Early Christian Reception of Darwin: A Cheat Sheet
1.) We Must Be Careful To Define “Darwinism” with Proper Historical Granularity.
a. Darwinism and evolution are not coextensive terms; sometimes they barely even overlap or can even be seen as rivals. There is a live debate today about whether theories of evolution can even be called “Darwinian” or “neo-Darwinian” as new avenues and complexities are unearthed.[1] Indeed, continued use of these terms by Christian apologists is often a sure sign (or taken as a sure sign) that they have no familiarity with any literature after the 1990’s.
i. There were multiple evolutionary theories on offer before Darwin, during Darwin, and after Darwin.[2] This perhaps seems obvious but especially in apologetic efforts the tendency to slip into homogenous and monocausal categories catastrophically undermines understanding.
ii. Darwin’s only truly unique contribution to the theory of evolution was the mechanism of natural selection. However, almost no one in Darwin’s day accepted natural selection, even Thomas Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog” did so only after a time and with great reluctance. In addition, there were no known mechanisms for trait inheritance as described by Darwin. This means that we encounter the complex phenomenon of Darwinism being used as an accusation; being used as a self-identification despite the non-use or modification of natural selection; being used as a moniker in the midst of still being equated with robust notions of teleology, progress, and providence; and even being used as self-dentification by those who are actively opposed to aspects of Darwin’s theory. Thus historically we are in the strange situation where “Darwinian” describes not just Thomas Huxley but even those who were otherwise opposed to Darwin on several major points like the Catholic St. Georges Mivart.
iii. Darwinism was retroactively christened as necessarily and primarily involving natural selection only in the mid-twentieth century, and equated with a major break christened as the “Darwinian Revolution” at the same time in the mid-twentieth century. Non-teleological interpretations of Darwin were likewise a historiographical rewrite especially with the rise of the neo-Darwinian synthesis with Mendelian genetics.[3] These reinterpretations also arose with historical and scientific works surrounding the 1959 Darwin centennial and historiographical trends (especially American) in the 20th century. It was in this same move that Darwinism was recast as being from the start anti-theistic and anti-teleological. Darwin historian Peter Bowler (himself not religious) as such notes “it might be queried whether the absolute prohibition on the concession to any idea of progress is not itself a product of materialist ideology.”[4] These rewrites found precedent in those spearheaded by Thomas Huxley and the X-Club’s attempts to rewrite the history of science to ensure it was seen as non- or even anti-theological. Yet “To ignore or attempt to explain away Darwin’s theism is to cut oneself off from understanding much of Darwin’s science.”[5]
2.) Darwinism and evolutionary theories were often still thoroughly theological and teleological in nature while also being scientific up until the twentieth century (and beyond).[6]
a. In general, both “science” and “religion” as historiographical demarcations have complicated histories and cannot be used as transhistorical, transregional absolutes. Both “territories” have been constructed, and recent scholarship has uncovered just how intermixed each are with the other in what prior scholarship too hastily diagnoses as clear cut “sides” or “domains.”[7]
b. Darwin assumed the “world” of the natural theologians like Paley, asked the questions they asked, and sought answers in terms of adaptation to the environment like they did. This was to flip them on their heads, to be sure, but “the evolution debate was merely a demarcation within natural theology.”[8]Theology was of such a piece with the ambient theological environment that one scholar has gone so far as to call the Origin of Species “the last example of Victorian natural theology.”[9] Indeed, “Darwin’s blow to the evidence of design, widely regarded nowadays as the coup de grace to natural theology, actually provoked an explosion of theistic literature.” Such was this explosion that “we might call the period from the 1880s to 1910 the ‘heyday of theism.’”[10]
c. The reception of Darwin and evolution at large was taking place amidst debates over the professionalization of science as a discipline, and how the borders and method of that discipline should be drawn. The reception of Darwinism is not a story of science vs. religion or theology for the simple fact that people of all levels of piety populated what were until recently thought to be clearly demarcated “sides” of science and religion.[11] The story of Darwinism and its reception is also in large manner the story of how “science” and “religion” emerged as historical categories in the first place.
d. The “nature red in tooth and claw” of Darwin was not (primarily) a secular attack on Christian visions of the world but in fact a borrowing from aspects of alternate strands of natural theological projects like that of the political economists:
i. Darwin was responding to Paley’s anodyne and all-too-rosy use of design as a theodicy.Especially after Darwin’s daughter died, such design arguments lost much of their heft. In Darwin’s early notebooks the concept of transmutation was received by Darwin with delight precisely because it could serve in a reworked theodicy for God. The death of Annie finally broke Darwin’s spirit in this regard.[12]
ii. Darwin was deeply influenced by Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith.[13] The newly aggressive world of Darwin’s was often meant to assault the clergy’s vision of the world, to be sure, but it remained a thoroughly theologically saturated counterpoint. This is not, I should mention, to question the science on offer. Merely to point out that at broader levels of interpretation it incorporated theology, aesthetics, and metaphysics.
iii. The “mechanical” nature of the world and its laws were originally promoted not as a secular, atheistic, or even deistic alternative to Christian notions of providence, but precisely to uphold them.[14] The myths stating otherwise have been called the “myths of the Clockwork universe.” Not only was the notion of “mechanism” which originally had vitalistic connotations in the Middle Ages later hollowed out, God’s acts, seen by those like Boyle or Newton as most in evidence in the organization of passive matter, became threatened by the more Romantic strains of thought imbuing matter with vitality, self-organization, and dynamic transformation. This transition was no different for Darwinians, seeing initially in the theory a “grander form of God’s providence” in the world but which was not only a threat to the reigning static notions of design in Augustan/Victorian natural theology, but the natural theology in evolutionary thought was itself later cut out, denied, and rewritten. To be sure many could swing the valence in a secular, even non-theological direction. But by and large this impression was achieved through re-writing the history of methodological naturalism and a mechanistic view of the world to expunge its theological roots (see: I.a.iii above). As Matthew Stanley has eloquently demonstrated in a recent brilliant monograph, Huxley and the X-Club set out to “reinterpret the history of science and erase its theistic past,” making “methodological naturalism” appear as solely the province of the naturalist. They wanted to “make it look like [science] had always been naturalistic. … Naturalism was given a long history to make it seem impossible that science was ever practiced any other way.”[15]
3.) “Creationism” must receive the same level of historical granularity as Darwinism
a. While historical scholarship has become increasingly aware of the nuances that we must keep in mind about “Darwinism” and “evolution” as historical entities, such granularity to the term “creation,” or “creationist” has been much slower to emerge. Ronald Numbers with some embarrassment notes that even in his “450–page book on the history of modern creationism” (now longer as it has been revised in a second edition) “failed to address the issue of when [creationism and its cognates] first came into use.”[16]
b. Creationism (and at a broader level theology and Christianity) went through any number of relevant transitions into the Victorian period and in the twentieth century that must be considered for a proper understanding of the clashes and dialogues with Darwinism and evolution. “Contemporary readers who associate creationism with the teachings of the so–called scientific creationists will no doubt be surprised by the small number of nineteenth–century creationist writers who subscribed to a recent creation in six literal days and the even greater rarity of those who attributed the fossil record to the Noachian flood.”[17] Indeed, “we will not fail to notice … that evolutionists were represented in the pages of the … manifesto The Fundamentals published between 1901-1915. This in itself points to a radical disjunction between earlier pluralistic fundamentalism and its later, more caustic counterpart.”[18]
i. Unfortunately, just as those like Huxley and the X-Club rewrote Darwinism, evolutionism, and indeed science to make to always appear outside Christianity, from the other side Young Earth or Scientific Creationists did the same. The creationists of the twentieth century “appear to have appreciation for the power of history,” and noticing this brings out attention to how much “history is being distorted, even rewritten, in the cause of the creationist crusade.”[19] Sadly, “because of their unprecedented success in pushing evangelicals to choose between young– and old–Earth histories, after the early 1960’s the flood geologists increasingly dictated the terms of debate over origins”[20] and this also applied to perceptions of the historical record as well.
c. In the early controversies over the newly discovered “deep-time” of the geological record, there were extremely few adherents opposed to this on the grounds of Ussher’s young-earth timeline or those like it. Nor was Ussher’s work the product of a “Biblicist” approach analogous to twentieth century creationists in the first place, but was pulling from the best historical and scientific data of Ussher’s time.[21] When theologians and geologists were opposed to the new deep time of geology it was often because many advocates were simultaneously using this data to promote a theological and philosophical vision of an eternal universe, which had been a constant adversary for Christianity since its advocacy among Aristotelians. In other words, it was not the denial of the Mosaic account in terms of geology that was often at stake, but the very notion of creation itself.
i. While the duels over geology is often put in terms of “catastrophists” (seen as more biblical because of later so-called “Flood Geology”) against the “Uniformitarians,” (being more secular because aligned with deep time) – the truth is that it was actually more often variations of catastrophism that were aligned with Darwin. Uniformitarians like Lyell while opposed to the uses of the Old Testament for geology were also by necessity anti-transmutationists – for if the notion was that nature had been operating by the same laws that remain unchanged, the biological world must also have remained unchanged.[22] On the other hand many of the catastrophists had a theory of the world that would provide key opportunities for the types of transitions envisioned in transmutationism.
d. Most of the geologists promoting deep time were themselves Christian.[23] Indeed, Martin Rudwick notes that the view of nature as itself historical and subject to narratives telling of changes both contingent and cumulative had as “one major source—even arguably the major source . . . [the] Judeo–Christian scriptures,” and theologies.[24] Geologists were not just Christians de facto; Christian theology had set the course for the broader philosophical expectations that made the new historicist terms of geology understandable and primed for reception.
e. There were few prominent adherents in the nineteenth century (literally countable one a hand, perhaps two) opposed to such geology because of a seven-day creation schema, or the use of the Noachic flood as a question mark over uniformitarian geology. A “literal” reading of Genesis as seven days of creation (putting aside for the moment that “literal” is a weasel-word essentially devoid of content and used primarily as a trump card in polemics) was hardly a majority position through church history and was barely held at all in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[25] Even more specifically, where a literal seven-day creation of the world was held, it was not held specifically in contrast to an ancient earth full of evolutionary life. Geology and deep time were seen as a major stumbling block because of the popular work of George McCready Price, following the supposed prophecies of Ellen White which founded Seventh-Day Adventism, made geology the primary point of attack for his anti-evolutionist crusade in the twentieth century.[26] We again encounter a piece of historical re-writing. Similar rewritings often attend things like Young-Earth Creationist’s misreading the Church Fathers on the notions of creation, Biblical authority, and infallibility.[27]
i. As a “control” condition showing that literal interpretations of Genesis were not the key cause for conflict, one can refer to the reference in Genesis to “waters above the firmament.” A recent study by Dina Boccaletti confirms that nowhere in Christian history was this verse taken as a source of potential conflict with reigning natural philosophy despite its ostensibly “straightforward” meaning in no way being compatible with natural philosophy.[28]
ii. A second important control is how Pierre Simon de la Place’s naturalistic “Nebular Hypothesis” of solar system formation was absorbed into “literal” Christian interpretations of Genesis even though the sequence of events it recounted was by no means one-to-one with the sequence of creation in Genesis (and of course la Place explicitly denied God as a hypothesis needed to explain the formation). To be sure there was conflict in some quarters, but since both the “Day-Age” and the “Gap” or “Ruin and Restoration” interpretation types were seen to fall under what was permissible as a “literal” interpretation the nebular hypothesis held little bite.
f. “Design arguments” are not one thing, but constitute an ensemble or family resemblance. We must pay attention to the changes that both changed the nature of what constituted a design argument, and the pressure and centrality placed upon them, to truly understand why they became a target during the rise of Darwinism and other evolutionary theories.
i. The collapse of Aristotelian and Idealist notions of “form.” This is the unsung major problem that new design arguments ran in to, as instead of a metaphysical statement design collapsed into the physical and became a purely (or almost purely) scientific or quasi-physical statement of perfect pre-adaptation to an environment.[29] “Paley’s natural theology . . . is not the antithesis to modern naturalism. It is modern naturalism in its theological guise.”[30]
ii. From Actus Purus to Demiurgos: to bolster this search for providence within the realm where once only the eyes of faith could pierce, divine attributes and activities were given increasingly “physical meaning” and such “transformations of metaphysical axioms into prescriptions for the natural world were extremely common in early modern science.”[31] Just as important, “the question of creation ceased to be about creation in its proper sense and becomes instead a question of manufacture.” Creation is no longer understood as a question of “ontological constitution but is rather misinterpreted as a question of temporal origins in a series of causes and effects which culminate in the manufactured artifact.”[32]
iii. From Nature to History: There was, moreover, a heretofore hardly commented upon switch in notions of God’s providence and activity in the world. At large, identifying the acts of God and His purposes in nature in the Christian tradition was seen as relatively straightforward: nature’s lawlikeness, its interlocked workings, etc. were all direct expressions of God’s Logos and ordering wisdom. In history however, where matters became highly contingent and full of apparent chance, it was only the eyes of faith that could speak of order at a deeper, ontological level. In the period “from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the nature–history boundary became blurred, as natural history was gradually transformed from a discipline that was concerned primarily with atemporal spatial and taxonomic relations, to a genuinely historical discipline that was concerned with organic change over time.” The problem with this was that “theological interpreters of evolutionary biology continued to carry with them a set of expectations about the perspicuity of God’s providential activity in nature that were no longer appropriate [based on the tradition of Christianity] for a discipline that had become essentially historical.”[33] Or, in other words, “whereas God’s providence in history was ‘secret,’ ‘hidden,’ ‘inaccessible,’ ‘not discernable,’ in the natural world such providence was ‘demonstrable,’ ‘very manifest,’ and convincing.” Such clear distinctions between these two realms of knowledge regarding God “was to become blurred when in the nineteenth century living things became subject to historical change.”[34] If the history of nature were understood to be “more akin to human history at the time Darwin published the Origin, no [theologian] would have expected to see conspicuous instances of purpose at every moment.” What the doctrine of providence would dictate, then, “would be that in spite of the prominence of apparent chance events, the faithful should be prepared to accept [or even perceive] that God’s hidden purposes were being fulfilled.” Viewed in this light, the purpose behind the “successions of species in the Darwinian framework would be no more obvious than the logic of the rise and fall of kingdoms in human history. Why so few read Darwinian evolution in this fashion is owing to a combination of [ironically contingent] historical factors—foremost among them the fact that the full implications of natural history’s transformations into a temporal enterprise were not fully recognized at the time. Hence, the fateful collision between the expectation of design and the apparent randomness of the Darwinian theory.”[35]
iv. The Ascendancy of Apologetics: As historian Alister McGrath speaks of the broad transition in design arguments, whereas earlier design arguments were arguments noting “order implies an orderer (an argument from design)” meaning that the eyes of faith could see and even unpack God’s acts in contingent events, this transitioned into arguments that had to lead to conclusions of design.[36] And so, he recognizes that there was a large scale shift in the method and the content of the arguments being put forward. “From 1690 . . . English natural theology increasingly became concerned with finding ‘evidence of design’ rather than [theological describing the] observation of order. ‘Physico theology’ increasingly became identified with this quest for design, [now] framed specifically in terms of the notion of contrivance.”[37]
1. The increase of the apologetic function of design arguments, along with the changed nature of what it was the design arguments were seen to accomplish, created a massive genre-switch. “Design” did not originally name a single genre or function, but fulfilled a great number of functions from doxology, paraenesis, theodicy, to broader activities within natural philosophy, to simply being the standard manner in which scientific discoveries were “encoded” and communicated to the public. Not all were meant to “prove” God in the strict sense of demonstration. This changed, and a genre-crunch occurred which narrowed the function of design to demonstration and judged an internally complex discourse by a single imposed standard. It is not surprising from this angle much of design “lost” by default.[38]
2. With this newly “physicalized” design argument, Paley, in effect, had thrown down a challenge. No natural law, comparable to, or derivable from, other genuine natural laws, he tacitly claimed, would ever be found to explain organic function and adaptedness, including the morphological co–adaptedness of parts to one another and the ecological fittingness of organisms to their niches.[39]
3. In an equal but opposite manner Darwin incorporates the observe side of this challenge: “…Darwin presented his theory with only a straw man to oppose it: either slow trans-specific evolution by means of ‘natural selection,’ or direct divine creation of new species from the inorganic dust of the Earth.” Curiously enough however, Darwin’s work was ultimately so successful that “at least in English-speaking countries [a majority] have often taken his essentially polemical argument [reducing the options to two clear sides] at its face value. But in fact the debate was never so sharply polarized.”[40]
4. It is largely through Paley’s influence upon Darwin therefore that the problem of “pre–adaptation”—the fit between ‘biological insides and environmental outsides”—would become, in Stephen J. Gould’s words, the “primary problem of evolution.”[41]
v. Such a transition means that Paley’s argument is not similar to Thomas Aquinas’ arguments of design, for example.[42] In other words we must pay attention to the fact that Victorian-era design arguments colliding with Darwin are their own unique species and do not represent the Christian tradition at large. We are here viewing the encounter between one particular form of Christian argument encountering another different form of Christian design argument in evolution and Darwin.
4.) The primary causes of unrest in the nineteenth century was not Darwinism or evolutionary theory but (at least) four major catalysts that preceded, coincided, and partially overlapped with Darwinism thematically or by association when it arose:
i. Materialism and positivist interpretations of science , scripture, and history.
1. These concepts overlapped with the charged political atmosphere of the time as they were associated with the radicalism of the French Revolution, and German Higher Criticism which had come to Britain in the infamous book Essays and Reviews which caused much more of a stir than the Origin did.[43] Not often mentioned in historical reconstructions, so-called “Design Arguments” for God’s existence were also intricately linked to social theodicies justifying the current Latitudinarian (Liberal) Anglican and largely Newtonian political and economic order. Contestation against William Paley’s design arguments could be leveled not for the sake of denying God, but of overturning or critiquing the reigning social order and the mechanisms of the market culture. As they became associated with materialism, Darwin’s arguments were also seen by some as an inroad for French radicalism and political atheism, and so caused a stir in part because they seemed a dagger aimed at the very heart of British life.[44]
ii. The rise of polygenetic theories of human ancestry initially soured the genial relationship between science and theology in the mid-nineteenth century. These theories were ironically refuted by Darwinism, and so theologians and Darwinians found themselves in a strange early alliance (especially in America) against the polygenists arguing for multiple races of humanity stemming from multiple origins beyond Adam and Eve.[45] In fact this alliance was part of the reason Darwinism found fairly rapid inroads even among Christians in America, precisely because it was seen early on as an effective abolitionist and anti-polygenist tool.[46] As such three key factors were already arising that intersected with Darwin and his reception among American Christians:
1. The Civil War and its fissures (North/South; Rural/Urban; etc.)[47]
2. Slavery and Abolitionism[48]
3. The “Science” of Race and the Racialization of Science[49]
iii. The rise of evolutionary anthropologies like those associated with Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, and even Karl Marx, which are often conflated with Darwinism but have recently been shown to be separate phenomena.
iv. The Victorian sensation caused by work The Vestiges of Natural Creation. “The Origin is among the most pervasive remnants of the Victorian world in our culture, yet it simultaneously forces much of that world into oblivion,” because of its power and success. Putting Darwin upon a pedestal, along with notions like the use of the category of “genius” further separating Darwin from his environment “obliterates decades of labor by teachers, theologians, technicians, printers, editors, and other researchers, whose work has made evolutionary debate so significant during the past two centuries.”[50] The Vestiges is the primary example of such a phenomenon of erasure. Originally anonymously authored but later discovered to have been penned by the Scotsman Robert Chambers, Vestiges provided a broadly theistic interpretation of early Lamarkian evolution that nonetheless promoted materialism under the canopy of God’s laws of nature and caused an uproarious sensation among Victorian readers for both good and ill. The Origin was in many ways not the catalyst for its own controversies, but became controversial precisely because the ambient thought environment had been conditioned by the Vestiges and were the streams of interpretations within which the Origin was received and placed.
5.) A Few Miscellaneous Mitigating Contexts to Keep In Mind When Considering Christian Reception of Darwinism and Evolution
a. Darwinism was treated by many as a new religion unto itself.[51] Where and when it was opposed, this was almost always because of the philosophies attached to Darwinism such as positivism and materialism. In many cases it was also because Darwinism was quite literally presented as an alternative to Christianity.
b. A major point of contention arose with how Darwinism was positioned and given meaning in the burgeoning genre of science fiction. It was not just the philosophies attached to Darwinism that were the primary problem, but the entire worldview and aesthetics that science fiction was creating in intentional contradistinction to the Christian imagination.[52]
c. Responses to Darwinism even among a specific group like Calvinists varied based upon geographical distribution (and so were dependent upon local circumstances above and beyond simply theological considerations).[53]
d. A major point of dispute between Protestants and evolutionary theory was not necessary the content but the method used. This was a fued between the reigning “Baconianism” that had been popularized by the Scottish Common Sense Realism of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, and the “hypothetico-deductive” methodology used by Darwin and others. This became even more heated when positivism began colonizing Darwinian discourse and exacerbated its differences with the reigning Baconian methodology.
e. Analogous to 4.i.1 above, anti-evolutionary arguments came to the fore to represent the heart of Fundamentalism precisely because big business in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, relying often on Baconian common sense induction, found evolutionary theory and its reduction of individual agency as well as its utilization of so-called “hypothetico-deductive” methodologies as a threat to the bottom line. Evangelicals “found an ideological haven in an alternate science of humanity that relied on a cluster of ideas orbiting business.”[54] Indeed, especially in the light of the lack of any centralized or even recognized authority in Evangelicalism, business interests often led in lieu of more robust sources of theological authority.[55]
[1] A few studies looking at how the theory has expanded beyond its popular “neo-Darwinian” presentations like those of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, see: Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why The Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010); Perry Marshall, Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design (Texas: BenBella Books, 2015); Lynn Margulis, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Dazzle Gradually: A Reflection on the Nature of Nature (Vermont: Chelsea-Green Publishing, 2007); James Shapiro, Evolution: A View From the 21stCentury (New Jersey: FT Press, 2011); Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Idem., The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self-Aware (Pennsylvania: The Templeton Foundation Press, 2015); Michael Morange, The Misunderstood Gene (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001); Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Denis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Idem., Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes The Animal World – And Us (New York: Doubleday Press, 2017); Kevin N. LaLan, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made The Human Mind (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017); Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates (New York: Current, 2015); Jean Gayon, “From Darwin to Today in Evolutionary Biology,” in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241f; Scott, Eugenie, and Glenn Branch, “Don’t Call It Darwinism,” in Evolution, Education, and Outreach 2 (2009): 90-94; Olivia Judson, “Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism,” New York Times, July 15, 2008; Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwinian Fundamentalism,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997.
[2] Bentley Glass et. al. Forerunners of Darwinism: 1745-1859 (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959).
[3] Peter Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Peter Bowler, “Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism,” Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2005): 19-32; Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), 161: “Darwin’s theory both before and after Malthus remained a theory of evolutionary progress.” Richards notes that it is only through the historiographical decisions of Darwin’s followers that he becomes a “neo-Darwinian” in terms of rejecting any notion of progression (136). Indeed: “For Darwin, evolution meant the advancement of higher, more perfect types—not, however, in a single linear train, but along different branches of the evolutionary tree, each arching up from a common organic stem to reach higher levels of organic differentiation. … Quite obviously Darwin regarded his evolutionary theory as a guarantee of general progress, even if in some general instances one had to admit a slide to the more primitive” (143).
[4] Peter Bowler, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 222.
[5] Dov Ospovat, “’Darwin’s Theology’, review of Neil Gillespie’s Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation,” Science (1980): 207, 520; cf. Ospovat, “God and Natural Selection,” Journal of the History of Biology 13 (1980), 169-194.
[6] Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Hedley Brooke, “The Relationship Between Darwin’s Science and His Religion,” in John Durant, ed. Darwinism and Divinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 40-75; Neal Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Chris Cosans, “Was Darwin a Creationist?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48 (2005): 362-371; Robert J. Richards, “Theological Foundations of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution,” in P.H. Theerman and K.H. Parshall, eds., Experiencing Nature (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 61-79; John Cornell, “God’s Magnificent Law: The Bad Influence of Theistic Metaphysics on Darwin’s Estimation of Natural Selection,” Journal of the History of Biology (1987): 381-412; Idem, “Newton of the Grassblade? Darwin and the Problem of Organic Teleology,” Isis 77 (1986): 405-421; Stephen Dilley, “Charles Darwin’s Use of Theology in the Origin of Species,” British Society for the History of Science (2011), 1-28; Richard England, “Natural Selection, Teleology, and the Logos,” Osiris 16 (2001), 270-287; Momme von Sydow, “Charles Darwin: A Christian Undermining Christianity?” in David M. Knight and Matthew D. Eddy, eds., Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 141-156; Paul Nelson, “The Role of Theology In Current Evolutionary Reasoning,” Biology and Philosophy 11 (1996): 493-517; Abigail Lustig, “Natural Atheology,” in Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse, eds., Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69-83.
[7] Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Peter Harrison, “’Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives ed. Thomas Dixon, Geoffery Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22-48; Peter Harrison, “Was There a Scientific Revolution?” European Review 15 no.4 (2007): 445-457; Peter Dear, “Historiography of Not-So-Recent Science,” History of Science 50, no.2 (April 2012): 197-211;
Margaret Osler, “Mixing Metaphors: Science and Religion or Natural Philosophy and Theology in Early Modern Europe,” History of Science 35 (1997): 91-113; Margaret Osler, “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific Revolution,” Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives, 70-85; Andrew Cunningham, “Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988): 365-389; James R. Moore, “Speaking of ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’—Then and Now,” History of Science 30 (1992): 311-32; David B. Wilson, “On the Importance of Eliminating Science and Religion from the History of Science and Religion: The Cases of Oliver Lodge, J.H. Jeans and A.S. Eddington,” in Facets of Faith and Science, ed. Jitse van der Meer (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), vol.I: 27-47.
[8] Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12.
[9] John Durant, “Darwinism and Divinity: A Century of Debate,” in John Durant ed., Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution and Religious Belief (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), 16.
[10] Bradley J. Gundlach, Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2013), 171; Jon Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900 (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1988), 120–121; John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 261–306.
[11] Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 171-200.
[12] Frank M. Turner, “The Late Victorian Conflict of Science and Religion as an Event in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives, 86-110.
[13] David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: System Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997), 113-140; Cf. Paul Oslington, Political Economy as Natural Theology: Smith, Malthus, and their Followers (New York: Routledge, 2017); Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2019), e.g. 52: “As Thomas Malthus and other Christian economists proved, such beauty [of the world and its order] was truly in the eye of the beholder. Scarcity, evil, suffering played positive roles in the evangelical theodicy of capitalism.”
[14] Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Arguments Over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
[15] Matthew Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 8.
[16] Ronald Numbers, Darwin Comes to America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 49.
[17] Ronald Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 16, 26.
[18] David Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1987), xii.
[19] Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, 173.
[20] Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America, 130.
[21] Martin Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 14. Rudwick is without questions the leading authority on the history of geology, some of his colleagues claiming that it is not too much of an exaggeration that he has near-omniscience on the topic. It is fortunate that he also rightly recognizes the complex but often positive relationship that Christians have had with the discipline over time.
[22] Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, 42-44; Reijer Hooykaas, “The Parallel Between the History of the Earth and the History of the Animal World,” Archive Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 10 (1957): 1-18.
[23] Michael Roberts, Evangelicals and Science (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998), 89-108.
[24] Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History, 4.
[25] Andrew J. Brown, The Days of Creation: A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2:3 (UK: Deo Publishing, 2014), e.g. 280-297; Stanley Jaki, Genesis 1 Through the Ages (New York: Thomas More Press, 1992) who makes a consistent effort to point out the anti-concordist and robustly theological traditions of reading the text throughout Christian history.
[26] Numbers, The Creationists, 88-119.
[27] For a few good notes on how Answers in Genesis for example misunderstands the Church Fathers, see Craig D. Allert, Early Christian Readings of Genesis 1: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation (Illinois: IVP Academic, 2018), 51-160; Michael Graves, The Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture: What the Early Church Can Teach Us (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014); William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).
[28] Dino Boccaletti, Waters Above the Firmament: An Exemplary Case of Faith-Reason Conflict (Switzerland: Springer, 2020).
[29] Norma E. Emerton, The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984); Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 150-296; Larry Chapp, God of Covenant and Creation: Scientific Naturalism and its Challenge to the Christian Faith (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 34-137; Cunningham , Darwin’s Pious Idea, 79-130;
[30] Hanby, No God, No Science, 170.
[31] Brooke, Science and Religion, 99. Cf. Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, 125–26: Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science 159–60; Brague, The Law of God, 236–37.
[32] Hanby, No God, No Science, 35; Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine, xix; cf. Gilson, Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 79.
[33] Peter Harrison, “Evolution, Providence, and the Problem of Chance,” in Karl W. Giberson, ed., Abraham’s Dice: Chance and Providence in the Monotheistic Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 261.
[34] Harrison, “Evolution, Providence, and the Problem of Chance,” 273.
[35] Harrison, “Evolution, Providence, and the Problem of Chance,” 277.
[36] McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine, 63.
[37] McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine, 53.
[38] On the non-homogeneity of design and natural philosophy, see: John Hedley Brooke, “Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observations on the Brewster-Whewell Debate,” Annals of Science 34 (1977): 221-286; John Hedley Brooke, “The Natural Theology of the Geologists: Some Theological Strata,” in Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences edited by L.J. Jordanova and Roy S. Porter (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1979); Peter J. Bowler, “Darwinism and the Argument from Design: Suggestions for a Reevaluation,” Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 29-43; Richard Yeo, “The Principle of Plenitude and Natural Theology in Nineteenth Century Britain,” British Journal of the History of Science 19 (1986): 263-282; Jonathan R. Topham, “Beyond the ‘Common Context’: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises,” Isis 89 (1998): 233-262.
[39] Depew and Weber, Darwinism Evolving, 102.
[40] Martin Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 222.
[41] Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 188.
[42] Edward Feser, Neo-Scholastic Essays (Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 49-58, 147-192.
[43] Charles Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 182-208.
[44] Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 101-131; On the variety of aspects that come into play when considering natural theology, see Brooke and Cantor, Reconstructing Nature, 141-246; Brooke, Science and Religion, 192-226.
[45] David Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
[46] Randal Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation (New York: Viking Press, 2017).
[47] Monte Harrell Hampton, Storm of Words: Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era (Alabama: University of Alabam Press, 2014); Not on science and religion per se, but useful here is Mark Noll, Civil War as Theological Crisis.
[48] Fuller, The Book That Changed America.
[49] Terence Keel, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (California: Stanford University Press, 2018).
[50] James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 518.
[51] Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us About Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[52] Elizabeth M. Sanders, Genres of Doubt: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Victorian Crisis of Faith (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2017).
[53] David Livingston, Dealing With Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
[54] Timothy E. W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 3; cf. Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
[55] Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
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