darwin, design, and the unification of nature 177and advocate in America, Asa Gray, certainly found theological advantages. He
even detected the possibility of a new theodicy:
Darwinian teleology has the special advantage of accounting for the
imperfections and failures as well as for successes. It not only ac-
counts for them, but turns them to practical account. It explains the
seeming waste as being part and parcel of a great economical pro-
cess. Without the competing multitude, no struggle for life; and
without this, no natural selection and survival of the fittest, no con-
tinuous adaptation to changing surroundings, no diversification and
improvement, leading from lower up to higher and nobler forms. So
the most puzzling things of all to the old-school teleologists are the
principiaof the Darwinian.^55
Gray may not have carried the world with him; but in that passage a unified
nature survived in the form of a unified process. As he put it elsewhere, evo-
lutionary relationships showed how biological species are “all part of one sys-
tem, realizations in nature...oftheconception of One Mind.”^56
I conclude with Gray because he identified a further respect in which a
unification effected through Darwin’s science might have deep religious sig-
nificance. An ultimately single origin of all living things meant that claims for
primordiallydifferent races could surely be silenced? The polygenetic theories
of the nineteenth century, which proposed multiple origins for humankind,
were not surprisingly perceived as subversive of an orthodox Christianity. Gray
was not alone in seeing in Darwinian evolution support for the monogenetic
case. To defend the unity of humankind required the different races to have
diverged from a common ancestor. This was precisely the kind of process that
Darwin had expounded. It was the polygenists who were now up against it. As
Gray put it: those who “recognize several or numerous human species, will
hardly be able to maintain that such species were primordial and supernatural
in the ordinary sense of the word.”^57 The use of natural selection to account
for racial differentiation while simultaneously reinforcing a monogenism was
a feature of early responses to Darwin’s theory, as in that of the Ulster Pres-
byterian George Macloskie.^58ConclusionI conclude not with the past, but with the present. In the summer of 1999,
one of the best known British newspapers,The Daily Telegraph,carried an
editorial headed “Faith in Darwin.” Wherever you go, it stated, “whatever ani-
mal, plant or bug you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same genetic code.”
It follows that “there was only one creation.” The editor’s conclusion, if not