darwin, design, and the unification of nature 171Creator had created every living form that could possibly exist. It was simply
that they had not all coexisted. Fossil forms were the missing links not in an
evolutionary sequence, but links in what Nicolaas Rupke has called the great
chain of history. This is Buckland himself: “[The] discovery, amid the relics of
past creations, of links that seemed wanting in the present system of organic
nature, affords to natural Theology an important argument, in proving the
unity and universal agency of a common great first cause; since every individ-
ual in such an uniform and closely connected series, is thus shown to be an
integral part of one grand original design.”^31 Creatures were wanted dead or
alive, but they were assuredly still creatures. After Robert Chambers and then
Charles Darwin, perhaps they were not? Perhaps, as they had earlier been for
Lamarck, they were merely products of nature?^32
Darwin’s Naturalism and Agnosticism
Here I turn to Darwin’s loss of faith in the Creator, who might have guaranteed
the unity of nature. Late in life, Darwin did his best to answer an earnest
inquirer:
I am very busy, and am now an old man, in delicate health, and
have not time to answer your questions fully, even assuming that
they are capable of being answered at all—Science and Christ
having nothing to do with each other, except in so far as the habit of
scientific investigations makes a man cautious about accepting any
proofs: as far as I am concerned, I do not believe that any revelation
has been made: with regard to a future life, every one must draw his
own conclusion, from vague and contradictory probabilities.^33
This is agnosticism of a kind: it is more than hinted that some questions
are unanswerable and that scientific practice breeds caution, perhaps even
scepticism. I also see pathos in this letter because more than forty years earlier,
when Charles had just become engaged to Emma Wedgwood, she had worried
about that very point—that the mind-set associated with thepracticeof science
might distance him from the biblical verses she most cherished. To understand
Darwin’s agnosticism, a few distinctions may help. A popular understanding
might be that theism affirms the existence of God, atheism denies it, and
agnosticism declares the question unanswerable. But we know there are many
kinds of theism, in some of which a deity is supposed not merely to exist, but
also to be active in the world. We also know that there can be many kinds of
atheist. Charles Bradlaugh put the point well: “I am an Atheist, but I do not
say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am
not mad enough to say anything of the kind.”^34 Similarly for the agnostic who
might not doubt the existence of a first cause but who, like David Hume, might