Darwin: His Legacy

In the late 1850s, Darwin was on the verge of publishing "The Origin of Species", an accumulation of his work during the preceding 25 years. Darwin was aware of the fact that the metaphysical implications of his work were hostile to Christian faith. While his own beliefs had changed slowly, he was sensitive to the strong orthodox beliefs of his wife (Wilson, 184). Wilson points out that Darwin's own views were like many of his age: "The Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of Hindoos' not only because of its 'false history of the world' but because of its 'attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant" (qtd. in Wilson, 184).

In "The Origin of Species" Darwin states:

" I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgement of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained — namely, that each species has been independently created — is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species."

Darwin espoused that all organic life forms including man have slowly evolved over generations from various different forms: this idea is hard to reconcile with the myth of Adam and Eve, of man in God's image and living out a preordained path. Darwin repeatedly emphasized, both in " The Origin of Species" and later in "The Descent of Man", that man is no different from an other organic life form on earth, survival for him is 'survival of the fittest' just as it is for any other living matter:

"The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse, -- the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, -- and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications."

While it may seem that Darwin reduced all living things to merely variating forms of matter, as A.N. Wilson points out in "God's Funeral" Darwin truly distinctive contribution to the nineteenth century world-view was not actually to promote 'materialism' but to 'remove the necessity for a metaphor of purpose' (188). Wilson shows how plenty of scientists and philosophers had already contributed a materialistic view of the world, essentially what Darwin did is he removed the need to personalize the conception of natural history:

"There was no need to pretend that Natural Selection had a view of things, or loved the world, or the people in it, any more than it had once loved amoebas or brontosauruses. The bleak impersonal chain of being rolled on with the inevitability of the other 'laws of nature': there was absolutely no need, if this was an accurate picture of what happened in nature, to posit the existence of a 'Creator" (Wilson, 188)


Wilson, A.N. God's Funeral: A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization Ballantine Publishing Group, New York, 1999.