Newsweek's fawning cover story on Charles Darwin scratches the surface on some facsinating trivia concerning the relationship between the English scientist and religion.

Of great interest is Newsweek's explanation of how Darwin traveled from belief to unbelief. "Although Darwin struggled with questions of faith his whole life," Newsweek explains, "he ultimately described himself as an 'Agnostic.' But he reached that conclusion through a different, although well-traveled, route." That route included anguish over the suffering God allowed. Slavery, for instance, horrified Darwin, and "the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time" suggested to him an indifferent God, which he could not accept. "In any case," Newsweek concludes, "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." In other words, sentimental, not scientific, reasons led Darwin to agnosticism. His journey to disbelief, fueled as it was by a personal tragedy, was not all that different from the journey to belief of countless Christians.

The piece also notes that Darwin studied to become a clergyman. Specifically, at Cambridge University's Christ College Darwin became a disciple of botanist John Stevens Henslow, an Anglican reverened. Another reverend, Adam Sedgwick, recommended him for his journey on the HMS Beagle. Darwin himself is buried in Westminster Abbey. All of this suggests that evolutionists who use Darwin as a brickbat to beat religion are omitting some rather important information. First, Christians have been more tolerant of Darwin, as his place of burial indicates, than Darwinists have been of Christians. Second, without the Christian institutions that schooled Darwin and the Christian ministers who mentored him, there would be no On the Origin of Species or Descent of Man.

The religious education was so broad that it gave the educated the tools to attack religion. Jesuits educated Voltaire, for instance, and Galileo studied for the priesthood. Evangelical atheists, who relish the consequences (real and imagined) of a Voltaire, Galileo, or Darwin, ignore their personal histories. It is hard to condemn Christianity as an incubator of intolerance when its earthly servants educated such men as Galileo, Voltaire, and Darwin.

Can one’s faith be strong enough to accept and not be threatened by science? It should be.
Why should a believer of God be threatened by any science? Most would say they shouldn’t.
Can man’s current vision allow us to truly understand all that there is to understand? I say not.
To deny and dismiss Darwin’s theories and seek to explain only with faith is to retard mans learning progress.
I think you will find few condemning Christianity but the attitudes of many “Christians” prompt their own condemnation.

Interesting broad bush stereotyping of Christianity RC indulges in. Must have gotten it from legacy media representations of Christianity and Christians (although Christianity by name is never mentioned, one knows where the gun is aimed at). It is actually this willingness, perhaps eagerness, ever credulity, to lump Darwin in with luminaries and assign people of faith the role of dullards that is a greater cause for retarding mans learning progress.

"...evolutionists who use Darwin as a brickbat to beat religion are omitting some rather important information."

'Religion', i.e., the belief in a deity, and Christianity are different. If someone's belief in a deity is based on a version of the teleological argument for the existence of God, then Darwin is a pretty effective 'brickbat'. Such arguments are not the basis of Christian belief.

Naturalistic evolution and Christianity are completely compatible; that is, the truth or falsity of one has no bearing on the truth or falsity of the other. Thus, Darwin's path to agnosticism is irrelevant to the status of Darwinism.

Rc...well said

Stephen Jay Gould put it this way: "If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions, then scientists cannot claim moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's construction."

Materialistic-Naturalism and Christianity are in no way compatible. One is monist, the other is dualist. One asserts the universe is the by-product of impersonal chance, unguided physical laws, and whoever time is needed to bring it about. The other asserts a universe by design, that same system undergoing corruption, the thus the need for redemption. One asserts no moral reality, no clear standards of Good and Evil, the other insists that both Good and Evil are very real. The incompatibilities go on and on.

sorry, I hit POST instead of Preview - corrections follow...

Materialistic-Naturalism and Christianity are in no way compatible. One is monist, the other is dualist. One asserts the universe is the by-product of impersonal chance, unguided physical laws, and whatever time is needed to bring it about. The other asserts a universe by design, that same system undergoing corruption, and thus the need for redemption. One asserts no moral reality, no clear standards of Good and Evil, the other insists that both Good and Evil are very real and that there exists a transcendent standard. The incompatibilities go on and on.

"One asserts the universe is...." Naturalism and materialism are different. Materialism is the claim that nothing exists except for matter (and motion). Naturalism, on the other hand, is the claim that the workings of the universe (and as concerns Darwin, the workings of biological systems) involves nothing except natural causes.

Excepting a few miracles (i.e., intervention of non-natural cause) such as the resurrection, etc., Christianity is compatible with naturalism.

Think of it this way. Do Christians believe that angels are pushing the Moon around the Earth, or do can they believe that it moves according to natural causes? And if Christians can be naturalists concerning the Moon, why not about every event in nature.

The cause of the universe (of nature) as a whole, on the other hand, is another issue.

I have no argument with your statement “Excepting a few miracles (i.e., intervention of non-natural cause) such as the resurrection, etc., Christianity is compatible with naturalism” as defined by you. Many Christians are, and historically have been, naturalists, as it pertains to the investigation of the Physical world. But naturalism is so defined today as excluding the supernatural from having any role in the physical world, including design, information, etc. And since only the physical world is real, the supernatural is excluded from reality by definition. Hence the hyphen in Materialistic-Naturalism. Darwinists routinely link these ideas together. That is why Gould’s NOMA construct is a straw man. If the moral is not real, and religion only speaks to the moral realm, it speaks to that which is irrelevant.

"But naturalism is so defined today as excluding the supernatural from having any role in the physical world, including design, information, etc."

My own view: other than a few isolated (but extremely significant) miracles, God is not a cause of events IN the physical world (leaving aside God as final 'cause'). Rather, God is the cause OF the physical world. That is, God created matter, motion and regularity and 'let it go'.

From a bare necessities standpoint, the Christian is committed to the belief that the universe must produce (by whatever means) moral agents capable of knowing God.

I have to respectfully disagree with this interpretation.

First of all, I don't see why the fact that Darwin'agnosticism was driven by sentiment rather than science should be of any interest. If anything, it would suggest that he did not base his scientific theories based on his own religious beliefs (or lack there of), but they were separate. Also, although the Origin of Speicies was not published until 1859, Darwin made a rough sketch of his view of evolution through natural selection in the early 1840s, before his daughter died, so again I don't think that would influence his views, so it is completely unfair to call the origin of species "an attack on religion." In fact, Darwin went out of his way to make the work be seen as anti-christian. It's only modern evolutionists like Richard Dawkins who make that absurd claim.

As for the fact that Darwin, Voltaire, and Galieo were educated in religious schools, how does this show the great tolerance of the Church. Would the church have educated them if they had known what works they would have produced later in life? I seriously doubt it. That's like saying that the Soviet education system was very tolerant because they educated Solzhenitsyn in the 1930s.

Although I see your point, I would have to disagree. I think information implies design. A naturalistic explanation cannot successfully explain an information rich system. No laws of physics or chemistry can produce information. Applying such physical laws in an attempt to produce an explanation for information always produces a category error. It is as if an archeologist were to attempt to carve out a naturalistic explanation for a pottery shard. He may be faithful to naturalism but he is applying the wrong methodology.

Your position, to me, sounds like deism. God starts the ball rolling and then let things unwind naturally. Morality is the basis for any kind of relationship. But a system like the one you describe, all moral dilemmas are removed or left up to the individual to determine. God really has nothing to say to such “moral agents capable of knowing God.” Historically, Deism just degenerates into socialism of some kind, for the idea of ultimate human accountability is abridged, and once again, good and evil are demoted to a matter of taste or person preference. Not the teaching of orthodox Christianity. Looks to me more like another form of moral relativism.

Marcus: Don't you fin it interesting that Darwin's motivation for becoming an atheist was the traditional, pedestrian problem of evil, while ideological Darwinists act as though (1) the only reason to doubt Darwin's account is belief in God, and (2) Darwin's account makes belief in God irrational? I find it interesting because it is ironic. (BTW I believe in evolution.)

How many Darwinians

I know there are a few people who support intelligent design who are not religious, but it does seem to me that almost everyone who supports ID is a traditionalist catholic or fundamentalist Christian. The only other people who get in the act tend to be some sort of ideological allies of these people who do it for prudential purposes.

Yes Richard Dawkins claims that evolution leads to athiesm, but he is in a very small minority. Even liberal evolutionary biologists like the late Stephen Jay Gould fought against this belief. Believing in evolution definitely does mean that a literal interpretation of the bible isn't true, but I'm sure a lot of science does that as well.

Marcus:

Why do you think that ID is the only way to be critical of Darwin's account? We might need to distinguish between that 'that' and the 'how' of evolution here. Ideological Darwinists tend to be rather jumpy-- they assume that any substantial critique of Darwin's account of evolution means that forced religion, ID-theory in schools, abortion bans, and anti-pornography laws might be around the corner. You yourself assumed that when I said 'reasons to doubt Darwin's account' that I had something about GOD in mind. I didn't.

I didn't accuse "Darwinists" or "evolutionary biologists" of acting as though (1) and (2) above were true. I accused "ideological Darwinists" of this. This group of people -- of which there are many thousands among blogs commenters, in newspaper and magazine offices, among Leftist activists, and at all univerisity and HS faculty lunch tables aroung the country --are involved in a political PR compaign using Darwin's name in support of their ideology.

You don't need science to show that a literal interpretation of the Bible isn't true. In fact, literalism is not prominent, and never has been, in the vast majority of Christians, particularly Christian scholars. Even only a minority of Protestants subscribe to literalism. Even William Jennings Bryan at Scopes' 'Monkey' trial rejected literalism! Why even bring up literalism about the bible? All I said was that ideological Darwinists tend to act as though the belief in God is irrational after Darwin, and that has nothing to do with literalism about the Bible. It has to do with whether ideological Darwinists understand that natural science has limits regarding what it can prove and disprove.

I believe the statement below contains a logical fallacy.

“I know there are a few people who support intelligent design who are not religious, but it does seem to me that almost everyone who supports ID is a traditionalist catholic or fundamentalist Christian. The only other people who get in the act tend to be some sort of ideological allies of these people who do it for prudential purposes.”

The fact that one does not believe in Darwinian evolution may indeed arise out of ones presuppositions about the world (call it faith if you wish), however, that does not prove or disprove the arguments for or against their conclusions. A Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew can be every bit the scientist that an atheist can. But they may not harbor the same underlying materialistic suppositions about reality. One can question the “evidence” for evolution irrespective of those suppositions.

Eugenia Scott likes to point out that if one questions evolution, there must be “religious” motivation behind it. Of course, one could say, for one not to question evolution there must be atheistic motives behind it. And I think there is, at least on a worldview level. Never-the-less, one must deal with the “evidence”, regardless of the motivation that lies behind the scenes or hidden in agendas. This is just the old genetic fallacy as they say in logic classes. If someone calls you a liar out of anger or malice, the fact that you are or are not a liar has nothing to do with their anger or malice.

For instance, creationists must deal with radiometric dating, starlight and time, geological deposition problems, ice cores, and other issues; not that fact that an atheist may be presenting the facts. Darwinists must deal with the information problem, the Cambrian explosion, Helium diffusion rates in zircons, lack of transitional forms, etc.; not the fact that the person pressing these issues believes in God.

When one resorts to dismissing arguments because the source is from a “fundamentalist Christian” or “traditionalist catholic” as above, one has resorted to marginalizing a group of people in order to dup oneself into believing one has “won” the argument. Ideology can indeed distort your view of the facts, but one still has an obligation to deal with the real evidence. That is why Flynn’s book “Intellectual Morons” is such a good read. He avoids the genetic fallacy and rests his argument on verifiable information.