"Eu não tive a intenção de escrever ateisticamente" (Darwin)

“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”: Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate

By Edward J. Larson
November 24, 2009

The argument between science and theology is as old as ancient Greece, where scientific rationalism first flourished, but it was revived with the advent of Darwinism.

he year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. 2010 marks 400 years since Galileo published The Starry Messenger, his first public comment on Copernicanism and the first popular argument for the revolutionary concept that the earth goes around the sun (rather than vice versa). In the two centuries between these two events, science had contributed to the rise of a rational humanist perspective largely eclipsed in the Western world since the gradual decline of ancient Greek natural philosophy over 1000 years earlier.

In the popular Western mind, Galileo moved humans from the center of the cosmos—and thus from the focal point of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic drama of divine creation and human morality—to its periphery. Further developments in modern astronomy and physics would demote humanity’s green abode to an insignificant speck in a vast and seemingly meaningless cosmos of strings and quarks that came from nothingness and appeared destined to return there. Darwin further displaced humans from the exalted place of being specially created by God in His image and destined for eternity to being the product of a blind, random, and purposeless evolutionary process that has proceeded for eons and is destined to continue with or without them so long as the cosmos continues.

Except for the specifics, nothing in these developments should have particularly surprised the ancient Greek natural philosophers, who had anticipated and debated all of these as general concepts without converting a substantial portion of the ancient Greek people from their traditional religious views. At bottom then and now was the question: What does this mean for human morality? It led to a rich dialogue then as it does now.

In Search of Secular Wisdom: A Greek Drama

For example, nearly 2500 years ago, Aristophanes wrote a popular and enduring comic dialogue, The Clouds, discussing the tensions between naturalistic science and traditional religion that raises many of the issues still informing this debate. In it, an old farmer named Strepsiades has sunk deep in debt due to his son’s passion for horse racing and seeks the secular wisdom for Socrates.

Their exchange begins:

Strepsiades: Throw open the Thinkery! Unbold the door and let me see this wizard
Sokrates in person. Open up! I’m MAD for education! […]
Strepsiades catches sight of Sokrates dangling in a basket overhead and calls up to him:

Strepsiades: Yoohoo, Sokrates!... What in the world are you doing up there?

Sokrates: Ah, sir, I walk upon the air and look down upon the sun from a superior standpoint.

Strepsiades: Well, I suppose it’s better that you sneer at the gods from a basket up in the air than do it down here on the ground.

Sokrates: Precisely. You see, only by being suspended aloft, by dangling my mind in the heavens and mingling my rare thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean. [...]

Strepsiades: O dear little Sokrates, please come down. Lower away, and teach me what I need to know!

Sokrates is slowly lowered earthwards.

Sokrates: What subject?

Strepsiades: Your course on public speaking and debating techniques. You see, my creditors have become absolutely ferocious. You should see how they’re hounding me. What’s more, Sokrates, they’re about to seize my belongings.

Sokrates: How in the world could you fall so deeply in debt without realizing it?

Strepsiades: How? A great, greedy horse-pox ate me up, that’s how. But that’s why I want instruction in your second Logic, you know the one—the get-away-without paying argument, I’ll pay you any price you ask. I swear it. By the gods.

Sokrates: By the gods? The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here. Tell me, old man, would you honestly like to learn the truth, the real truth, about the gods?

Strepsiades: By Zeus, I sure would, The real truth. [...]

Sokrates: [Physical entities, like clouds,] are the only gods there are. The rest are but figments.

Strepsiades: Holy name of Earth! Olympian Zeus is a figment?

Sokrates: Zeus? What Zeus? Nonsense. There is no Zeus.

Strepsiades: No Zeus? Then who makes it rain? Answer me that.

Sokrates: Why, the Clouds, of course. What’s more, the proof is incontrovertible. For instance, have you ever yet seen rain when you didn’t see a cloud? But if your hypothesis were correct, Zeus could drizzle from an empty sky, while the clouds were on vacation.

Strepsiades: By Apollo, you’re right. A pretty proof.

Like any great literary work, the themes raised by Aristophanes nearly 2500 years ago still resonate today. The playwright has Sokrates, the voice of scientific reason, saying there is no god. The view appealed to Strepsiades, the simple farmer, because he thought that it might free him from the duty to pay gambling debts. Denying god undermines morality, this view suggests, while scientific reason could provide an alternative (and surer), basis for ethics. Sokrates certainly thought so in his day, and many modern philosophers of science believe so today. These issues are as old as ancient Greece, where scientific rationalism first flourished, but revived and became even more pressing with the advent of Darwinism 150 years ago this fall.

“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”

In November, 1859, within a week of receiving a pre-publication copy of his former student’s bold new book, On the Origin of Species, the great nineteenth-century Cambridge University geologist and ordained Anglican minister Adam Sedgwick wrote to Charles Darwin,

I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Tis the crown & glory of organic science that it does thro’ final cause, link material to moral... You have ignored this link; &, if I do not mistake your meaning, you have done your best in one of two pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which thank God it is not) to break it, humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it.

Origin of Species, of course, was the book that Darwin used to launch his theory of evolution by natural selection—a product of over two decades of painstaking, largely private research, which (in turn) followed in the wake of Darwin’s famous four-year round-the-world voyage as a young naturalist aboard the British survey ship, the H.M.S. Beagle. It was during that voyage that Darwin first took seriously the idea that current plant and animal species evolved from preexisting species rather than each having been specially created by God. As an idea, evolution was as old as science itself, but had never gained widespread acceptance among scientists; at least until Darwin’s day.

Writing to Darwin after he received his advance copy of Origin of Species, Harvard University botanist Asa Gray also expressed concern about the book’s theological implications. “I had no intention to write atheistically,” Darwin replied to Gray.
But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do... evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that the cat should play with the mouse [before killing it].

Alluding to William Paley’s analogy between a crafted telescope and the human eye, which was a key part of the Anglican theologian’s famous proof of an intelligent designer behind organic creation. Darwin then added, “Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressing designed.” Even human nature and mental ability might result from natural processes, he concluded.

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