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Science and the Bible by Bolton Davidheiser Chairman, Science Division Biola College
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F or a l o n g t im e there has been a rumor that shortly before his death Charles Darwin became a Bible-believing Christian. It is said that he confessed his conversion to a Lady Hope. Biographies of Darwin do not mention such an incident, and anyone who could document it would achieve something of considerable significance. Darwin’s wife was very religious, though a Unitarian, and she deplored such of his writings as seemed to her to put God farther off. She attended church regularly, had the children confirmed in the Church of England, and read the Bible to them. She questioned whether it was right to knit or go visiting by carriage on Sundays. She had parts of Darwin’s autobiography deleted because of their irreligious emphasis, though they have since been restored. In other words, if Darwin had pro fessed faith at the end of his life, she would have rejoiced and would not have tried to suppress it. When Darwin was a young man, he accepted the Bible literally, though there is no evidence that he under stood the gospel message of salva tion by grace. The only degree he ever earned was in theology, and he planned to become a country clergy man. Of his intended career as a clergyman he said in his autobiog raphy that the plan was never “ for mally given up, but died a natural death when on leaving Cambridge I joined the Beagle as naturalist.” He called the day he sailed with the Beagle his “ second birthday.” Dur ing the voyage he formulated evolu tionary views, which reoriented his life. This was the tragic substitute for the second birth of the Chris tian ; according to the words of Christ to Nicodemus; “You must be born again.” In connection with the story of his confession of conversion to Lady Hope, it is alleged that Darwin said he regretted his evolutionary views, which were the immature thoughts of his inexperienced youth. This is definitely not true. Darwin was 50 years old when he published The Ori gin of Species, which brought him fame and convinced the scientific world that evolution is true. He was 62 when he published The Descent of Man, in which he discussed hu
man evolution and said that man probably evolved from monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere rather than from monkeys of the West. In his old age he wrote an auto biography for his children, in which he wrote destructively of the Chris tian faith. Of his own loss of faith he said that while a young man on the Beagle, “ I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Tes tament from its manifestly false his tory of the world . . . was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus, or the beliefs of the barbarian.” He told his children that he lost his belief in Christianity as a divine revelation because he found differences in the gospel accounts and because his observations of the laws of nature made miracles in credible. He concluded: “ Thus dis belief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no dis tress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true. . . .” Three years before his death he wrote to a student who inquired about his religious views, “ Science has nothing to do with Christ, ex cept insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. As for a future life, every man must judge for him self between conflicting vague proba bilities.” In the last letter he ever wrote, three weeks before he died, Darwin expressed the opinion that the origin of life would be found to be a “ con sequence ~of some general law,” in other words, not through divine in tervention. Herbert Spencer did much to popu larize evolution, and during his life he was acclaimed with greater praise than Darwin received. But when he died, he was refused burial in West minster Abbey because of his anti- Christian utterances. Darwin, how ever, was interred there with honor. It seems that Darwin was just as anti-Christian as Spencer, but he did not express his opinions on religion publically. At any rate, it was not because of a story concerning Lady Hope that Darwin was granted a place in Westminster Abbey.
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