Evolution of a Scientist

Darwin's greater, and more radical, achievement was to suggest a plausible mechanism for evolution. To a world taught to see the hand of God in every part of nature, he suggested a different creative force altogether, an undirected, morally neutral process he called natural selection. His crucial insight was that organisms which by chance are better adapted to their environment--a faster wolf--have a better chance of surviving and passing those characteristics on to the next generation.

Although Darwin struggled with questions of faith his whole life, he ultimately described himself as an "Agnostic." William Howarth, an environmental historian who teaches a course at Princeton called "Darwin in Our Time," dates Darwin's doubts about Christianity to his encounters with slave-owning Christians, which deeply offended Darwin, an ardent abolitionist. More generally, Darwin was troubled by the problem of evil: how could a benevolent and omnipotent God permit so much suffering in the world he created? In any case, it all changed for him after 1851. In that year Darwin's beloved eldest daughter, Annie, died at the age of 10--probably from tuberculosis--an instance of suffering that only led him down darker paths of despair. A legend has grown up that Darwin experienced a deathbed conversion and repentance for his work, but his family has always denied it. He did, however, manage to pass through the needle's eye of Westminster Abbey, where he was entombed with honor in 1882.

So it's not surprising that fundamentalist Christians have been suspicious of Darwin and his works--or that in the United States, where 80 percent of the population believe God created the universe, less than half believe in evolution. Some believers have managed to square the circle by mapping out separate realms for science and religion. "Science's proper role is to explore natural explanations for the material world," says the biologist Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian. "Science provides no answers to the question 'Why are we here, anyway?' That is the role of philosophy and theology."

The Darwin exhibit was conceived in 2002, when the current round of Darwin-bashing was still over the horizon, but just in those three years' time museum officials found they had to greatly expand their treatment of the controversy--in particular, the rise of "intelligent design" as an alternative to natural selection. ID posits a supernatural force behind the emergence of complex biological systems--such as the eye--composed of many interdependent parts. Collins comments, in a video that is part of the museum show: "[ID] says, if there's some part of science that you can't understand, that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well. And if science does figure out [how the eye evolved]--and I believe it's very likely that science will... then where is God?"

That is the mournful chorus that has accompanied every new scientific paradigm since Copernicus declared God unnecessary to the task of getting the sun up into the sky each day. The church eventually reconciled itself to the reality of the solar system, which Darwin invoked in the stirring conclusion to the "Origin": "There is grandeur in this view of life... that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." For all his nets and guns and glasses, Darwin never found God; by the same token, the Bible has nothing to impart about the genetic relationships among the finches he did find. But it is human nature to seek both kinds of knowledge. Perhaps after a few more cycles of the planet, we will find a way to pursue them both in peace.

With Anne Underwood and William Lee Adams

© 2005