Published: February 05, 2006 04:12 pm            

Dr. Richard Elam: Darwin and the idea of progress

For some readers, a question may be forming as to the “crisis of faith” that I make reference to in my columns.

In the United States, there doesn’t seem to be such a crisis, at least on the surface, so are my analysis overdrawn? Perhaps they are, but in Europe the “crisis of faith” has long passed and there exists a twilight of Christianity, predicted by writers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The two world wars in the 20th century and the horrors of the Holocaust thrust Europe, much more than the United States, into a faith dilemma that seems to have been resolved through indifference.

In a column of this length, I do oversimplify knowing that Christianity still exists, at least nominally, in Europe but it does not seem to have the vitality or the visibility it once had.

A major part of the reason for this is the scientific revolution that began in the 16th century and continues to make discoveries today that lead many to question their traditional faith.

Europe in the 19th century seemed to be awash in a sea of technological innovation, scientific discoveries, overseas expansion and democratic reform.

The pre-eminent philosophy might be considered that of “progress.” At least until the wars of the 20th century, the view held by many Europeans was that mankind verged on a golden age in which rational thought could solve all our problems and knowledge of the world around us would lead us into a utopian society, all built on the concept of progress.

For many, Charles Darwin’s notion of “natural selection” was a perfect fit ascribing a natural progression from simple to complex, unintelligent to intelligent, and bacteria to humanity, the highest of God’s creatures.

Herbert Spencer, building on a social understanding of Darwin, coined the term “survival of the fittest” to describe this process. The problem is this distorted what Darwin had written. Nevertheless, the idea of progress might have been the spur that prompted him to see the natural world the way he did.

Whatever the context or deeper philosophical reasons for his writings, we would be hard pressed to find a more influential thinker from the 19th century than Darwin.

Like a rising number of middle class English families, the family of Darwin was still officially Christian but had moved toward the edges of the faith. Both of his grandfathers were involved in the origins of the industrial revolution.

Josiah Wedgwood, who became a Unitarian, made fine pottery while Erasmus Darwin, an Anglican, wrote a text, “Zoonomia,” that hypothesized on the kinship between all living things. The young earth idea was already under fire from many directions and the evidence for extinct species was accumulating as Europe entered the 19th century.

Change and advancement in the sciences and technology created an atmosphere of progress in the minds of many, but not all. Thomas Malthus, in his “Essay on Population,” predicted that the growing population would someday strip the earth of its agricultural capacity, causing major cataclysms. It was this essay, read by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at nearly the same time that caused a new idea to germinate in their minds.

Science is a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning. Much progress is made from the gradual accumulation of data and basing a scientific hypothesis on what the data show. Darwin, in particular, spent years gathering information about fossils, certain types of plants and animals, and domestic breeding, concluding, as had his grandfather, that species appear through common descent.

What he could not figure out, however, was how such a thing could happen. How could one species become another? This same question was being asked by Wallace halfway around the world in Singapore.

Strikingly, both read Malthus and reached the same conclusion: Species change over time through competition for limited resources, or “natural selection.” Neither knew anything about genetics, but both had made a deductive leap of the imagination to arrive at an almost identical idea.

When Wallace sent him a paper he had written, Darwin felt compelled to rush into print a summary of the conclusions he had reached and the data he had accumulated. The “Origin of Species” appeared in 1859 and the Royal Society, although giving Darwin priority because of earlier writings, recognized he and Wallace as Co-discoverers of natural selection.

As the age of the earth began to appear much longer than traditional Christian teachings allowed, deep-time provided the requisite framework for natural selection to work its will. Given enough time a species isolated from others could change into another, resulting in the remarkable diversity of life found around the world by the 19th century.

Lesson of history: The idea that species were mutable would be like a clanging cymbal to those in the Christian community. Copernicus and Galileo had taken the earth out of the center of God’s universe, Newton had created a clockwork universe making God somewhat superfluous, and now Wallace and Darwin had removed God almost completely from the creative process.

Instead of fixed “kinds” created by God in a single moment of time, these new ideas theorized that humanity appeared only consequently by the workings of natural processes. Not surprisingly, a firestorm ensued. By the late 19th century, conservative Christians in the United States were leading a resurgent battle against “modernism” in general and evolution in particular.

For many in Europe, however, the crisis of faith simply deepened.



Dr. Richard Elam has been a

history and government instructor for Hill College Johnson County Campus for the past two decades. He can be reached at RichardElam@hotmail.com. His column appears bimonthly.

        

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