Years ago, in "Survey of British Literature," I was assigned to read a selection from The Origin of Species. It wasn't long, as reading assignments went, and I can't remember now what topic Darwin was discussing. I remember feeling bored, so it probably wasn't sexual selection.
Or maybe it was, for in the intervening years I've become more familiar with Darwin's memorably colorless way of putting things--for example, "We should remember the fact given on excellent authority in a former chapter, namely that several peahens, when debarred from an admired male, remained widows during a whole season rather than pair with another bird."
Darwin's plodding prose style does not measure up to that of the King James Version of the Bible (a work with which his are frequently compared), and I formed the view that the pedagogical intent must have been to shed light upon the morose musings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I found Darwin less annoying--he didn't make his points in chiming quatrains of iambic tetrameter--but he aroused no strong sensation in me.
I realize now that my reaction was unusual. For a more representative response, consider the views of Power Line wingnut John Hinderaker, who once summarized Darwin's place on the scrap heap of intellectual history in the following manner:
Modern leftism has always been anti-religious at its core. The three great intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, founded by Marx, Darwin and Freud, were all rebellions against the European religious tradition. Marx sought to secularize history, Darwin to secularize biology, and Freud to secularize human nature. All three movements pretended to be scientific, but in reality were pseudo-science. Hostility to religion was their essence and their motivation.
Many concur with Hinderaker, whose hasty sketch blends well with other pictures they are fond of staring at with blank incomprehension. Apparently it is necessary to take sides, and despite initial coolness I'm recommending Darwin's. The flip side of "colorless" and "plodding" is "meticulous" and "systematic." Lurking behind that one unintentionally humorous sentence about spurned, bitter peahens is a tremendous evidentiary edifice founded upon acute observation and built up with the power of human thought.
I get a kick out of people who say evolution is "just a theory." You never hear them saying the same thing about the notion that everything is made of atoms. That is because they do not detect in the atomic theory a challenge to their religion or their politics. Their numbers are legion, and they have worked up a controversy over evolution by pleasing each other with a prolific assortment of bad arguments.
Hinderaker, for example, eschews science altogether in an effort to reduce evolution to a personality cult. Let us put to one side his evident assumption that an unbeliever is necessarily incapable of uncovering the laws of nature. No one who combines regard for truth with the slightest knowledge of Darwin's character could assert that he was motivated by hostility to religion.
The young man who signed on as naturalist for the Beagle had been a candidate for Holy Orders in the Church of England. With age, he grew skeptical on religious questions, finally declaring himself "agnostic." It's unclear to what degree his scientific views influenced his religious ones. His writings--letters and private journals as well as the famous treatises--often betray profound horror at the suffering in the world. He was deeply affected by the early death of a daughter, Anne.
Darwin also worried about a rift between him and his wife Emma, a devout Anglican, brought on by divergent religious opinions. One biographer has suggested that on her deathbed the widowed Emma agonized over the prospect of not being reunited with her husband in heaven. Other scholars have speculated that the anxiety Darwin felt over troubling Emma with his skepticism contributed to the mysterious ailments that afflicted him through his life.
Perhaps. What is clear is that Darwin unfailingly regarded religious faith with reserved respect. He was a most tolerant skeptic who, in a letter to the botanist
Asa Gray, summed up his position on The Religious Question by writing: "I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can."
This was in 1860, the year after the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin, one of the great men of science, was never a crusading atheist. Hinderaker pretends to know what he is talking about, but in reality he doesn't. The disease has a high incidence among enlistees in the anti-evolution corps.
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