Review of Current Religious Thought: October 27, 1958

Our last article dealt with the great nineteenth century debate in this country concerning the bearing of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species on religion. As typical disputants in this controversy we singled out two conservatives, James McCosh, President of Princeton University, and Charles Hodge, Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. McCosh had favored “development,” while Hodge had argued that “Darwinism is atheism.” We intimated our surmise that Hodge was right about “Darwinism” and that McCosh championed a rather expurgated form of evolution, not really Darwinism.

Darwin himself was probably the cause of the divergence between Hodge and McCosh, as well as between a host of others ranged on opposing sides in this continuing debate. Hodge was careful not to say that Darwin was an atheist, and McCosh almost as cannily avoided saying that Darwinism was teleological. Actually, Darwin’s system was atheistic, but Darwin himself was not. L. Sweet has observed that “in all the range of Darwin’s writing there are few religious references of any sort.… Theological or metaphysical thought always made a demand upon him to which he felt little able or inclined to respond. He says, for example: ‘I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginnings of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic’ ” (Verification of Christianity, pp. 282 f.). When he assured a famous Harvard scientist “Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical,” he no doubt spoke sincerely. But it was owing to “my not being at all accustomed to metaphysical trains of thought” that Darwin could not understand those who charged that “Darwinism is atheism.” A man not actually an atheist, if he were not a careful philosophical or theological thinker (which Darwin, on his own statement, was not), could advance an atheistic theory without recognizing it or admitting it. Many people, great and small, implicitly state things which are furthest from their intentions. This seems to have been the case with Darwin and many Darwinians.

It is wise for the anti-Darwinists to distinguish between the implications of this system and the intentions of its advocates. We do not suggest that some ardent Darwinians are not fully aware of the implications and state them explicitly. As a matter of fact, this was clearly the case with Thomas Huxley, whose able exposition and cogent defense of Darwin’s theories may have contributed to the association of atheism with Darwinism. Darwin himself hesitated and vacillated, but never repudiated his Creator.

Let us continue our historical survey with another Princetonian to guide us. In 1946, Walter Lowrie, celebrated student of Kierkegaard, edited and translated Religion of a Scientist, Selections from Gustav Th. Fechner. In his introduction he writes: “The publication of this book has been delayed for two years because no university press could be found which would assume responsibility for this introductory chapter.” What appears to have been so objectionable? For one thing, he mentions the very controversy to which we have earlier referred, except that now the debaters are no longer Hodge and McCosh, but Hodge’s successor, B. B. Warfield, and McCosh. Then a student at Princeton University, Lowrie “felt no sympathy” for Warfield’s reactionary attitude.” But, “in later years, I sometimes suspected that he had said a mouthful, and recently in reading his articles again I was not surprised to find that so long ago he did in fact advance the same general objections to the Darwinian theory which ultimately brought it into discredit. But nothing succeeds like success, and in America Darwinism was able to hold for forty years more” (p. 57).

Lowrie shows that in Europe the Darwinian theory never did make the impression that it made in England and America. Gustav Fechner is a scientist in point. Enrico Marconi in Italy actually made out a stronger case for the descent of the ape from man than had been made for the ascent of man from the ape. Lowrie knows of no European scientist of repute, since the First War, who favored Darwinism. “Oswald Spengler said of this theory that future generations will look back upon it as one of the most pitiable delusions which ever gained sway over the human mind” (p. 62).

In this country, the demise of Darwinism came in 1925, the very year of the great “farce,” the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In that year J. Arthur Thompson delivered his lectures Concerning Evolution. These Yale lectures advocated “emergent” and “creative” evolution, which were heresies in Darwinism, and indicated that its greatest champion had abandoned the cause. Official notice of the “demise of Darwinism” came in Professor Louis More’s lectures on The Dogma of Evolution delivered at Princeton University in the same year. But Lowrie acknowledges that this “news” (the “demise of Darwinism”) was not welcomed and it had not even been announced to the public at the time of his writing (1946). “For in academic circles,” he concludes, “it is not good form to speak ill of Darwinism … lest the public should find out that about such an important matter scientists have for several generations been deceived and have been deceivers” (p. 69).

The recent article in Life by Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley who did so much for Darwinism in his day, which gives the impression that Darwinism is today an impregnably established fact. But that does not seem to be the general tenor of current evolutionary writing. G. S. Carter’s recent “Hundred Years of Evolution” calls natural selection a firmly established principle, but admits that it has been subjected to some modification and amplification. S. W. Beadle’s “Uniqueness of Man” in Science (Jan., 1957) holds to evolution indeed, but finds that wisdom, courage and faith in man and God are needed for future progress. Again, L. Eisely, in Saturday Evening Post (April 26, 1958), “Evolutionist Looks at Modern Man,” shows a religious orientation far removed from the agnostic implications of Darwinism.

Julian Huxley’s review of G. M. McKinley’s “Evolution: The Ages and Tomorrow” (Nature, Jan., 1957) shows the trend of modern evolutionary theory toward teleology and the apprehension of old line Darwinians.

After the last war, we made it a point in London to visit the house of the famous scientist. We found the house a bombed ruin. We thought then that Darwin’s theory was in the same state of disrepair. Probably that house has now been rebuilt. But it can hardly be called the house of Charles Darwin. Nor can the theories of evolution which are such a “dogma” today be called Darwinism, though they may have evolved from it.

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