Is it a Travesty that Darwin is Buried in Westminster Abbey?

I considered this the best essay of my undergraduate career - and certainly my best scoring; yet when I revisit it, I find that my own shift of faith changes my argument. This is my reworking and response, over a decade later.

NOTE

As appropriate to this site and to make it more interesting to read, I have removed the formal citations and bibliography, but any quotations and reference are still indicated. As I originally wrote with the male pronoun for humans and God, I have retained this.

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Darwin himself said, "I suppose I deserve to be called a theist." But did he?

The answer to this question is hard to pin point for three reasons. Darwin did not write huge amounts about his religious views, especially in his published works, as he believed religion to be a private matter which should be well thought out before publishing on. He confessed to his friend Asa Gray in a letter that his own theology as 'hopelessly muddled'. Darwin held no one religious conviction throughout his life, and his views are not simply defined. And theism is a vague term embracing a huge spectrum of belief. I would like to be more specific.

As Darwin not want to offend others, it is likely that only his private notebooks and letters reveal his true thoughts on religion. To research this I went through Darwin's autobiography and diaries, as well as works by James Rachels and N. Gillespie.

Theism simply means a belief in God's existence. Monotheistic religions are strong affirmations of theism. Christianity has a very particular affirmation: for many of its broad strands, it is about a personal relationship with God who is revealed in a particular holy book. I feel I can swiftly reject the notion that Darwin was latterly the mainstream understanding of a Christian. When he boarded the Beagle, Darwin said that he believed the bible as revelation and absolute authority and recalls defending it to other crew members. But Sandra Herbert remarks in Darwin's autobiography that his was a belief of intellect, not personal faith. Darwin enjoyed and was convinced by Paley's arguments for design in his undergraduate studies, which Darwin later renounced. His clergy training was done out of obedience to his father and convenience rather than a divine calling, and he apparently showed little interest in the acts of worship on the beagle.

Darwin said that he believed in a personal God but did not identify with the Christian God.

It seems that Darwin's chief problems were what he called 'the damnable doctrine of hell; God as a 'vengeful tyrant', and the contradictions of scripture. These are problems that many still wrestle with, but have also been overcome by believers.

Darwin's early faith can be attributed to his upbringing and the climate of the time. Yet being Christian was no longer the only cultural norm: the sea of faith as Matthew Arnold wrote in his poem, Dover Beach, was receding through Biblical Criticism; to temper it was the evangelical revival. In his own family there were those who held liberal views, yet his wife had a deep and presumably conventional faith. Darwin uttered that he never gave up his faith until he was forty years of age.

A much less affirmative form of theism is deism: God made the world and left it ticking, but has now no part on the world. Some deists would say that you can know that god exists, but not anything about him. Although my tutor at the time, Professor Brooke, had written a paper asserting what I am about to, he graciously allowed me to be credited with the idea independently. That assertion is that Darwin is not a theist - he is a deist: a vague belief in a Maker or Greater Existence but with whom the kind of relationship that an evangelical Christian enjoys is not possible.

Before I can explain this, I must deal with two theological positions: that of atheism and agnosticism. In the case of applying these terms I find it more like a Venn diagram with each area overlapping, rather an filling cabinet with distinct drawers. The quote I began with and the well known "...I for one must be content to remain agnostic" comes from the same paragraph in Darwin's autobiography, almost the same breath. Darwin said he was not an atheist, but this is more about a rejection of God. Logically, God cannot be proven either way, but it is easier to prove that something exists than it definitely doesn't; to have scoured the universe and to be sure that there is no God in it is a tall order. The agnostic says he cannot know that God exists; the atheist says he doesn't want to. Sometimes I think that Darwin came close to atheism but it is hard to decide between these positions. Did he adopt the position of agnosticism as a way of shutting God out of his thought? In which case, he could simultaneously be an atheist and an agnostic? It is a perfectly logical position.

If Darwin was a theist, it would have to be of the slightest kind. Darwin assigned God to a tiny place in his thinking. He wrote little religiously - isn't this a clue in itself? God may be a personal matter he argued, separate from science, but that alone does not warrant the huge amount of Darwin's writing without God if Darwin had strongly believed in God. Darwin said that there was no more need to mention God than the human architect when admiring a building (as a lover of architecture, I see this as a poor analogy). In his academic writings, Darwin does more than omit God, he makes explanations without him.

God's role for Darwin in his most theistic days is one of prime Mover and general foreseer; God is not planner and controller of all variations; and if God did not plan the tiniest of events, then why attribute anything to providence? - this I read many times in Darwin's writing. For Darwin, nature takes care of itself.

Darwin's God diminished as he grew older. James Rachels, writer on moral philosophy from an atheist standpoint, sums up Darwin's view as the wish for gradual illumination of men's minds away from religion. Darwin went through a materialistic stage, but I think that Darwin became an agnostic then, not a theist. He became less spiritual, denying that music and contemplation were evidence for God. Darwin progressed, becoming what Paul Heelas calls a cynic agnostic - not committing himself but positing that God is less likely to exist. Yet Darwin said that religious contemplation is the deepest subject that can fill a man's mind.

Ultimately, Darwin said that we cannot know from where our origins came and maintained that blind chance was a puzzling and unlikely stance; there is something above man's intellect but we should not bother to grapple with it. This is certainly agnosticism, but which kind? Darwin says that God has let the world to be and that we cannot know him. Perhaps there is a pinhead of deism there which does make Darwin marginally a theist. I would prefer to summarise that if Darwin were a theist, he would have to want there to be a God to be more assertive about his wish. Darwin seemed haunted rather than convicted by it. In my Venn diagram, Darwin's positions would overlap several areas and yet remain grey.

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I was aware of wide beliefs within Christianity, being at a liberal university; yet I considered that there was only one kind of Christian. Despite taking classes on other faiths, I was very Christo-centric and confess that to this day I prefer western theology, although I have begun to explore some which is outside of Christianity and tinged with Buddhism.

My premise was, then, that if Darwin had ever been the kind of Christian that I was then he would not have given it up; it's a theological belief from Calvin that once 'saved', your faith never really dies; and like Brideshead Revisited, the thread of divine grace will draw you back if you stray too far. As personal experience and relationship was so central to the teachings I was brought up with, I could not conceive of a faith that was mostly intellectually driven. I could not understand why Darwin should not want to out himself as a Christian if he really were one. And I could not understand why someone whose books had caused tectonic shifts in the church should have written what he did if he believed in God the Creator as I did. Creation and Science were of great interest to me and I was writing a dissertation over two years about it. I was well aware that even among evangelical Christians that not accepting evolution is quite a minority view. Despite my own tectonic shifts in faith, this is curiously one view from the fundamentalist box that I still keep: not upholding the views of Creation Scientists or in any way wishing to be associated, I simply find that evolution as a theory is preposterous and all the more strange that it is so rarely challenged. In a day when we are encouraged to think for ourselves and no creed is assumed in society - we have a scientific creed which is almost a sign of credibility, even normalcy.

I now understand the struggles that Darwin may have had with conventional faith far better, and am aware of public figures and personal acquaintances who have left a mainstream Christian position for spiritulaity that like Darwin's is not easy to define.

As for my new angle - is it a travesty that Darwin is buried where he is? For one, he did not set out to be the antichrist and it is my understanding that he did not mean his theories to do the damage that they did, nor are they always fully understood. The survival of the fittest notion which seems cruel to some Christians is an invention of Herbert Spencer, not Darwin. Christianity has survived, whether through embracing evolution or rejecting it.

I also think that Westminster Abbey has a wider understanding of faith than I did. It is a national church where other poets and monarchs lie who do not all fit the orthodox Christian mould. Darwin is not my idea of a national hero but then neither is Henry VIII. Considering Darwin's anniversary is to be marked by great celebrations, it shows that many still consider him a monumental figure and are happy to put him in what is more a hall of fame than a place of Anglican pilgrimage or a symbol of Christianity.