11

Experiencing Evolution:

Varieties of Psychological

Responses to the Claims of

Science and Religion

Ronald L. Numbers

In the early twentieth century the psychologist Sigmund Freud
noted that science had already inflicted on humanity “two great out-
rages upon its naı ̈ve self-love”: the first, associated with the sixteenth-
century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, “when it realized that our
earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a
world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable”; the second, asso-
ciated with Charles Darwin, “when biological research robbed man
of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and rele-
gated him to a descent from the animal world.” Conceitedly, Freud
went on to observe that “man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffer-
ing the third and most bitter blow,” this time at the hands of psycho-
analysts, such as himself, who were showing that humans behavior
was influenced by unconscious urges.^1
Freud need not have worried so much about the mental suffer-
ings inflicted by modern science. Copernicanism had indeed dis-
lodged humans from the center of the cosmos, but in the Aristote-
lian world the center was the lowliest place in the universe; there is
little evidence that humans felt diminished by being hurled into
space.^2 Psychoanalysis never achieved the prominence its founder
dreamed of, and so never caused the trauma he anticipated. But
what of Darwinism? How much emotional distress did the revela-
tion of ape ancestry cause humans? How often did their encounters
with evolution produce spiritual crises? And what was the nature of
the crises that occurred?