darwin, design, and the unification of nature 173Darwin emphatically did replace that image: once one had been staggered, as
he claimed to be, by the extent of nature’s extinctions, it was those insects that
cruelly and horribly buried their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars that buried
themselves in his mind. Darwin did not destroy the argument from laws of
nature to their lawgiver. This is an important, often neglected, qualification.
But if his belief in a personal God had ever rested on the adaptive minutia of
living organisms, it would certainly have been shaken by his theory. As he
protested to Asa Gray in October 1861, “when I think of my beloved orchids,
with rudiments of five anthers, with one pistil converted into a rostellum, with
all the cohesion of parts, it really seems to me incredibly monstrous to look at
an orchid as created as we now see it.”^40 Earlier, he had tried to clarify his
position when Gray had suggested that the variations on which natural selec-
tion worked might have been designed. Darwin objected. It was not that “de-
signed variation” made his “deity ‘Natural Selection’ superfluous”; but rather
from studying domestic variations he had come to see what an enormous field
of undesigned variability there was for natural selection to appropriate.^41 In
Darwin’s reference there to natural selection as his “deity,” we catch a glimpse
of what Susan Cannon observed long ago—that Darwin did not so much de-
stroy the universe of the natural theologians asstealit from them.^42 But was
this enough to induce agnosticism with reference to the being of a God—the
kind of God who might be described as the ground of the possibility of there
being a mechanism of natural selection at all? Darwin’s use of language sug-
gests that perhaps it was not. Certainly, in the letters to Gray, he pleads a lack
of clarity on the matter. He would say he was in a hopeless muddle or that he
did not feel sure of his ground. In the early drafts of his theory he had even
used the device of a “Being with forethought” to explicate what he meant by
natural selection: “Let us now suppose a Being with penetration sufficient to
perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization quite impercep-
tible to man, and with forethought extending over future centuries to watch
with unerring care and select for any object the offspring of an organism pro-
duced under the foregoing circumstances; I can see no conceivable reason why
he could not form a new race...adapted to new ends.”^43 Darwin’s “Being”
was a heuristic device, to be sure, but in the light of such remarks it would
surely be odd to say that the being of such a Being was excluded by his science?
Were there, then, other sources of unbelief to which we might point? Here
are a few that we find in recent literature. The river of dissent that ran through
his family from his radical grandfather through his skeptical father to his athe-
ist brother, Erasmus, has to be considered. If Christian preachers put unbe-
lievers beyond the pale, then members of his own family were destined for
perdition. The doctrine of eternal damnation he would describe as a “damnable
doctrine.”^44 The issue took on an existential dimension when his father died
in the late 1840s. As many commentators have observed, Darwin shared in
that moral revolt against Christian orthodoxies that was to exact its toll in so