6 Michael Ruse
then lets unbroken law do the job. In other words, Darwin moved from seeing
miracles as the greatest evidence of God’s existence (something he would have
gleaned from reading Archdeacon Paley’s standard text,Evidences of Christianity
[1794], when at Cambridge) to seeing laws as the greatest evidence of God’s ex-
istence (something he would have gleaned from reading Charles Lyell’sPrinciples
of Geologyon the voyage).
One should stress that this was no great move for Darwin, and certainly not
something that would have been socially ostracizing. Lyell was openly a deist, at
that time worshiping with the Unitarians (a group who, in those days, believed
in God but denied the Trinity and hence the intervention of the Incarnation).
Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus was a deist, and the whole of the Wedgwood family
were Unitarians. So really Darwin was just changing one family belief for another.
(Darwin’s father Robert was probably an out-and-out atheist, but for professional
reasons obviously had to keep his non-belief under cover. He was certainly cynical
— or sensible depending on your viewpoint — in packing Charles off to Cambridge
to become a parson. But what else was a concerned father to do when faced with
an undirected son?)
It is probable that deism stayed with Darwin for many years, but then late in
life his beliefs drifted into the agnosticism of so many late Victorian intellectu-
als. Darwin never became an atheist — towards the end of his life he admitted
that sometimes he had flashes of belief — but generally found agnosticism both
emotionally and intellectually satisfying. He never wanted to deny his beliefs or
non-beliefs, but as an English gentleman never wanted to parade them. His clos-
est personal friend was the local vicar, with whom he worked for the welfare of
the villagers and with whom he carried on numerous friendly, if argumentative,
discussions over the dinner table. In the end, the State Church had no problem
calling Darwin home.
Darwin knew of what we might call the organic origins problem. Indeed, the
genesis of species was a hot topic when he was a young man. The astronomer-
philosopher John F. W. Herschel, writing to Lyell (in a letter that became public),
referred to it as the “mystery of mysteries” [Cannon, 1961]. Darwin also knew
of the evolutionary solution. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin, first in his major
workZoonomia[1794–1796] and then in verse had held forth about evolution.
Robert Grant had almost certainly talked to Darwin on the topic. And then in
the second volume of thePrinciples, Lyell had given a very clear exposition of
the evolutionism of the French biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck [1809]. Poor
Lyell was in a quandary. By rights, as a uniformitarian he should have agreed that
organisms have natural origins. He certainly argued at length that their demise is
natural, and hinted that their origin is likewise. But he could never really bring
himself to accept evolution (late in life he more or less staggered over the line).
It has been suggested that the progressive nature of evolution went against his
steady-state view of the world, but a much more probable cause is the case of
Homo sapiens. Deist or not, Lyell could not stomach the idea that we might have
natural causes. Hence no evolution, even though a whole generation of biologists