172 life
deny that anything could be known about it. These are elementary distinctions,
but they have to feature in any story told of Darwin’s trajectory from belief in
a personal God to his self-description as increasingly agnostic. There is, for
example, a distinction he makes in theDescent of Man. He is discussing
whether races have existed that had no idea of one or more gods. His answer
from his experiences on theBeaglevoyage is a resounding yes. Some races
have had no words in their language to express the idea of deity. But this
question, he immediately adds, is “wholly distinct from that higher one,
whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe”.^35 Thatquestion he
continued, “has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest in-
tellects that have ever existed.” If Darwin intends to count himself among those
affirmers, then a possible source of agnosticism—the lack of a universal sense
of God—is overridden by an appeal to superior intellects. But this very passage
introduces yet another problem: the ambiguity of Darwin’spublicstatements.
He does not actuallysaythat he agrees with these high intellects.
Darwin’s distinctions are important. It has been said that Darwin’s inex-
orable exposure of the process of natural selection removed the need to posit
a first cause as the origin of life on Earth. It is not clear that Darwin would
have agreed with that. The adjective “inexorable” is inappropriate since even
in his agnostic days Darwin admitted that, while the fact of evolution was
widely accepted, there was no consensus on the mechanism. Importantly, Dar-
win had not solved the riddle of those first few living forms. It worried Huxley’s
contemporary John Tyndall that Darwin had not given a naturalistic account
of the origin of life.^36 The option to believe in a god-of-the-gaps, if one was so
inclined, was clearly still open.
A further complication concerns the nature of religious belief. It has been
tempting for historians to streamline Darwin’s progression from Christianity
to deism to agnosticism, as if there must be a linear and irreversible attenuation
of belief. Darwin himself preferred to say that his beliefs often fluctuated.
When he spoke of an increasing agnosticism as he grew older, he included the
three words “but not always.”^37 What one sees is an oscillation between evo-
lutionary theism and an outright agnosticism. To complicate matters further,
a thoughtful agnosticism could itself become, accompany, or nurture a reli-
gious position. As Bernard Lightman has insisted, there were many shades of
agnosticism, some reverent and devout, some expressly Christian.^38
The temptation to ascribe Darwin’s loss of faith to his science has been
irresistible. At work was not only that cautious mind-set we have already seen,
but also the success of what is sometimes called a methodological naturalism.
The more we know of the fixed laws of nature, he famously wrote, the more
incredible do miracles become.^39 His process of natural selection could coun-
terfeit design: Paley’s argument from contrivance to contriver was denatured.
The ramifications were serious if one wished to see the world as Paley had
seen it: happy and contented with its buzzing insects on a summer night.