Are We 'The Children of the Victorians'?

A.N. Wilson makes a very interesting comment on Darwin's legacy in todays world:

"By discovering the molecular structure of D.N.A. (1953), Watson and Crick really wrote the final paragraph of the story begun by Wallace and Darwin a hundred years earlier. We could now see, beyond reasonable argument, how it worked; how Darwin's intuition was right, and that all life is related, and could - or, more than could, does - derive from a common source.
One suspects that the question of origins - with which this whole matter has been concerned since Darwin published his most famous book in 1859, with that word in its title - betrays a mistaken picture of the kind of information science could pass on to us. It has been noticeable that once they stop their fascinating analyses of how and begin to attempt to formulate to why, the scientists seem every bit as clumsy as the most amateurish theologians, either falling back on the imagery of science-fiction, with J.B.S. Haldane vision of life climbing out of 'the primordial soup', or succumbing to Francis Crick's own touching but lame view (he is a non-believer in God, one should hasten to say) that 'the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going'. These days even the most hard-nosed materialists, if they get themselves into conflict with the religious, find themselves wanting to say how awe-struck they are by the complexity and wonders of nature, and end up sounding like Louis Armstrong with his 'wonderful world'.
This is the one area of life where, more than in any other, we seem the children of the Victorians." (179)

What Wilson seems to be saying is that we, like the Victorians, seem to have a desperate need to answer the question of 'why are we here?'. We as human beings are always search for the meaning of our existence. We can try map the path of life to that moment in time when it all began but we will still have no clear answer as to why. Yet what unites science and religion is the search for those answers. Though science may espouse a universe without purpose, a natural history with no First Cause, the random, 'just is' type of mentality still fails to fully answer the question 'why', or at least satisfactorily. In a sense, perhaps it because of the answer is so unsatisfactory: to accept an existence without reason or purpose is, for many of us, like Carlyle said; to accept a future without Hope. It is a dreary, mundane world that we are left with, something that even most scientists do not truly want to accept. Instead they search for that missing ingredient so necessary to a love of life; that 'awe' and wonder of nature that perhaps,was best expressed in the works of Wordsworth:
" For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
(Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, 1978, stanza 3)

It seems, without this sense of something sublime, entirely possible for the universe to become as Carlyle described "void of all Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: It was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?" (The Everlasting No, 88-9).

Carlyle, Thomas Sartar Resartus : The Everlasting No 1838, qtd in
Buckler, William E. Prose of the Victorian Period Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1958.

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