaac Newton was one of many interested in such scripturally based chronologies. There was no clash with science on this, because there was no obvious way for science to date the origins.

Earth science based on observation basically dates from the mid seventeenth century.[2] We might distinguish three main important areas of actual field-work:

i. Structure (i.e. recognition that strata had a structure).

ii. Composition (i.e. mineralogy, what the rocks were made of).

iii. Fossils (in the modern sense of living remains turned to stone).

On structure, Steno (1631-1686), who later entered holy orders, was one of the first to suggest study of strata on the obvious presupposition that they indicated an order of deposition.

In the systematic study of the structure of mineralogy and rock composition John Woodward (1665-1728) founded a system that, though not profound, makes Porter describe him as 'remarkable' and 'prophetic' in pointing the way forward.[3]

Fossils had long puzzled observers. Some looked like living creatures, others didn't, and opinions on their origins varied. Woodward began a useful collection of fossils and minerals, still intact in Cambridge. At that time there was no obvious reason why living creatures should 'turn to stone', and no obvious reason why fossils should not (like minerals and crystals) be chemical products of the rocks themselves.[4] Nevertheless, the consensus view by the early eighteenth century was that fossils were the remains of once living creatures.[5]

Naturalists at that time also faced the wider problem of constructing a theory to explain how strata formed, why fossils were found on tops of mountains and how (since they were all Christians of varying orthodoxy and piety) this fitted Genesis. It should, however, be noted that they all generally took a Baconian approach, not tailoring nature to the Scriptures, nor feeling any great theological pressure to do so, but simply developing their theology and science together in seeking an ultimate unity of knowledge.[6] Though, of course, individuals sometimes failed in the application of this approach to which they were committed, science 'confirmed' Scripture but did not begin from it.[7]

One suggestion was that most of the earth's surface structure was laid down during the one Noarchic flood. Two Cambridge scholars on what Porter describes as 'on the liberal and rationalistic wing' of the church put forward such theories.[8] Both Burnet's (1681) and Whiston's (1696) theories proposed non-supernatural mechanisms, though neither were practical naturalists. Theologically, Whiston was unorthodox, whilst Burnet took Genesis very allegorically. They found few followers ­scientific or theological.

A third 'flood-geology, was that of Woodward, An Essay Towards a Natural Theory of the Earth (1693). Woodward suggested that in the flood the stone, minerals, chalk etc 'lost their solidity' and were 'sustained in the water', eventually resettling in the order of different specific gravity'. Contemporary Christian naturalists like the pious Ray, Lhwyd, Nicholson, Baker, etc, found this to make neither scientific nor theological sense. They pointed out that neither the strata nor fossils are in order of specific gravity, it would have required far more water than the Bible implied, the shells would also have dissolved (leaving no fossils) etc.[9] Woodward was forced to introduce supernatural miracles ­supposing that normal gravity was suspended etc. This (though modern 'flood geologists' usually resort to similar stratagems) all rather defeats the original object of constructing a scientific theory of the flood - ­given enough miracle any theory can be made compatible with observation.

More biblically minded critics also pointed out that the Bible referred to the same rivers before and after the flood, that the curse dated from the fall of Adam and not the flood, and that the Bible implied a longer period than the 14 days in May suggested by Woodward to account for fossil leaves.[10] Woodward was a pioneer in observational geology, but his actual system was scientifically impossible and biblically unsound.

There was also another important model which gained some support, due to Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Though Hooke believed in the Bible and the widespread effects of Noah's flood, he believed that marine fossils were found on mountains because the earth's surface was in a constant cycle of uplift and fall - a series of catastrophic earthquakes over a long period of earth history. His system prefigured the later one of Hutton (whom some have suggested knew of it) and also some ideas of William Smith.[11]

It should actually be noted that in general (and Woodward was an exception) 'most theorists were not field-workers, and most field-workers did not write theories'.[12] Field workers - like Ray and Lhwyd, were all too aware of the shortcomings of theories. Davis Young rightly portrays how Ray puzzled about how to construct one.[13] Earthquakes might raise sea floors - but not to the extent needed for mountains. A single flood of short duration could not account for distributions of rocks and fossils without great ad hoc introductions of miracle. Thus, though most naturalists suspected that a worldwide flood might have something to do with fossils on mountains, ideas (like Woodward's) that all the Strata were laid down in one universal flood were never part either of scientific or of Christian orthodoxy. Men like Hooke, Ray and Lhwyd believed no less in the flood than Woodward, but could not believe it the sole agent for laying down the strata.

In the eighteenth century, the most important figure in biology was probably Carl Linne or Linnaeus, the man who adapted Ray's system of organic classification into the one which is still used today. Linnaeus like Ray, specifically rejected the possibility that all the fossils could have been laid down in the Genesis Flood.[14] Such, in fact, was the effect of accumulating evidence that one modern study states that by 1750 Woodward's theories: 'were so undermined that they could no longer be accepted, even by those geologists who emphasised the flood's role.[15] One of the few prominent 18th century 'flood geology' naturalists was Alexander Catcott, who held a tense mixture of Woodwardian and Hutchinsonian ideas.[16] Hutchinson rejected Woodward as insufficiently 'literalist', and Hutchinsonians continued as a minority (much as modern young-earth creationists). They were never, however, regarded as mainstream or orthodox. John Wesley, for example, was himself interested in 'scientific' literature and encouraged his preachers to be. He read (with them) various books on Hutchinson's system, and his growing criticism culminated by 1758 in saying: 'I am more and more convinced that they have no foundation in Scripture or sound reason.'[17]

By the late eighteenth century all schools of geology had concluded that the world was much older than previously thought. There were, however, two major areas of controversy:

1. Aqueous vs Igneous: 'Neptunism' held that virtually all rocks had been laid down by the agency of water, except relatively recent volcanic rock. 'Vulcanism', held that a number of rocks (e.g. basalt, granite) were formed from molten lava - i.e. were igneous in origin.

2. Progressivism vs Steady State: This concerned whether the process showed a beginning ('primitive' rocks which contained no fossils), or was simply endlessly cycling with no trace of any beginning.

Neptunism was generally progressivist, vulcanism could be either. In these movements the figureheads (though not the founders) came to be Werner and Hutton. Hutton argued that even granite was igneous, and was a strong advocate of a 'steady state' theory. He did not necessarily reject catastrophes as part of geological history, but saw them as part of a steady-state system.

Hutton himself was deistical, but there was no lack of Christians (e.g. Rev Playfair) amongst his most prominent supporters. His steady state system merely says there is no apparent trace of a beginning; God could, of course, have created the whole thing instantaneously as an ongoing system. It was never a simple issue of theological differences, and (though many were also interested in theology) the arguments were, with few exceptions, based on observational evidence.

In the early 19th century there were two further developments. The first was the recognition by English engineer William Smith, that particular strata could be systematically identified by their fossils. It should be noted that Smith's ideas began from the practical experience of work in mines, cuttings, and road surfaces (which were just bare rock and not covered). The flat strata around Bath where he lived showed fairly clearly how different fossils appeared at different layers. Smith was not a theoretician, and his approach was structural rather than thinking in terms of 'dating'.[18] No particular 'theory' was assumed, and certainly no concept of evolution.

The written dissemination of Smith's idea owed much to the writings of Brongniart and Cuvier. Cuvier was a renowned French Protestant who experienced religious renewal. He also opposed and rejected the contemporary theories of evolution (due to Laplace) as unempirical. Cuvier also developed an influential idea (based mainly on data from around the Paris Basin) that there had been successive widespread floods. In England, William Buckland (a Dean who wrote about the design of God in creation and whose wife attended an evangelical church[19]) developed this into a notion of successive worldwide floods, of which the flood of Noah might be the last.[20] This form of 'catastrophism' (i.e. successive 'catastrophes') became popular. A leading advocate for it was the Cambridge Professor of Geology, Adam Sedgwick. Its leading opponent was probably the Scottish naturalist John Fleming, who rejected it (in favour of a tranquil flood) on both geological and biblical grounds.[21] Both were highly competent scientists. Theologically, Sedgwick identified his views with those of Charles Simeon - acknowledged as one of the foremost evangelical leaders of his generation[22] - whilst Fleming was part of the evangelical revival which split the Church of Scotland. On both sides of the debate, then, leading protagonists were firm Evangelicals.

The standard 1820's geology textbook was co-authored by W D Conybeare (whose 1839 book on the Christian Fathers shows a highly orthodox theology) and Phillips (who held to the orthodox 'gap theory' of Genesis).

Of the first three decades, then, of the nineteenth century, we can make the following clear generalisations:

1. No serious geologist believed the world 6000 or so years old, or that the strata were laid down in one big

2. No school of geology or leading geologist assumed or even believed in organic evolution - although the idea had been put forward both in Britain and in France.

3. Christians (including Evangelicals) were prominent in the development and dissemination of the ideas of geology.

4. Their ideas developed not because of some anti-Christian agenda, but simply because of what they saw in the rocks.

By around 1830 various controversies had become settled amongst serious geologists:

A. Neptunism had been right in believing the rocks to show a one-way history rather than an endless cycle (as Hutton had thought)..

B. Neptunism had been wrong in supposing that mineral type indicated age of rock - granite, for example, was fossil-free not because it was 'primitive, (i.e. before organic creation), but because it was igneous (i.e. solidified from molten rock, which could be of any period).

C. Neptunism had been wrong, and Vulcanism right, in the igneous origin of basalt, granite etc, and igneous rocks played a major part in earth history.

D. The association of fossil type with age was accepted.

E. The successive worldwide flood theories were abandoned, and Fleming's slow processes were accepted.

Sedgwick's own field work, for example, led him to a public admission in a Presidential Address to the Geological Society in 1831 that his former views on (B) and (C) had been wrong. Dean Buckland, Reader in Geology at Oxford, made the same admission in footnotes in a work of natural theology of 1836.[23] These ideas were the basis of the work from 1830-1855 which saw the development of the geological column still accepted by geologists today.

We need at this point to mention the work and influence of Charles Lyell, a lawyer turned geologist about which more baloney has probably been written (by Christians and non-Christians) than any other figure in geological history. Lyell put forward two distinctive theories:

i. 'Rate-uniformity': he assumed that rates of all processes had been constant, and actually tried to work out time spans based on it.[24]

ii. 'Steady-state': Lyell assumed that all the genera of animals had always existed in a steady cycle of species change - there was no 'progression' of animal forms.

On (i), his sympathisers never numbered more than a small minority of geologists - the general view (well expressed by Sedgwick) was that it was a gratuitous assumption. Lyell's attempts at actual time spans were never accepted, and by the 1860's even he admitted it was hopeless.

Lyell's steady state theory fared even worse, he won no notable converts, and this has led Michael Bartholomew in his detailed studies to call Lyell a 'singular figure'.[25] Lyell's famous Principles of Geology (1830-33) was a best selling introduction, but neither of his distinctive ideas convinced the geological world. What was more influential was its version of geological history - a version which was really propaganda. Porter calls it 'mythic history'[26] but it remains influential.

In Reason, Science and Faith we show in detail a number of other key points on Lyell:

1. Lyell was fairly theologically orthodox (though not naturally devout), and his Principles took an anti-evolution line because of his views on the specialness humankind.

2. Lyell was not especially important to the development of geology

Actually the Evangelical John Fleming had been leading an assault on Bucklandian catastrophism in 1825-6 when Lyell was still a catastrophist,[27] and Fleming was justifiably angry when Lyell later tried to claim the credit for its demise.[28] Fleming, Scrope and Prevost, were probably at least as influential as Lyell on professional geologists like Sedgwick. Sedgwick's own field observation was the real reason for his change of mind which occurred between 1827 and 1830 i.e. before Lyell's book was published.[29] In any event, what was distinctive in Lyell's system remained an oddity, and some modern evangelical geologists have doubted if even Lyell himself fully accepted it.[30] Lyell's excessive belief in constancy of rates was not accepted by the majority of those who established the geological column.

The geological column, then, was essentially completed by 1855 (later changes were merely verbal) - four years before Darwin published his Origin of Species, and three key points need to be made about this:

1. It did not assume evolution, and key geologists were vehemently anti-evolution

2. It did not assume uniformity of process rates and most geologists were catastrophis

3. It did not depend on a circular 'dating the rocks from the fossils and the fossils from the rocks'.

These three points are demonstrated in detail in our Reason, Science and Faith. On issues of methodology Adam Sedgwick (the most successful stratigraphic geologist of all time) is especially important. His method was a complex interaction of three dimensional stratigraphy checked against fossil horizons – no circularity was involved and at no stage in his long career did he accept evolution let alone assume it as part of his method.-

Interpreting Genesis 1-3 in the Age of Geology

What was the effect on biblical interpretation of the various stages of development in geology that started in the last part of the seventeenth century?

John Wesley, who died in 1791, could not really be blamed for still believing the world was 6,000 years old. It was really by about the start of the nineteenth century that geology had concluded (on empirical grounds) that the great thickness of strata indicated an ancient earth. During the period (say) 1819-1833 there was still one school of geology that believed that over long time periods there had been successive inundation's - the last could be identified with Noah's flood. That in turn was overthrown empirically by the early 1830's.

So how did Bible-believing Christian leaders react to this development of geology and the geologists in their midst? Four basic alternatives were on offer:

1. A Flood Geology: Put forward an alternative geology with all or most strata ascribed to one flood, so that a young earth (c 6000 years) can be kept.

2. The Age-day View: The 'days' were taken to be long time periods.

3. The Gap theory: That between Gen 1:1 and Gen 1:2 there was actually a long gap (into which dinosaurs etc could fit), then 'the earth became without form and void'. The rest of Genesis 1 describes its reconstitution.

4. The Framework View: Basically following Augustine & co in a belief that the 'days' are purely schematic.

The first of these was taken up in books by the so-called U.K. 'Scriptural Geologists' listed in Table 1 below.

When the Geological Society was founded in 1809, its emphasis was on empirical research rather than overall theory. As people realised in the 1820's and particularly in the 1830's that actually a geological consensus was now being reached, some reacted by rejecting it and looking for an alternative. Flood-geology was essentially a phenomenon of the 1830's, at a time when the full evidence for the new geological consensus could easily not be known by figures who were (as most of them were) slightly out of date with their mugged-up science.

But how did Evangelicals in the 1820's and 30's react? Support was given Scriptural Geology by the Calvinist editor of the weekly paper The Record - whose dour controversial tone was deeply distasteful to many Evangelicals.[31] Its attitude was abhorred by major evangelical leaders like Simeon, Sumner and Henry Venn.[32] Sumner himself, regarded by Toon as one of the few whose evangelical credentials were above reproach, castigated Ure without hesitation.[33] In any event, a modern study can state: 'the following of the Scriptural geologists, for all their vociferousness and the plenitude of their tracts, was small and consistently so.'[34] Mortensen, who is highly sympathetic to these 'Scriptural Geologists' in his recent PhD thesis, nevertheless shows how by 1850 (note: nearly a decade before Darwin published his book on evolution) all the major orthodox commentaries had abandoned any support for such schema.[35] Ronald Numbers' monumental book identifies only the very obscure Lord brothers as advocating flood geology in the U.S.A. after 1850 (Lord's magnum opus being in 1851).[36]

Actually, my own PhD thesis (Sec 6.2) shows that, in the crucial 1820's and 1830's, mainstream geology was accepted by both Anglican and non-Anglican Evangelicalism, as well as the High Church – i.e. all those in the church who regarded the whole Bible as inspired. This point is important, for it seems not always to have been well understood even in some modern historical works.[37] In this period, the mouthpiece of the moderate evangelical Anglicanism of Simeon, Wilberforce, Sumner, and the so called 'Clapham' group central to British Evangelicalism, was the Christian Observer. Though it would print letters from 'Scriptural Geologists' (and even from the more extreme Hutchinsonians who rejected Newton), its editorial line consistently supported mainstream geology and the position of clerics like Conybeare and Sedgwick who were geologists. On the other hand it equally clearly rejected any suggestion (such as that made by Powell at Oxford) that the Bible might contain historical or scientific mistakes. Amongst Church of Scotland Evangelicals, key leaders like Thomas Chalmers, and geologist Hugh Miller, were equally clearly committed to the value of geology. Amongst leading non-Anglican (or 'Dissenter') Evangelicals, John Pye Smith wrote his book On The Relation Between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science in 1839. His acceptance of mainstream geology was continuous (his correspondence with geologist John Phillips is extant in Oxford and we have read it) and a final version was issued just after his death in 1854.

The most common views amongst leading Evangelicals between 1815 and 1859 (when Darwin published his book) were the age-day and gap theory. The exact origins of these two views are hard to discover. The idea of the 'days' as millennia was very early in Christian and Jewish thinking (e.g. it is mentioned by Irenaeus), but there would have been no possibility to associate them with geological ages until geology reached this point in the eighteenth century. The age-day theory can actually be traced back to Buffon in Epoques de la Nature (1778), but was influentially revived by the Evangelical G S Faber in his Genius and Object (1823), and had its most illustrious pre-1859 geological advocate in Hugh Miller in his The Testimony of the Rocks (1857). Miller actually portrays the days as visionary or prophetic - but argues that they are also indicative (with some caveats) of time periods in history.

The gap-theory is traced by Ramm to some figures in the seventeenth century,[38] and work in progress by Michael Roberts may in due course produce further evidence of its early occurrence.[39] In the nineteenth century it owed its popularity to Chalmers in The Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation (1817), to John Pye Smith's On the Relation between the Holy Scriptures and Certain Parts of Geological Science (1839) (and in later works like G H Pember's Earth's Earliest Ages (1876)). Influential geological advocates were Buckland in Geology and Mineralogy Considered With Reference to Natural Theology (1836) - supported by high church scholar Pusey. Amongst the evangelical geologists, in America Hitchcock supported it, and in Britain Sedgwick also tended towards it though later was more wary of committal.[40]

Variants of the age-day and the gap-theory dominated Evangelicalism in the years before Darwin (though in Reason, Science and Faith we also look at ideas in J H Kurtz (1842) and P H Gosse (1857) which never caught on much).

A popular view is that when Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859 most Christians believed the world to be about 6000 years old. It is quite simply incorrect. Leaders of all branches of the church had long since abandoned any such view and it was not generally considered credible by then. What the 'person in the street' believed is harder to decide.

Evolution Before Darwin

(1) Romantic Evolutionary Deism

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was born near Nottingham, went to Chesterfield school, then Cambridge University where he studied classics, mathematics and medicine. In 1756 he qualified as Doctor of Medicine from Edinburgh after two years study there. He moved to Litchfield where he lived for 25 years giving medicine free to the poor and for fat fees to rich. He became a very eminent Doctor and a friend of Wedgwood and Watt the new breed of inventors/industrialists. He influenced Shelley, Keats and Coleridge and was involved in scientific societies. His major works were The Botanic Garden (1789-91) Zoonomia (1794-6) Phytologia (1800) and The Temple of Nature (1803). A gargantuan man - large of appetite - he had 14 children (from two wives + 2 illegitimate). Socially and politically he was a revolutionary freethinker, Deistic in religion he admired the Unitarian Priestly. His view of mind was reductionist and materialist. He was Charles Darwin's grandfather, though died before Charles was born His system of evolution was romantic rather than empirical, it was fanciful and hypothetical, and was not generally regarded as at the forefront cutting edge of science in the early 19th century. Erasmus summarized his ideas:

Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of rime, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of aged before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the first great cause endowed with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end.

When I quote this in lectures I usually add "Amen" at the end – it sounds so much like a liturgy! This is not a science of mechanisms and empiricism, but a visionary deism.

(2) French Transformationism

The founder of this school was Jean-Baptist de Monet Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829)

"Lamarckianism" was a system of evolution based on use and disuse of organs + interior forces. There was a kind of inbuilt upwards movement in organic life. Other members of the school included Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire (1772-1844). He applied term 'evolution' (applied to embryonic development) to the process of transformation from 1834 time his works began to be more mystical and vague - dominated by idea of unitary universe. From 1832-1837 Geoffroy's son Isodore produced work on monstrosity - seen as source of evolution.

(3) The British School

In the first half of the nineteenth century there developed at Edinburgh and then in University College London a school of comparative anatomy based on the French ideas (i.e. Lamarck/Geoffroy). This school was:

* Politically radical - standing for the abolition of all privilege

* Atheistic - often actively ridiculing the idea of God and design in nature

* Materialistic - reducing mind to matter

* Evolutionist - linking even invertebrates and vertebrates

* "Disreputable" – largely marginalized as Richard Owen became dominant in anatomy.

The Edinburgh group were involved in giving private tuition on a large scale because the official medical lecturers (as sometimes happens in complacent Ivy League institutions) were out of date, boring, and uninspiring. A leading figure was Robert Knox (1793-1862), who in 1828-29 had 504 students in his "unofficial" private tuition group. In 1820 he came under suspicion (although later cleared) of involvement in the infamous Burke & Hare murders for cadavers, and in1842 Left for London where he experienced various failures to get an academic post. Publications in Lancet etc Another key figure was Robert Grant (1793-1974) who in 1814 Graduated as MD from Edinburgh

1815-1820 and had studied medicine and anatomy at continental universities e.g. Paris. Grant became a lecturer on invertebrate animals in Knox's extramural anatomy school in 1824. Grant seems not to have flouted any transmutationist (i.e. evolutionary) views as much as the flamboyant Knox and there may be some doubt as to how far Grant held the evolutionary views in the earlier 1820's[41] or whether he really was the anonymous author of an article in Jameson's journal in October 1826 which took a Lamarckian view. In any event, in1827 he received recommendations from the fairly scientifically conservative John Barclay and Robert Jameson to obtain the post of Professor of Zoology Comparative Anatomy in the newly formed University College, London. He was also recommended by the conservative evangelical scientists John Fleming and David In 1827, then, Grant became professor of comparative anatomy and zoology in University College London. A reserved person, Grant was seen as increasingly eccentric in his formality of dress as he lectured, and increasingly anachronistic and out of date in his approach. Loosely connected with this group was Robert Chambers (1802-1871) the son of cotton manufacturer who was a bookseller and publisher. In 1844 he wrote Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation anonymously - by 1860 it had sold over 60,000 in the UK, plus foreign edition. The book bore the marks of a self-taught person, and was slated by scientific critics from the evangelical Adam Sedgwick to the agnostic T H Huxley. It position was basically materialist, though its evolutionary schema was deistic.

Outline of Darwin's Life and Religion

Charles Darwin 1809-1831

Erasmus Darwin's son Robert Wareing Darwin was also an eminent doctor, and married a member of the Wedgwood family. Their son, Charles Darwin, was born in Shrewsbury in 1809. Robert Darwin had Darwin brought up like his devout mother as an Anglican (i.e. an Episcopalian or member of the Church of England) although his own freethinking views were more towards Unitarianism.

The Darwin's were very affluent, and Charles had a good education (though was an average pupil). In 1825 he went to Edinburgh University with the intention that he would follow the family medical tradition. The anatomy courses there were gruesome and boring, and he disliked and eventually abandoned medicine.[42] He attended, however, courses by two of the leading British exponents of the two schools of geology in the 1820's. One was Thomas Charles Hope's chemistry lectures. Hope was not research-active but spent much money and time on his renowned flamboyant and visual lecture courses. Hope included geology and mineralogy, which his syllabus shows were treated from the Huttonian (vulcanist) viewpoint. The other course was given by Robert Jameson, covering zoology, botany, paleontology, geology, mineralogy and "the philosophy of zoology". both Jameson and the course, complete with field trips, were justly renowned. Charles found Jameson's style very boring, but (in spite of his later statement that he abandoned it) he persevered as his notebooks show. Jameson was a Neptunist, and was also the one to introduce (and translate) Cuvier's ideas of successive inundations. Jameson famously remarked to a Royal Commission in 1827:

It would be a misfortune if we all had the same way of thinking. Dr Hope is decidedly opposed to me, and I am opposed to Dr Hope, and between us we make the subject interesting."[43]

Darwin read both Jameson's course Text Manual of Mineralogy (1821) and the 5th edition of his translation of Cuvier's geological discourse Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1827). Darwin was reading other science books. He studied the evangelical John Fleming's Philosophy of Zoology which took a vitalist rather than materialist view of living organisms, and bought and possibly read John Barclay's Treatise on Life and Organisation (1822) which gave a similar view (though his actual notes in his own copy date from a later period). Barclay was critical of Erasmus Darwin and other evolutionists for a mechanical materialist view of animals.

In 1823 a student natural history society, the Plinian Society, had started, and Darwin joined this with enthusiasm. An important figure in this was graduate and tutor Robert Grant, who is reputed also to have sat in on Jameson's lectures. Grant was in his early thirties, a very reserved bachelor who lectured in full evening dress (and indeed continued to wear frock coats to lecture long after no one else did!). Reports[44] show him as ostensibly melancholic and humourless, a kind of loner devoted to his subject with excessive zeal. Darwin remarked:

I knew him well. He was dry and formal in manner, but with much enthusiasm beneath his outer crust.

In any event the young Charles became friendly with Grant and learned much on invertebrates through him in numerous field excursions. At some stage Charles had read and annotated his grandfather's Zoonomia which he admits "I greatly admired at this time" - and it is hard to believe he did not discuss it with Grant.

On 27th March 1827 Darwin's first proper scientific paper was delivered to the Plinian Society on an obscure marine invertebrate Flustra. This led to a cooling of relations with Grant, as Darwin's daughter related some forty years later. Rushing to tell Grant of his discovery, he "was confounded on being told that it was very unfair of him to work at Prof G.s subject and in fact he would take it ill if my father published it." Three days before Darwin's "big moment" Grant read a notice on Flustrae to the senior Wernerian Society (which accepted only graduates) in which Darwin's work was subsumed with little or no notice. Grant may have seen this as a Professorial programme (similar disputes have not been uncommon in the history of university science), and Darwin was probably not original. In any event, relationship with Grant cooled, and the evidence seems to be that Darwin did not embrace the older man's transmutationism at this time.[45] Darwin's religion during this time was formally Anglican. His private notes show, of course, that he was interested in materialism (he could hardly not be at Edinburgh at this time where it was in hot dispute. Darwin toyed with materialism in private notebooks – but seems not to have gone far into it.

He realized, however, that medicine was not for him, and it was decided that he would go to Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge at that time were Anglican (i.e. Episcopalian or C of E) institutions and a degree gave the possible intention of entering the Anglican Ministry. In preparation, he read and appreciated the evangelical John Bird Sumner's[46] Evidences of Christianity.[47] He was delighted with the logic of William Paley's Evidences for Christianity when he read it as part of his Cambridge degree.[48] That degree was an ordinary BA, rather than the academic Mathematical Tripos, and he was not required to do a great deal of work. He spent much time with his cousin William Darwin Fox who was four years older and in his final year. Fox was gentle, unassuming, with a love of natural history curiosities and an intention of becoming a country parson. Living fairly indolently, the pair were both passionate beetle collectors, and Darwin an accomplish etymologist.

For some time devout Christians had been in the forefront of Cambridge science. The renaissance of Cambridge science was pioneered by ardent evangelical Isaac Milner (Jacksonian Professor 1783-92), and continued by his later successor the evangelical William Farish, a close friend of the doyen of evangelicals Charles Simeon. Edward Daniel Clarke, professor of Mineralogy in this period, was also a supporter of the Bible Society. Trinity Fellow Adam Sedgwick (who had attended Farish and Clarke's lectures) had become Woodwardian Professor of Geology in 1818, began annual lectures in 1819, and went on to become a key stratigraphic geologist. Trinity and John's colleges were central to the rise of Cambridge to a dominant position in British science. The great polymath William Whewell (1794-1866) who invented the word "scientist" in the early 1830's, became a Fellow of Trinity in 1817 and Prof of Mineralogy in 1828. In 1813 John Herschel (1792-1871) had passed out senior wrangler from neighbouring St John's College and become an FRS at the age of 21 – going on to win the Copley medal for mathematical papers by 1822 when he took over his father's telescopes and work. In 1826 George Biddell Airy (1801-1892) became Lucasian professor, and in 1828 Plumian professor of astronomy. Others in the circle, like Joseph Romilly, John Stevens Henslow, Richard Sheepshanks, and George Peacock, also went on to scientific interest and honour. Sometimes dubbed "the Cambridge Network"[49], the brilliant group had great effect in science. The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was founded in 1831 by a group in which these men were central. Thackray and Morrell started a fashion for calling this Cambridge Network "Broad Church"[50] – but this is misleading. They were not bigots, but their theology was generally conservative and moderately evangelical.

Darwin was greatly influenced by Professor John Stevens Henslow with whom he came to spend much time. Henslow had been a Professor of Mineralogy, and then of Botany, but was also at home in mathematics and theology.[51] He was a knowledgeable scientist, did much to advance science in school curricula, and was also a devout Christian of whom Darwin himself remarked that he cared so much for the biblically based 39 articles of the Church of England that "he would be grieved if a single word… was altered."[52] Ironically, Darwin once rushed through to Henslow with a similar "eureka" moment he had been so disappointed with in Grant. Henslow, in contrast, was encouraging, showed no professional jealousy, and was easy for any young scientist to be with. Darwin adulated him – seeing him as the epitome of professional and personal perfection in a man.

Though never himself devout, Darwin was fairly orthodox in his theological beliefs at this time. He later never wavered from the assertion that:

"As I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be folly accepted."

This is, of course, hyperbole. These Anglican Dons believed that all the bible was inspired, but were certainly not "literalists" - any more than the mainstream of Christian teachers ever had been. Though, of course, the miracles and resurrection in the gospels were taken literally, Dons like Henslow and Sedgwick (or figures like Paley and prominent evangelicals like Sumner) were not "literalists" on Genesis 1-3 and ALL of them believed by this time that the world was very old. We have to be very careful of some of the material on this presented e.g. by Janet Browne, who does not seem to understand well the religious climate of the times nor the non-literality of the evangelical tradition. Darwin's qualms as he thought about ordination were not about orthodoxy, but about whether he could really, when asked in the ordination service, claim that he had been "inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit" to ordination. To graduate, however, he had to make no such claim, but he did have to assent to the 39 articles of the Church of England, which certainly took the classic approach of the Christian church and held to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Darwin did so without qualms.

Darwin left Cambridge in 1831, and completed his science education with a brief geological tour of Wales with leading geologist Professor Sedgwick in 1831.[53] So strong is the "Darwin myth" than in a new Channel 4 TV programme broadcast September 2002 "Origins", Darwin was portrayed by Steve Jones (a geneticist wheeled in by TV companies when real historians of science won't sing the tune they want!) as a radical advocate of glacial action facing contemporary prejudice in favour of bones being washed about by Noah's flood. Though years later Darwin did, of course, see that those Welsh valleys had marks of glacial action, he was far from a trendsetter on glacial action. He continued to argue in the 1850's that the parallel "roads" around Glen Roy were raised marine beaches long after the evidence of glacial causality was obvious, and in spite of obvious glacial remains at the valley head. To contemporaries, he was not "St Darwin the infallible" – but just another geologist (good but fallible). alongside others. A comparison of the journals of Darwin and Sedgiwck on this trip shows just what one might expect. That of Sedgwick is professional, detailed, and technical – that of Darwin more speculative and less technical. He was a young inexperienced geologist completing his scientific education.[54]

At the opposite extreme from the "St Darwin" approach of adulators, in some of the literature it has been suggested that Darwin was some kind of dilettante "amateur" in science in 1831.[55] This is also totally misleading. Actually, the terms "amateur" and "professional" in science have virtually no meaning in 19th century (or earlier) England. Professorships were not enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle, and holders were expected to either practice medicine or hold a church living (e.g. Sedgwick was a Canon) even to maintain a moderate bachelor lifestyle. There were no "science degrees" at Oxford or Cambridge (at least until 1851 – and these were for the less able!). There were, of course, those who were accepted/accredited as scientists and those who were not, but there was no "scientific career structure". Figures like A R Wallace and T H Huxley – brilliant though they were – struggled to make enough to live on from their science. Figures like Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin were supported from private means – but were no more "amateurs" than (say) Robert Boyle or Isaac Newton. In 1831 Charles Darwin was one of the best-trained young naturalists in Europe. He had studied under Hope, Jameson, Grant, Henslow and Sedgwick – and had read a great deal more and done a lot of fieldwork on his own and under individual supervision. Darwin had also seen the radical change in geology between 1825-1831. The old Neptunist-Vulcanist controversy (still in Edinburgh) was falling away by 1831 when Sedgwick delivered his famous recantation. Darwin was about to launch on a geological "career" – and he did so under the new paradigms.

In religious terms, he had understood materialism, but had come out on the orthodox side. The men he adulated were not the Edinburgh materialists, but the devout Cambridge Dons – Henslow in particular – whose scientific and personal qualities he so admired. Darwin himself had felt no great inward calling to the ministry, but was fairly orthodox in his religious views. He was not a transmutationist (overt or crypto) and certainly did not go off on the HM S Beagle to look for evidence for evolution. His own evolutionary speculations began after his return from that trip, as we shall see, in 1836.

Charles Darwin 1831-1842

From 1831 to 1836 Darwin was on the HMS Beagle as a gentleman companion to the Captain Robert Fitzroy, and as an unofficial naturalist. We have noted that he had received a first rate training as a naturalist. He was unofficial because the official naturalist was a comparatively low-prestige post and Darwin was a gentleman – but he was not "amateur" in any sense we would think today.

He had been advised by Henslow to get and read Lyell's newly published Principles of Geology but "on no account to accept the views therein advocated." Henslow was, of course, was partly joking. Browne suggests that Henslow and Sedgiwck objected to Lyell's idiosyncratic "steady state" model on theological grounds – but she really does not understand the fundamental Baconian views of the Cambridge Dons who regarded such issues as to be settled by observation not theology. They were, of course, entirely right. Modern geology has emphatically rejected both Lyell's unidirectional model and his uniformitarian assumption that all the processes always went at the same pace. Both Sedgwick and Henslow valued the work as a general introduction to geology, but rejected its idiosyncracies. Darwin exaggerated his indebtedness to Lyell, but he did, on the journey, see evidences for the slow changes in land elevation over long periods of time. Darwin was fundamentally a geologist at this time, and specimens sent home were presented to the Geological Society by his mentors Henslow and Sedgwick. He achieved a geological reputation in his absence.

In Christian terms he remained orthodox:

Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused thee. But I had gradually come by this time, i.e. 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus….By further reflecting… that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracle become, - that the men of the time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us,- that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events,- that they differ in many important details///I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation…. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans… which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can, indeed, hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.[56]

After he came home in 1836 he began speculating on transmutation (evolution), whilst confirming his reputation as a geologist. It seems fairly clear that his belief in evolution, and invention of the ideas of natural selection, arose at this time and not before or during his voyage. He lived in Gower Street – near to Robert Grant whom he apparently never went to see.

Darwin was now (1838) speculating on materialist ideas. This is not just or even primarily about evolution. His notebooks around this time begin to reflect an essentially materialist and deterministic view of human beings. He was concluding that freewill was an illusion and the brain was mechanistic. He read Comte's Positivist Philosophy and moved away from the old Cambridge spiritual view of humankind. He read and agreed with the work of his brother's girl friend, Harriet Martineau, who held that "right" and "wrong" are culturally conditioned, not spiritual endowments.[57] This kind of moral relativism was common amongst the very radical Whig dissenters and Darwin's observation of alternative cultures on his Beagle trip had made him ripe for it. He courted in 1838 (and in 1839 married) his cousin Emma Wedgwood, a devout Christian, and opened his heart to her about his increasing unorthdoxy on religious issues.

He was not, of course, an atheist at this time, and no serious commentator believes he was. For example:

…despite his recognition of the materialist implications of selectionism for human nature, he continued for some time to believe that the natural world was created by a rational God.[58]

… Darwin was no atheist. He accepted that all this resulted from God's natural laws, and if it looked like leading to a godless conclusion, a "Man… would earnestly pray "deliver us from temptation".'

Harriet Martineau was a Unitarian, believing that matter itself was endowed with spirituality. God was seen as setting it all in motion. Yet in his notebooks Darwin was exploring the obvious metaphysical implications of a consistent positivist creed. A person can be "congratulated for doing good" but the act is actually purely conditioned and "deserves no credit". Moreover "wickedness is no more a man's fault than bodily disease!". Had his Anglican friends known his views, it would not have been his evolution by this deterministic materialism that would have shocked them.

But he still had no mechanism for evolution. Darwin claimed that in 1838 the reading of Malthus essay on population pressures triggered his recognition that "natural selection" was the evolutionary mechanism he had been looking for. Whether this was true, or he had earlier seen the idea in Patrick Mayhew as some suggest, by 1838 the framework of his later theory was in place.

Darwin claims in the long passage quoted above that with his loss of belief he "felt no distress". Yet Moore and Desmond are probably right in their assessment:

Darwin was approaching the Victorian dilemma, becoming 'destitute of faith, yet terrified of scepticism.' His new Malthusian evolution might have been implicitly secular, but it was not atheistic. How could it be, he asked, when God's laws produced so 'high a mind' as ours?[59]

This, always, was a tension in Darwin's evolution. As a process it was blind, pointless, directionless. New species were simply better adapted to particular environmental niches. There were, rationally, no "higher animals". Yet what Victorian gentleman, faced with all the feelings of adulation towards a perfect gentleman like Henslow or an angelic wife like Emma, could not feel that there "really were" such things as "higher faculties"? Who could really throw off any notion of purpose or morality or meaning – or indeed the choices we feel ourselves to freely make?

Meantime, the devout Emma was lovingly expressing to him her concerns, urging him to:

Read our Saviour's farewell discourse to his disciples which begins at the end of the 13th Chap of John… it is the part of the New Testament I love the best…

Emma was always concerned for the eternal destiny of her beloved Charles – but by this time he believed neither in a soul nor an afterlife. It deeply concerned him, and continued to concern him for the rest of his life as she too was concerned for her husband. As Moore and Desmond say:

Emma's Christianity was a simple evangelical prescription to gain everlasting life by believing in Jesus…[60]

Again, his later claim to have "felt no distress" is unconvincing. It was very stressful.

Charles Darwin 1842-1851

By 1842 Darwin, Emma and their two children moved to Downe (or Down) in Kent, away from the turmoil of London in the 1840's. He lost his third child Mary as a baby born shortly after their arrival, and continued to write and work as a naturalist. By 1842 also, Darwin's evolutionary ideas were fully formed and sketched – though he did not yet announce it publicly.

In early 1844 Darwin communicated some of his ideas on transmutation to the young botanist Joseph Hooker, newly back from a stint as assistant surgeon on a navy vessel (the mid decks equivalent of Darwin's trip – open to poorer men like Hooker and T H Huxley to further their scientific careers). Darwin famously wrote:

I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confession a murder) immutable.

Darwin probably felt this for a number of reasons. He remained both indebted to and deeply fond of Sedgwick and Henslow, and believed that the Cambridge circle would be deeply offended by his materialistic evolution (as his letter to Sedgwick even in 1859 when the Origin was published showed). Secondly, he was aware that his devout wife could be hurt by the publication of his views. Thirdly, in the 1840's there was deep resentment amongst much of the population (including nonconformist Christians) about the power, patronage, and wealth of the Established church. Only Anglicans could graduate from or hold posts at Oxford or Cambridge, and much of the science patronage was controlled by the Church of England. In cities, the poor lived in squalor, whilst the church collected tithes. Atheism and atheistic transmutation were a favourite theme of the radical agitators – and the last thing Darwin wanted was to be associated with the rabble in the very turbulent 40's.

Hooker (whose background was evangelical) was moderate in response. He would be interested to see any evidence, though had as yet seen nothing to convince him. Meantime, Darwin ought at least to become an expert at something. Darwin did. He spent years studying barnacles.

In 1844 Robert Chambers published anonymously a tract of evolutionary Deism The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chambers was self-taught – and it showed. The work was savaged in reviews not only by the Christian Sedgwick, but the agnostic Huxley, as bad science. Darwin remarked of it:

the writing and arrangement are certainly admirable, but his geology strikes me as bad, and his zoology far worse.[61]

It tried to combine materialism (which was more the base of Sedgwick's objections than the evolution as such) – whilst keeping a deistic God who set it all up. Darwin realized that he would have to have a better case than he did before announcing his own theory.

His religious faith seems to have continued to decline. Moore and Desmond suggest that

Just as his clerical career had died a slow "natural; death", so his belief in "Christianity as a divine revelation" had withered gradually. There had been no turning back once the death-blow fell. His dithering had crystallized into a moral conviction so strict the he could not "see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true." If it were, "the plain language" of the New Testament "seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

Hard heartfelt words, they recalled the bitter months and years after the Doctor's death. But what about the wider issues? How could belief in God and immortality be justified given the conflicting evidence? "Inward convictions and feelings" were unreliable because the human mind had evolved. Blind nature had given them a survival value, like other instincts. So while he sometimes felt himself a theist, at others he distrusted his own feelings, let alone anyone else's.[62]

His evolutionary views, coupled with his hardening materialism, certainly played some part in this decline. But emotional issues were probably also important. The death in 1851 of his favorite daughter Annie (aged ten) destroyed any vestige of belief in a benevolent creator:

For him the death marked and impasse and a new beginning. It put an end to three years deliberations about the Christian meaning of mortality; it opened up a fresh vision of the tragic contingency of nature… Annie's cruel death destroyed Charles's tatters of belief in a moral, just universe. Later he would say that this period chimed the final death-knell for his Christianity, even if it had been a long drawn-out process of decay.[63]

This death was the formal beginning of Darwin's conscious dissociation from believing in the traditional figure of God…. Little by little, his theological doubts turned into conviction.[64]

The thought, moreover, of his unbelieving father (who had died in 1848) in an everlasting hell of incessant torture brought a moral revulsion to what he thought was the teaching of Christianity as we noted in his words above.[65] There were then (as indeed now) conservative evangelicals who believed hell to be eventual annihilation rather than everlasting conscious torment[66], but most simply take it that timeless suffering is involved without even looking into what the New Testament actually says and without thinking of the enormity of the implications of what they believe. Darwin did think about it, and it horrified him.

Charles Darwin 1851-1859

Darwin continued with his scientific study, slowly moving from geology to biology. He studied not only Barnacles, but the effects of pigeon breeding – looking for the breeder selection parallels to natural selection. But still few knew of his theories. He was working on his big book on natural selection, but was not yet ready to publish. As well as Hooker, the evangelical American botanist Asa Gray now also knew of Darwin's ideas – in a detailed letter – but was sworn to secrecy. Darwin was unready to publish, but safeguarding his priority.

In 1858, as is well known, his hand was forced by the arrival of a paper from the young naturalist. A R Wallace. Wallace, unlike Darwin, was not rich, and was earning his liv