Barry's Blog

H. L. Mencken once observed of religion: "The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride." Mencken has certainly had his following of committed disciples, and many of them trace their religious zeal, or lack thereof, back to Charles Darwin.

It was exactly a century and a half ago, in 1859, that Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species. It is perhaps the most controversial book of the past millennium, and the work that has since made Darwin the patron saint of modern atheism. According to the opinion of atheist Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

There is little doubt that evolution has helped in turning many away from religious faith. Dinesh D'Souza, a former fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and the author of numerous books, pointed this out in a recent article of Christianity Today. He observed that the distinguished Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, through evolution, gained a profound sense of intellectual liberation from his Baptist upbringing in the South. Others have become secular "evangelists" for the Darwinian cause, like Michael Shermer, who was an evangelical Christian studying at Pepperdine University when his study of evolution led him to give up his fatih. Today, Shermer is the editor of Skeptic magazine.

As D'Souza suggests in his article, many of the modern-day evangelists touting evolution as the death-knell to religious belief actually go beyond what Darwin himself initially believed. While Dawkins suggests that Darwin made it possible for one to be an "intellectually fufilled atheist," Darwin himself was careful to only call himself an "agnostic," one who does not know whether God exists. Here, we must distinguish between Darwin the scientist and Darwin the unbeliever. Darwin, who was raised Anglican and even considered becoming a clergyman, did eventually jettison his Christian faith, but it was not primarily because of evolution.

The story is told in Adrian Desmond and James Moore's authoritative biography, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. When Darwin's daughter Annie died at age 10, Darwin came to hate the God he blamed for this. This was in 1851, eight years before Darwin released Origin of Species. Furthermore, aound the time of Annie's death, Darwin also wrote that if Christianity were true, then it would follow that his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and many of his closest family friends would be in hell. Darwin found this utterly unacceptable, given that these men were wise and kind and generous. Darwin's rejection of God was less an act of unbelief than a rebellion against the kind of God posited by Christianity. A God who would allow a young girl to die and good people to go to hell was not a God whom Darwin was willing to worship.

Ironically, while Darwin's work would be praised by many biologists because it deepened man's understanding of divine teleology (design), many of his followers saw Darwinian theory as the perfect argument against the Christian case for divine creation. And while Darwin was originally modest about evolution (a theory to account for transitions from one life form to another), he would become increasingly insistent that evolution was an entirely naturalistic system, having no room for miracles or divine intervention at any point.

D'Souza recounts that when Darwin's co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, wrote him to say that evolution could not account for man's moral and spiritual nature, Darwin accused him of jeopardizing the whole theory: "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child." Darwin's ultimate position was that it was disastrous for evolution to, at any point, permit a divine foot in the door.

A major takeaway from Darwin's story is that religious belief, or its lack, is as much borne out of the heart, and our volition, as the head. The issue of pain and suffering, and reconciling it with a good and loving God (what the theologians call "theodicy") has been with us from time immemorial. It is as old as Dostoevsky dealing with it, particularly in the chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor," from his classic, The Brothers Karamazov, and it is centerpiece in the the popular and somewhat controversial bestseller, The Shack, by William Young.

Perhaps C.S. Lewis' words from Mere Christianity, dealing with how he reconciled the idea of a good God that had made a world that had gone wrong, are as apropos as any we might find. They show how Lewis resolved the reality of pain and suffering in this blighted planet, which will one day be redeemed.

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be a part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet...Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning." -C. S. Lewis, "The Rival Conceptions of God," Mere Christianity