E pensar que renomados historiadores de ciência propalaram esses mitos...
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Darwin's complex loss of faith
It wasn't evolution that led Darwin away from religion, but nor was it simply the loss of his beloved daughter
Nick Spencer
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 September 2009 16.30 BST
Article history
It is easier to make a film about a man who allegedly "killed God" than one who studied barnacles for eight year years. The new film about Charles Darwin, Creation, does the former and although it has been criticised for historical inaccuracy, it remains a beautiful, moving and eminently watchable movie.
Darwin himself never thought his theory killed God, writing towards the end of this life "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist." It didn't even kill his own religious faith. But it did wound it severely.
Up until his return from the Beagle in 1836, Darwin considered himself an "orthodox" Christian. There is no reason to doubt this although it is important to recognise that his orthodoxy was a specific early 19th century, rational, demonstrable, civilised, gentlemanly kind of orthodoxy. In particular, it was heavily influenced by William Paley whose Natural Theology confidently argued that nature contains "every manifestation of design… [that] design must have had a designer … That designer must have been a person [and] that person is God." Christianity for Darwin was primarily a proof to be established and Paley did that admirably.
Charles Darwin working on the Origin of Species. The biologist is potrayed by Paul Bettany in the new film, Creation. Copyright: RPC Nature Ltd/Icon Film Distribution UK 2009
When his emerging theory began to undermine these ideas, it also undermined the Christianity that was built on them. It didn't happen immediately. Darwin's notebooks show him trying to accommodate an intellectually credible idea of God and his new theory – in many ways successfully.
Evolution wrecked special creation, for example, but was the idea that God had made each species separately so appealing? Was it not "grander" to see all life emerging through a continuous process of law-governed evolution than to believe "that since the time of the Silurian [God] has made a long succession of vile molluscous animals"? Special creation was nothing to boast about. "How beneath the dignity of him, who is supposed to have said let there be light and here was light."
Suffering, however, was a problem. Natural selection emphasised the ubiquity and apparent necessity of suffering in the natural world and for someone who had been brought up on William Paley's "happy world … [of] delighted existence" this was a serious issue.
It was not a deal breaker, however. At the end of the first sketch of what was to become The Origin of Species Darwin balanced the extraordinary grandeur of life with the pain inherent in natural selection. "From death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature we can see that the highest good, which we can conceive, the creation of the higher animals has directly come."
This was the issue. If "higher animals" – with all their splendour and sophistication, their grace and their grandeur, ultimately their minds, metaphysics and morality – if they were indeed "the highest good, which we can conceive" then maybe evolution by natural selection was not simply compatible with the idea of God but actively supportive of it. Everything hung on how the scales balanced between life's grandeur and its potential for grief.
Those scales titled towards scepticism for the decade of so after Darwin first developed his theory but remained in the balance. He remained a theist of a Christian flavour throughout the 1840s although one with precious little faith. (Whether he had much faith before is itself questionable, as his perceptive wife, Emma, recognised even before they were married).
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