206 life
Two of these queries can be dealt with quickly. Darwin’s indelicate an-
nouncement inThe Descent of Man(1871), that humans had “descended from
a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears,” indeed attracted
considerable attention. And some conservative Christians did express abhor-
rence at the prospect of relinquishing an honored position at the head of cre-
ated beings only to be herded together “with four-footed beasts and creeping
things,” over which man had formerly held dominion. Darwinism, complained
one contemptuous critic, “tears the crown from our heads; it treats us as bas-
tards and not sons, and reveals the degrading fact that man in his best estate—
even Mr. Darwin—is but a civilized, dressed up, educated monkey, who has
lost his tail.” There is no reason to believe, however, that such die-hard crea-
tionists ever took human evolution seriously enough to be more than rhetor-
ically distressed.^3
More revealing of genuine concern was the fundamentalist A. C. Dixon’s
confession to feeling “a repugnance to the idea that an ape or an orang outang
was my ancestor.” But even he promised not to let the “humiliating fact” stand
in the way of accepting human evolution, “if proved.” The Southern Baptist
New Testament scholar A. T. Robertson put the choice somewhat more color-
fully in stating his openness to theistic evolution: “I can stand it if the monkeys
can.” Despite lots of humor about routing “the biological baboon boosters” and
shaking “the monkey out of the cocoanut tree,” I have found no evidence that
the prospect of having monkeys for uncles caused emotional distress anywhere
near the level of that created by biblical and philosophical concerns.^4
Somewhat more surprising, given the widespread assumption that evo-
lution played a major role in the secularization of Western thought, is the
relative infrequency with which evolution seems to have been implicated in
the loss of religious faith. Fairly typical of intellectuals who rejected Christianity
was the experience of Charles Darwin himself. By the time he returned to
England from the voyage of theBeagle,he was entertaining doubts about the
reliability of the Bible. He tried to staunch these doubts, but, despite persistent
effort, he reported in his autobiography that “disbelief crept over me at a
very slow rate,” causing “no distress.” Instead, he came to find Christianity
revolting:
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be
true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the
men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother
and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And
this is a damnable doctrine.
As these words suggest, and as the historian James R. Moore has shown,
Darwin finally abandoned Christianity not primarily because of his developing
views on evolution but for moral concerns awakened by the death of his kind