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Darwin and Religion

Author(s): John C. GreeneSource: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Oct. 15, 1959), pp.716-725Published by: American Philosophical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/985427 .

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DARWIN AND RELIGIONJOHN C. GREENE

AssociateProfessorof History, Iowa State College(Commemorationf the Centennialof thePublicationof The Originof Speciesby CharlesDarwin,Annual Meetingof theAmericanPhilosophicalSociety,April, 1959)

THE purpose of this paper is to view Darwinand his writings in the broad perspective of thehistorical conflict between science and religion.The modern history of that conflict may be dividedinto three overlapping stages. In the first stage,the new physics and cosmology of the seventeenthcentury, combined with scientific, technological,and economic progress in the eighteenth, gave riseto natural religion, or deism, as a competitor ofrevealed religion. In the second stage, reachingits climax with Darwin, the further progress ofscience undermined the traditional conception ofnature as a stable framework of rationally con-trived structures, a view which had underlain bothChristian natural theology and deism. In thethird stage, beginning in Darwin's day and ex-tending to the present, the methods of naturalscience were applied to the study of human natureand society, and these methods came to be re-garded by many as the only methods which couldyield knowledge of man and nature.The first of these stages was already well under-way by the time Darwin began to think seriouslyabout religion. The Newtonian conception ofnature as a law-bound system of matter in mo-tion, when pushed to its logical conclusion, provedirreconcilable with belief in miracles, special prov-idences, prophecies, and the like. These had pro-vided the "external evidences" of the divine originof the Bible and hence of Christianity. Withrespect to the "internal evidences," the spread ofhumanitarian feeling and of optimism concerningthe prospects of human life in this world produceda moral revulsion against the God of the OldTestament and the pessimistic view of humannature expressed in traditional Christian doc-trines. Finally, the very notion of revealed truthran counter to the growing demand that all knowl-edge be based upon clear and distinct ideas de-rived from experience by reason and observation.In Germany the beginnings of the "higher criti-cism" made further inroads on belief in the ple-nary inspiration of the Bible, that is, the belief

that everything in the Bible, properly interpreted,is substantially true. Darwin's account of theconsiderations which led him in the years 1836-1839 to abandon the Christian faith in which hehad been reared will serve as a brief summary ofthese intellectual trends:. . . I had graduallycome, by this time, to see thatthe Old Testament from its manifestly false historyof the world and from its attributing to God thefeelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to betrusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, orthe beliefs of any barbarian. The question thencontinuallyrose before my mind and would not bebanished,-is it credible that if God were now tomake a revelation to the Hindoos, would he permitit to be connectedwith the belief in Vishnu, Siva,&c, as Christianityis connectedwith the Old Tes-tament. This appearedto me utterly incredible.By further reflecting that the clearest evidencewould be requisite to make any sane man believe inthe miracles by which Christianity is supported,-that the more we know of the fixed laws of naturethe more incredible do miracles become,-that themen at that time were ignorant and credulousto adegreealmost incomprehensible y us,-that the Gos-pels cannot be proved to have been written simul-taneouslywith the events,-that they differ in manyimportant details, far too important as it seemedto me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies ofeyewitnesses;-by such reflections as these, whichI give not as having the least novelty or value, butas they influencedme, I graduallycame to disbelievein Christianityas a divine revelation. . . . This dis-belief crept over me at a very slow rate, but wasat last complete. The rate was so slow that I feltno distress, and have never since doubtedeven for asingle second that my conclusionwas correct.'

One suspects that the painlessness of the processwas not only due to its slowness but also becauseDarwin had never felt that deep anguish of thespirit to which Christianity ministers and whichcaused many of his contemporaries to cling to it1 Darwin, Charles, The autobiographyof Charles Dar-win 1809-1882 with original omissions restored, 85-86,New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959.

PROCEMINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 103, NO. 5, OCTOBER, 1959716

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VOL. 103, NO. 5, 1959] DARWIN AND RELIGION 717despite growing intellectual difficulties. Thispoint will be amplified in connection with Dar-win's anthropology.What role did Darwin's writings play in thefurther transformation of attitudes toward theBible and the idea of revealed religion? Mostimportantly they had the effect of bringing theBiblical narrative of the early history of man intodoubt. Not that Darwin was the first to suggestthat man's origins had been crude and bestial.Rousseau and Lord Monboddo had sketched theevolution of human nature from brutelike begin-nings, and Lamarck had plainly implied man'sapelike emergence in a long course of organicevolution. But Darwin converted the scientificcommunity to this view. He thereby raised itfrom the status of a subversive speculation tothat of a scientific theory strenuously defendedby scientists in an age when the prestige of sciencewas growing steadily. In this sense, Darwin'swritings may be said to have acted as a catalyst,hastening a series of reactions which would havetaken place eventually from other causes, such asthe progress of Biblical criticism and new dis-coveries of fossil remains, but which now camerapidly.Darwin himself avoided attacking the Bible,but for Huxley, his doughty champion against allcomers, the battle against the doctrine of inspira-tion, whether plenary or otherwise, was the crucialengagement in the fight for evolution and forfreedom of scientific inquiry.I am very glad that you see the importanceof doingbattlewith the clericals, [he wrote to Joseph DaltonHooker]. I am astoundedat the narrowness of theview of many of our colleagueson this point. Theyshut their eyes to the obstacles which clericalismraises in every direction against scientific ways ofthinking, which are even more importantthan sci-entific discoveries. I desire that the next generationmay be less fettered by the gross and stupid super-stitions of orthodoxy than mine has been. And Ishall be well satisfied if I can succeed to howeversmall an extent in bringing about that result.2Surveying the polemical situation in 1893, Huxleyfelt that the battle against Biblical authority hadlargely been won.

The doctrine of biblical infallibility [he wrote]. . .was widely held by my countrymenwithin myrecollection: I have reason to think that many per-sons of unimpeachablepiety, a few of learning, and2 Huxley, Thomas, Life and letters of Thomas Huxley3: 123-124, London, Macmillan, 1913.

even some of intelligence, yet uphold it. But I ven-ture to entertain a doubt whether it can produceany champion whose competency and authoritywould be recognised beyond the limits of the sect, ortheological coterie, to which he belongs. On thecontrary, apologetic effort, at present, appears todevote itself to the end of keeping the name of"Inspiration" to suggest the divine source, and con-sequently infallibility, of more or less of the biblicalliterature, while carefully emptying the term of anydefinite sense. For "plenary inspiration" we areasked to substitute a sort of "inspiration with limitedliability," the limit being susceptible of indefinitefluctuation in correspondence with the demands ofscientific criticism.This Parthian policy is carried out with somedexterity; but, like other such manoeuvres in the faceof a strong foe, it seems likely to end in disaster.3Actually, the response to evolutionary biologywithin the Christian camp has been rather morevaried than Huxley's words suggest. In somechurches, notably the Roman Catholic, a slow butdefinite accommodation to evolutionary biologyhas taken place within the context of traditionaldoctrines concerning the inspiration of Scripture.According to the Reverend E. C. Messenger ofLouvain, writing in 1949:Most [Catholic] theologians down to very recenttimes repudiated any form of evolutionary theory,even of plants and animals. Wiser counsels now

seem to prevail, and a decided modification of theattitude of theologians is now being witnessed onthe possibility of applying some restricted form ofevolution to man. Theologians still seem to holdfast to the absolutely literal interpretation of thenarrative of the formation of Eve. But the day maycome when it will be more generally recognised that,in addition to the core of historical truth, the narra-tive contains figurative elements. Inevitably thispresents the appearance of a losing battle, and of arearguard action, in which successive positions aredefended to the last, only to be abandoned under thepressure of necessity. A different attitude is surelydesirable, and it would at least have the merit of amore wholehearted recognition that Science as wellas Theology reveals to us truth concerning God andthe world which He has made.43Huxley, Thomas, Science and Hebrew tradition:essays, "preface,"vii, New York, Appleton, 1910.4 Messenger, E. C., Theology and evolution,211, Lon-don and Glasgow, Sands & Company, 1949. This bookis a useful compendium of Catholic opinion, includingpapal pronouncementson the question of evolution. Inconnectionwith Messenger's call for a new attitude to-ward evolution, it is worth noting the favorable interestrecently shown by the Vatican in a lecture in Rome byProfessor Johannes Hurzeler, curator of vertebrate

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718 JOHN C. GREENE [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.In Protestant circles the rise of evolutionarybiology and of the higher criticism produced theopposing reactions known as modernism (or lib-eralism) and fundamentalism. Modernism aban-doned the doctrine of plenary inspiration in favor

of an evolutionary conception of the growth ofreligious ideas and sentiments; fundamentalismreaffirmed plenary inspiration in its narrowestform and rejected whatever in biology could notbe reconciled with the letter of Scripture. Thisconflict of opinions is too familiar to require de-scription here. Of more recent interest is thedevelopment of new conceptions of revelation andinspiration in the Protestant fold.In recent Protestant theology [Walter M. Hortonwrites] the old scholasticdistinctionbetweennaturaland revealed theology is generally questioned,anda new conceptionof revelation has appeared,basedupon a less rationalistic theory of religious knowl-edge. According to this view, religious revelationdoes not consist of the communication f propositionsabout God to be believed; it consists of the con-frontationof God and man throughactual historicalevents, such as the Flight from Egypt, the Baby-lonian Captivity,and the Life of Christ. What isdisclosed in such events is "not truth concerningGod, but the living God Himself". . . Since Godconfronts us through the meaning of events, anyreport or comment which powerfully conveys thatmeaningmay be divinely inspired,whether or not itis factually inerrant. The Bible can thus conveya true revelation of God, and its writers can beGod's inspired interpreters,while at the same timethey are thoroughlyhuman and fallible.5

Again Horton writes:For Niebuhr (as indeedfor Barth himself . . .) theWord of God is something contemporaneous,orrather something eternal, which impinges upon ourage through a human and fallible historic medium.Literal faith in the ipsissimaverba of Scripture is aform of idolatry which God will punish as he willpunish the idolatrousState-worshipof our national-istic contemporaries. But let the words of Scripturebe taken as what Niebuhr calls "myths"and Barthcalls "tokens"-symbolic expressions of truths toopaleontology at Basle University. Hurzeler describeda skeleton four feet in height recently unearthed in acoal mine in Tuscany. He indicated that this creaturemust have lived more than ten million years ago andthat it representeda high degree of "humanization."5 Horton, Walter M., Revelation, in: A handbook ofChristian theology: definition essays on concepts andmovements of thought in contemporary Protestantism,327-328, New York, Meridian Books, 1958. See alsoBaillie, John, The idea of revelation in recent thought,New York, ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1956.

transcendent or human science to grasp, on whichneverthelessour humanfate depends-and they willlead us back to a fresh appreciationof Christianorthodoxy.6At the same time, say the advocates of this viewof revelation, the historic conflict between scienceand religion will be greatly mitigated, since re-ligion and revelation are conceived to deal withthose aspects of reality, especially the value as-pect, which are inaccessible to science.It would appear, then, that, although evolution-ary biology has done much to stimulate a rethink-ing of the doctrines of revelation and inspiration,it has by no means relegated them to the limbo ofexploded ideas.In the second stage of the modern conflict be-tween science and religion further scientific prog-ress undermined the static conception of naturewhich had informed both Christian natural the-ology and deism. Here again, traditional viewshad begun to disintegrate before Darwin pub-lished, but his influence was nonetheless decisive.In the static version of the doctrine of creation,set forth in such works as John Ray's Th-e Wis-domt of God Manifested in the Works of theCreation (1691) and William Paley's NaturalTheology (Darwin said he knew it almost byheart), nature was conceived as a framework ofrationally contrived structures fitted as a stagefor the activities of intelligent beings. The basicstructures of nature-stars, seas, mountains, spe-cies, etc.-were thought to be permanent andwisely contrived to fulfill certain functions in thegeneral economy of nature. Change, though everpresent, was superficial; it could not alter thefundamental aspect of things. Structure wasperfectly adapted to function; harmony and bal-ance prevailed in all the operations of nature.The lower forms of existence ministered to theneeds of the higher.7In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuriesthis view of nature was seriously shaken by the

6 Horton, Walter M., The new orthodoxy, The Amer.Scholar 7: 3-11, 1938, quoted in Gail Kennedy, ed.,Evolution and religion: the conflict between science andtheology in modern America, 88, Boston, D. C. Heath,1957. This volume containsa useful bibliographyon thesubject of evolution and religion.7For a fuller analysis of the static view of natureand the factors involved in its decline see my article,Objectives and methods in intellectual history, Miss.Valley Hist. Rev. 44: 5874, 1957; also, my forthcomingbook The death of Adam: evolution and its impact onwestern thought, scheduledfor publicationby the IowaState College Press in October, 1959.

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VOL. 103, NO. 5, 1959] DARWIN AND RELIGION 719development of the nebular hypothesis in astron-omy, by uniformitarian geology, by paleontologywith its long catalogue of extinct species, and bythe evolutionary speculations of Erasmus Darwinand Lamarck. Charles Darwin's contribution tothe further disintegration of the traditional viewwas twofold. On the one hand, by convertingthe scientific community to belief in organic evolu-tion he multiplied a thousand-fold the impact ofevolutionary ideas on the traditional faith in thestability and wise design of the fundamentalstructures of nature. Secondly, in his emphasison natural selection as the primary mechanism ofevolution he knocked the last remaining propfrom under the static view. Lamarck had recog-nized that the perpetual mutability of the inorganicenvironment implied the perpetual mutability oforganic forms, but he believed that living matterwas endowed (presumably by the Creator) witha capacity to undergo adaptive transformationsin response to changing environmental require-ments. Hence he was inclined to doubt the realextinction of species. For him, organic changewas progressive precisely because it was adap-tive. In Darwin's view, however, the variationswhich determined the survival or extinction ofplants and animals were largely unconnected withtheir efforts to survive. Those organisms whichhappened to vary in such a way as to gain acompetitive advantage in the struggle for exist-ence survived; those which happened to vary inless fortunate directions dwindled in numbers andeventually became extinct. Thus, struggle andchance, the antitheses of pre-established harmonyand wise design, became the engines of organicchange and the architects of such adaptation ascould be discerned in nature. This was the lastand harshest blow to the traditional view of na-ture, a blow from which natural theology has notyet fully recovered.

Most of Darwin's contemporaries evaded thefull force of the blow by transferring the elementof wise design from the structures of nature them-selves to the general system of matter in motionwhich had produced those structures in the courseof time. This maneuver gave rise to precisely thekind of evolutionary theism which ImmanuelKant had foreshadowed a hundred years earlier,when, in propounding his theory of cosmic evolu-tion, he declared:Matter, which is the primitive constituent of allthings, is . . . bound to certain laws, and when itis freely abandoned o these laws it must necessarily

bring forth beautifulcombinations. It has no free-dom to deviate from the perfect plan. Since it isthus subject to a supremely wise purpose, it mustnecessarily have been put into such harmonious re-lationships by a First Cause ruling over it; andthere is a God, just because nature even in chaoscannot proceed otherwise than regularly and accord-inig to order.8Applied to geology, biology, and eventually tohistory, this view of things harmonized with thenineteenth-century faith in progress and appealedto a wide variety of men and women, rangingfrom Christian liberals like John Fiske and AsaGray to out-and-out agnostics like HerbertSpencer.Darwin himself took a much less cheerful viewof the theological consequences of his theory ofnatural selection. To those who achieved peaceof mind by minimizing the role of natural selec-tion and assuming some kind of directive agencyor progressive tendency in the process of heredi-tary variation, Darwin replied that natural selec-tion was the only means which could bring aboutthe adaptation of organisms to their changing en-vironments. To those who, like Asa Gray andCharles Lyell, proposed that God providentiallysupplied streams of variation in the right direc-tions from which the environment could select,Darwin was equally unresponsive. If God pro-vided the variations which were selected, did Healso provide those which were eliminated? DidHe also provide the variations which pigeon fan-ciers selected to please their own or other people'sfancy? Did He determine the shape of Darwin'snose? If so, it amounted to saying that all varia-tions were predetermined, those which resulted inbeautiful adaptations and those which did not.As Darwin saw all too clearly, the conceptionof nature as a law-bound system of matter in mo-tion, when pushed to its ultimate conclusion,eventuated in stoicism. "The old argument ofdesign in nature, as given by Paley, which for-merly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now thatthe law of natural selection has been discovered,"he wrote. "There seems to be no more designin the variability of organic beings and in the ac-tion of natural selection, than in the course whichthe wind blows. Everything in nature is the re-sult of fixed laws." 9 But Darwin could not look

8 Kant, Immanuel,Universal natural history and theoryof the heavens .., translated by William Hastie inKant's cosmogony . . . 26, Glasgow, J. Maclehose &Sons, 1900.9Darwin, Charles, Auttobiography, 87.

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720 JOHN C. GREENE [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.on the production of order and adaptationthrough the operation of natural laws with Im-manuel Kant's optimistic enthusiasm. Presum-ably the laws of nature implied a law-giver, butwhat kind of law-giver would achieve the adapta-tion of structure to function by proliferating mil-lions of variations at random and leaving it tothe environment to eliminate those which did nothappen to fit? What kind of law-giver wouldpermit the enormous amount of suffering evidentin nature? "What a book a devil's chaplainmight write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering,low, and horribly cruel works of nature!" Dar-win exclaimed in a letter to Hooker. To AsaGray he confessed like bewilderment:There seems to me too much misery in the world.I cannot persuade myself that a beneficentand om-nipotent God would have designedly created theIchneumonidaewith the express intention of theirfeeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, orthat a cat should play with mice. Not believingthis, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye wasexpressly designed. On the other hand, I cannotanyhow be contented to view this wonderful uni-verse, and especially the nature of man, and to con-clude that everything is the result of brute force.I am inclinedto look at everythingas resultingfromdesigned aws, with the details,whethergood or bad,left to the working out of what we may call chance.Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel mostdeeplythat the whole subject is too profound or thehuman intellect. A dog might as well speculateonthe mind of Newton. Let each man hope and be-lieve what he can.'0

And so it went, around and around, in Darwin'shead-law and chance, chance and law. The dif-ficulty was that, when nature was conceived as alaw-bound system of matter in. motion, chancewas but the other side of a coin stamped law. Inthe old view of nature, chance and change hadbeen the antitheses of design and permanence.The forms of the species were regarded as de-signed by God; varieties were products of timeand circumstance, of chance, not in the sense ofbeing uncaused or not subject to law, but in thesense of not being a part of the original plan ofcreation. Now, in the evolutionary view of na-ture, change was everywhere, and everything

10 Darwin to Asa Gray, Down, May 22, 1860, quotedin Francis Darwin, ed., The life and letters of CharlesDarwin including an autobiographical chapter 2: 105,New York, Appleton, 1898. See also Darwin's letterto Joseph Dalton Hooker, July 13, 1856, quoted inFrancis Darwin, ed., More letters of Charles Darwin. . .1: 94, London, John Murray, 1903.

was either chance or law depending on how onechose to look at it. Adaptation of structure tofunction was a chance outcome of the operationsof nature in the sense of not being specificallyarranged in terms of a preconceived plan for theeconomy of nature, but it was certainly not chancein the sense of being uncaused or spontaneous.Thus, Huxley answered the charge that Darwinhad introduced chance into nature by pointing outthat "chance variations" must result from theoperation of definite laws. Darwin, he declared,had in no way destroyed the teleological view ofnature, since the element of design was simplytransferred from the present structures of natureto the hidden system of laws, elements, and forceswhich had produced them. Yet he, like Darwin,asserted repeatedly that he could see no purposein nature. But what was a teleological view ofnature which denied purpose, or telos, in nature?The old terms had taken on new meanings. Con-fusion was rampant.Oddly enough, it was precisely the element ofchance variation (taking chance not as the obverseof law but rather as its opposite) which recom-mended Darwin's theory to the American prag-matists Charles Peirce and William James as ameans of deliverance from the mechanical de-terminism of nineteenth-century physics andchemistry-"the block universe eternal and with-out a history," as William James described it.Peirce's interpretation of the theory of naturalselection was totally at variance with Darwin'sconception of nature as a law-bound system ofmatter in motion. "In biology," wrote Peirce,"that tremendous upheaval caused in 1860 byDarwin's theory of fortuitous variations was butthe consequence of a theorem in probabilities,namely, the theorem that if very many similarthings are subject to very many slight fortuitousvariations, as much in one direction as in theopposite direction, which when they aggregate asufficient effect upon any one of those things inone direction must eliminate it from nature, whilethere is no corresponding effect of an aggregate ofvariations in other directions, the result must, inthe long run, be to produce a change of theaverage characters of the class of things in thelatter direction."11 Peirce then went on to sub-

11 Peirce, Charles,MSS., IB 3a "Folderof Late Frag-ments" ("Why should a Doctrine of Chances raise Sci-ence to a Higher Plane?") (Jan. 25, 1909), 15, quotedinWiener, Philip, Evolution and the founders of Prag-matism,81, Cambridge,Mass., Harvard University Press,1949.

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VOL. 103, NO. 5, 19591 DARWIN AND RELIGION 721stitute a statistical conception of natural law forthe traditional idea of natural law as a rigid pat-tern of behavior imposed on matter by the Cre-ator, and to envisage the world process as agradual growth of concrete reasonableness in theuniverse at large. In his opinion, a cosmogonicphilosophy capable of representing the state ofknowledge at which the West had arrived in hisdaywould suppose that in the beginning-infinitely re-mote-there was a chaos of unpersonalized eeling,which being without connectionor regularitywouldproperly be without existence. This feeling, sport-ing here and there in pure arbitrariness,would havestarted the germ of a generalizing tendency. Itsother sportings would be evanescent,but this wouldhave a growing virtue. Thus, the tendency to habitwould be started; and from this, with the other prin-ciples of evolution, all the regularities of the uni-verse would be evolved. At any time, however, anelement of pure chance survives and will remainuntil the world becomes an absolutely perfect, ra-tional, and symmetricalsystem, in which mind is atlast crystalized in the infinitely distant future.12Or, as he put it in another place:. . .the coalescence, the becoming continuous, thebecoming governed by laws, the becoming instinctwith general ideas are but phases of one and thesame process of growth of reasonableness. This isfirst shown to be true with mathematicalexactitudein the field of logic, and is thence inferred to holdgood metaphysically.'3

Likewise, William James, Henri Bergson, A.N. Whitehead, and others, each in his own way,found in the idea of organic evolution the key to anew cosmology in which spontaneity, novelty,and purpose had a place, a place which had beendenied them in the cosmology inherited from theseventeenth century. The influence of these newideas may be seen in the writings of modern stu-dents of evolution, as when Professor Dobzhanskywrites, somewhat mystically: "In producing life,cosmic evolution overcame its own bounds; ingiving rise to man, biological evolution tran-scended itself. Human evolution may yet ascendto a superhuman level." 14To summarize concerning Darwin's role withrespect to the second stage of the conflict between12Peirce, Charles, Collectedpapers of Charles SandersPeirce 6: paragraph33, quoted in Wiener, op. cit., 84.13Ibid. 5: paragraph4, quotedin Wiener, op. cit., 91.14 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, The biological basis ofhuman freedom, 27, New York, Columbia UniversityPress, 1956.

science and religion: On the one hand, he gavethe death blow to traditional natural theology bydrawing out the ultimate implications for biologyof the conception of nature as a law-bound systemof matter in motion. On the other hand, he helpedto precipitate a cosmological revolution (develop-ing independently within physics itself) whichthrew into doubt the Newtonian cosmology Dar-win and Huxley had taken for granted. Naturewas open once more to the elements of value,purpose, and novelty which Newton and his con-temporaries had extruded from it except in so faras they thought to find them in the wise designof the structures of nature.We come now to the third stage of the conflictbetween science and religion, the stage in whichthe methods and attitudes of natural science wereextended to the study of man, his history andinstitutions, political, economic, religious, andmoral. The hope for a natural science of manand society had been voiced in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, but it was HerbertSpencer, in the mid-nineteenth century, who firstproposed that the evolution of human history andhuman institutions be viewed as a simple exten-sion of cosmic and organic evolution, continuouswith them and subject to the same general laws.In his essay entitled "Progress: Its Law andCause," published in 1857, Spencer discerned inthe whole universe a progressive developmentfrom homogeneity to heterogeneity. Progressseemed written into the structure of things. Itwas "not an accident, not a thing within humancontrol, but a beneficent necessity." In humanhistory, said Spencer, progress had come aboutprimarily through a competition of individuals andraces. Those who were best adapted to the chang-ing requirements of the environment won out overthose less well-adapted, thus setting the stage forstill further progress.15The relation between Darwin and Spencer isan interesting one. On the one hand, Darwinwas highly suspicious of Spencer's intellectualmethods. "My mind," he wrote Spencer's Amer-ican disciple John Fiske, "is so fixed by the in-ductive method, that I cannot appreciate deductivereasoning . . . such parts of H. Spencer as Ihave read with care impress my mind with the

15 For a fuller account of Spencer's ideas as well asthose of Auguste Comte, see my article Biology andsocial theory in the nineteenth century: Auguste Comteand Herbert Spencer, Critical problems in the historyof science (Paper No. 14), scheduledfor publication bythe Wisconsin University Press in the fall of 1959.

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722 JOHN C. GREENE [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.idea of his inexhaustible wealth of suggestion, butnever convince me." 16 On the other hand, therecan be no question that Darwin shared Spencer'sbelief in necessary, if somewhat sporadic, im-provement in both nature and history and re-garded natural selection as the chief engine ofprogress in both. The modern reader is rathersurprised to see how frequently Darwin uses theterms "improve"and "improvement"in discussingnatural selection. When Lyell protested thatnatural selection need not imply natural improve-ment unless there were some "principle of im-provement" at work in nature independently ofnatural selection, Darwin replied:When you contrast natural selection and "improve-ment," you seem always to overlook . . . that everystep in the natural selection of each species impliesimprovement n that species in relation to its con-ditions of life. No modification can be selectedwithout it be an improvementor advantage. Im-provement implies, I suppose, each form obtainingmany parts or organs, all excellently adapted fortheir functions. As each species is improved,andas the number of forms will have increased, if welook to the whole course of time, the organic condi-tion of life for other forms will become more com-plex, and there will be a necessity for other formsto become improved,or they will be exterminated;and I can see no limit to this process of improve-ment, without the intervention of any other anddirect principleof improvement. All this seems tome quite compatiblewith certain forms fitted forsimple conditions,remaining unaltered,or being de-graded.17

But what was the criterion of "improvement"?Not simply survival, for Darwin was quick toconcede that natural selection might bring aboutdevelopments which constituted "retrogression"when viewed against the trend of development asa whole. Improvement in the latter sense seemedto imply some notion of "higher" forms of lifecapable of surviving in a wider range of environ-ments. But Darwin and his colleagues Hookerand Huxley could never decide just what theymeant by "higher" and "lower" forms. "I donot think zoologists agree in any definite ideas onthis subject and my ideas are not clearer thanthose of my brethren," Darwin wrote Hooker.18

16Darwin to John Fiske, Down, December 8, 1874,Life and letters 2: 371.17 Darwin to Charles Lyell, Ilkley, Yorkshire, Octo-ber 25, 1859, Life and letters 1: 531.18 Darwin to J. D. Hooker, Down, 1854, More letters1: 76.

But, if there was no precise criterion of "higher"and "lower," there could be no precise meaningto general improvement as distinct from competi-tive advantage in a specific situation. Ironicallyenough, Wallace and Darwin both thought thatmuch of the ambiguity in this respect might havebeen avoided if instead of using the term "nat-ural selection," loaded with implications of intelli-gent choice, Darwin had used instead Spencer'sterm "survival of the fittest." Nowadays, on thecontrary, biologists lament that Spencer's termwas ever adopted, even secondarily, because ofthe difficulty of defining a criterion of fitness andof stripping it of value implications. The moralof the story would seem to be that biologists canneither live with nor live without normative con-cepts implying standards of excellence. Thus, G.S. Carter, in his recent survey A Hundred Yearsof Evolution, struggles with the "problems raisedby the element of progress in evolution.""These," he declares, "are the most fundamentalof all, for it is the progressive nature of biologicalevolution, its progress from the simple to the com-plex, towards a 'better' organism and more 'ef-ficient' life, that is the most outstanding charac-teristic of evolution in living nature." 19 ProfessorCarter's liberal use of quotation marks in thispassage betrays his uneasiness at introducing whatare essentially normative concepts into a sciencewhich he regards as "necessarily mechanistic."Whatever the difficulties involved in the notionof progressive improvement by natural selection inthe realm of nature, they were as nothing com-pared to those which Darwin and Spencer en-countered when they attempted to carry the ideaover into human history. That mankind hadprogressed and would continue to progress Dar-win seldom doubted. "I cannot explain why,"he wrote to Lyell in 1860, "but to me it wouldbe an infinite satisfaction to believe that mankindwill progress to such a pitch that we should [look]back at [ourselves] as mere Barbarians." Againhe wrote: "I am sorry to say that I have no'consolatory view' on the dignity of man. I amcontent that man will probably advance, and carenot much whether we are looked at as mere sav-ages in a remotely distant future." "To believethat man was aboriginally civilised and then suf-fered utter degradation in so many regions," hedeclared in The Descent of Man, "is to take apitiably low view of human nature. It is appar-

19 Carter, G. S., A hundred years of evolution, 181,New York, Macmillan, 1957.

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VOL. 103, NO. 5, 1959] DARWIN AND RELIGION 723ently a truer and more cheerful view that prog-ress has been much more general than retro-gression; that man has risen, though by slow andinterrupted steps, from a lowly condition to thehighest standard as yet attained by him in knowl-edge, morals and religion." 20 This progress, headded, gave hope for "a still higher destiny inthe distant future."A very comforting, even inspiring, view ofthings this, but there were ambiguities in it, bothas to the criterion of improvement and as to themethod by which it had taken place and wouldtake place. These difficulties may be illustratedwith respect to Darwin's account of the originand progress of the moral sense, which he re-garded as the chief attribute distinguishing manfrom the lower animals. In Darwin's view, themoral sense sprang from the interaction of thesocial instincts with man's superior intellectualpowers, the whole process being guided by nat-ural selection.It must not be forgotten [he wrote in The Descentof Man] that although a high standardof moralitygives a slight or no advantage to each individualman and his children over the other men of thesame tribe, yet . . . an increase in the number ofwell-endowedmen and an advancement n the stand-ard of morality will certainly give an immenseadvantage to one tribe over another. A tribe in-cluding many members who, from possessing in ahigh degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedi-ence, courage, and sympathy,were always ready toaid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for thecommongood, would be victorious over most othertribes; and this would be natural selection. At alltimes throughout the world tribes have supplantedother tribes; and as morality is one importantele-ment in their success, the standard of morality andthe number of well-endowed men will thus every-where tend to rise and increase. . . . But as mangradually advanced in intellectual power, and wasenabled to trace the more remote consequencesofhis actions; as he acquired sufficientknowledge toreject baneful customs and superstitions; as he re-gardedmore and more, not only the welfare, but thehappinessof his fellow-men; as from habit, follow-ing on beneficial experience, instruction, and ex-ample, his sympathies became more tender andwidely diffused,extendingto men of all races, to theimbecile,maimed,and other useless members of so-

20 Darwin, Charles, The descent of man, and selectionin relation to sex, new edition, revised and augmented,145, New York, Appleton, 1886. See also Darwin'sletter to Lyell, Down, January 4th?, 1860, Life and let-ters 2: 56, and another letter to the same, Down, April27, 1860, More letters 2: 30.

ciety, and finally to the lower animals,-so wouldthe standardof his morality rise higher and higher.. . .Looking to future generations, here is no causeto fear that the social instinct will grow weaker,and we may expect that virtuous habits will growstronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. Inthis case the struggle between our higher and lowerimpulseswill be less severe, and virtue will be tri-umphant.21

But, it may be asked, if human sympathies be-come extended to all mankind, to all races andnations, to the imbecile and the maimed, the so-called useless members of society, what becomesof the competitive struggle and hence of theprogress of man? Here, indeed, was a dilemma,and Darwin was caught squarely on the horns ofit.Man, like every other animal, [he wrote] has nodoubt advanced o his present high conditionthrougha struggle for existence consequent on his rapidmultiplication;and if he is to advance still higher itis to be feared that he must remain subject to asevere struggle. Otherwise he would sink into in-dolence, and the more gifted men would not be moresuccessful in the battle of life than the less gifted.Hence our natural rate of increase, though leadingto many and obvious evils, must not be greatlydiminished by any means. There should be opencompetitionfor all men; and the most able shouldnot be preventedby laws or customs from succeedingbest and rearing the largest numberof offspring.22This would seem a frank enough avowal of Spen-cer's "Every man for himself, and the devil takethe hindmost," but Darwin immediately adds thatthe moral qualities, though developed in part bythe struggle for existence, are developed evenmore "through the effects of habit, the reasoningpowers, instruction, religion, &c." than throughnatural selection.Darwin's reference to the elevating influenceof religion on the moral sense is interesting inview of the precarious state of his own religiousbeliefs. Speaking as an anthropologist, he thoughtto find the origin of religious ideas in the fearsand dreams of primitive peoples. Presumably itwas only in the later stages of social advance thatreligion exercised a beneficial influence on moral-ity. "The idea of a universal and beneficentCreator," he noted, "does not seem to arise inthe mind of man, until he has been elevated bylong-continued culture." Yet the latest advances

21 Darwin, Descent of man, 124-125, 132.22 Ibid., 618. See also pages 133-134.

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724 JOHN C. GREENE [PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC.in science, to which Darwin himself had con-tributed mightily, seemed to undermine belief insuch a Creator. Science, in discovering the secretof man's lowly origin and the equally humbleorigin of his highest thoughts and aspirations,seemed to Darwin to have destroyed confidencein man's reason and in his deepest intuitions whenconfronted with the ultimate questions of humanexistence. Darwin himself confessed to an "in-ward conviction" that the universe was not theresult of chance. "But then," he added, "with methe horrid doubt always arises whether the con-victions of man's mind, which has been developedfrom the mind of the lower animals, are of anyvalue or at all trustworthy. Would any one trustin the convictions of a monkey's mind, if thereare any convictions in such a mind." 23

Here, indeed, was agnosticism, an agnosticismwhich trusted in the power of science to trace theorigin of stars and planets, mountains and species,morality and religion, but which to all the deepestquestions of the human spirit returned an Ignoro,followed by an Ignorabo. These were gloomythoughts, and they were but little relieved by Dar-win's rather ambiguous belief in the progress ofman. For over human progress lay a darkshadow-"the idea," he wrote to Hooker, "orrather I presume the certainty of the sun someday cooling and we all freezing. To think of theprogress of millions of years, with every continentswarming with good and enlightened men, allending in this, and with probably no fresh startuntil this our planetary system has been againconverted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloriamundi, with a vengeance. ... 24There was, however, an even more dreadfulthought which never occurred to Darwin becausehe assumed that the progress of science and civi-lization necessarily brought moral improvement inits wake. This was the thought, all too familiarto the present generation, that man might perishnot through some natural catastrophe but by hisown hand, because the progress of science andtechnology, of man's intellectual powers, had out-run the progress of human sympathy and under-standing.These difficulties and ambiguities in Darwin'sreflections on nature, man, and God would not beworth rehearsing at-such great length if they had

23 Darwin to William Graham, Down, July 3, 1881,Life and letters 1: 285.24 Darwin to J. D. Hooker, Down, February 9, 1865,More letters 1: 260-261.

been his difficulties alone. After all, he wasprimarily a biologist and a very great one. Itwould perhaps be too much to expect any biologistsince Aristotle to be simultaneously a great moralphilosopher and social thinker. But Darwin'sdifficulties and inadequacies were those of his ageand of the age which succeeded. They entereddeeply into biological and social thought and stilldo. The genetic fallacy which led Darwin tosuppose that the religious beliefs of mankind wereadequately accounted for in terms of the dreamsand fears of primitive peoples was to permeatesociology and cultural anthropology for manyyears to come. The sociological positivism whichidentified Kant's categorical imperative as thevoice of society built into the individual by a longcourse of social training was to reappear in Freudand Durkheim. The anti-metaphysical bias whichrelegated to the realm of the unknowable every-thing which could not be formulated scientificallywas to become even more pronounced. The con-ception of human progress as an outcome of com-petitive struggle between individuals, nations, andraces was to wreak incalculable havoc in the cus-tody of men less deeply humanitarian than Dar-win. Finally, the confident assumption that theprogress of intellect, especially of science and thescientific attitude, is necessarily accompanied bymoral and cultural progress still lingers on despitethe shattering events of our own age and thethreat of atomic destruction. "Judged by anyreasonable criteria," Professor Dobzhansky writesin his recent book The Biological Basis of HumanFreedom, "man represents the highest, most pro-gressive, and most successful product of organicevolution. . . . Most remarkableof all, he is nowin the process of acquiring knowledge which maypermit him, if he so chooses, to control his ownevolution. He may yet become 'business managerfor the cosmic process of evolution,' a role whichJulian Huxley has ascribed to him, perhaps pre-maturely." 25What should a sane man think of this? Shouldhe conclude with Sir Julian that the cosmic proc-ess, after billions of years of labor, has finallybrought forth a creature, man, who is ready ornearly ready to direct the future course of things?Or should he rather regard the very entertainingof such an idea as a symptom of the madness with

25 Dobzhansky, Biological basis of human freedom,87-88. See also Huxley, Sir Julian, Evolution in action,116, New York, Mentor Books, 1957.

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VOL. 103, NO. 5, 1959] DARWIN AND RELIGION 725which the gods afflict those whom they woulddestroy ?To summarize: With respect to revealed re-ligion, Darwin's writings helped to precipitate arethinking of traditional doctrines concerning in-spiration and revelation, a rethinking which hasproceeded in several directions and is still goingon.With respect to natural religion, Darwin shat-tered its traditional basis by exhibiting the adap-tation of structure to function in the organicworld as a necessary outcome of random variation,struggle for existence, and natural selection. Formany of his contemporaries the blow was softenedby the indomitable faith of the nineteenth centuryin progress, a faith which enabled them to viewthe world-machine as a divinely contrived mech-anism for insuring perpetual improvement in na-ture and history. But Darwin found little com-fort in this view. Progress was too slow, toosporadic and haphazard, too precarious to reflectmuch credit on the Creator, if there was one. Butthough Darwin remained a prisoner of the law-bound system of matter in motion which he hadextended to biology, others found in his theoryof organic evolution a way of escape from thegloomy confines of that system. The revolutionin biology was soon followed by a revolution inphysics and cosmology.

With respect to the third stage of the conflict,in which the methods of natural science wereapplied to the study of man and society, Darwinplayed a pioneer role. His writings in this fieldare valuable not so much for their scientific con-tent as for the light they throw on the difficultiesinherent in the concept of social science. LikeSpencer, Darwin attempted to apply the conceptsof biology to human history; like Spencer, hewound up in hopeless contradictions. Biologyafforded no criterion of progress for a creaturelike man, and Darwin was forced to bring in othercriteria, imported surreptitiously from his Chris-tian background. To the very end, he failed toappreciate the morally ambiguous character ofhuman progress. He failed because, like manysocial scientists today, he had no adequate con-ception of man. Whatever his origin, man is avery peculiar creature, whose inmost being eludesthe abstractions of science. For science, sinice itadopts the point of view of the detached observer,has no access to those aspects of reality which canbe known only from the point of view of theactor. Yet, ultimately, the scientist himself is anactor in the difficult human situation, and sciencebecomes pointless and even destructive unless ittakes on significance and direction from a re-ligious affirmation concerning the meaning andvalue of human existence.