experiencing evolution 207but unbelieving father in 1848 and the passing of his favorite child, lovable,
delightful 10-year-old Annie, two and a half years later. How, reasoned the
distraught father, could an omnipotent, benevolent God let such a perfect child
suffer so much and die so young? Too broken even to attend Annie’s funeral,
Darwin turned his back on God.^5
A number of years ago the sociologist Susan Budd studied the biographies
of 150 British secularists or freethinkers who lived between 1850 and 1950,
hoping to test the prevailing view that “The effects of developing scientific
knowledge, especially Darwinism, and of the higher criticism have been...
mainly responsible for weakening belief in the literal truth of scriptural religion
for some, and for forcing others to abandon belief in God altogether.” She
discovered that only two of her subjects “mentioned having read Darwin or
Huxleybeforetheir loss of faith.” A few years back, I examined the reactions
of eighty prominent nineteenth-century American scientists to Darwinism and
found no evidence to suggest that a single one of them severed his religious
ties as a direct result of his encounter with evolution.^6 It is no wonder that in
writing the sensational Victorian novelRobert Elsmere(1888), in which the
clerical hero experiences a crisis of faith and abandons Christianity, Mrs. Hum-
phry Ward said nothing about Darwin or evolution. Although she had initially
intended to invoke the “converging pressure of science & history,” she decided
in the end that it would be truer to the times to feature only the latter.^7
Even personal testimonies about the corrosive effects of evolution on re-
ligious beliefs cannot always be taken at face value. The Victorian writer Sam-
uel Butler supposedly told a friend “that theOrigin of Specieshad completely
destroyed his belief in a personal God.” But, as one of his biographers points
out, “He had...already quarreled with his father [a cleric], refused to be or-
dained, thrown up his Cambridge prospects, and emigrated to New Zealand
as a sheep-farmer before Darwin’s book came out.” He quit praying the night
before he left for the Antipodes.^8
In this essay I want to explore the emotional experiences of some of the
people whodidsuffer spiritual crises associated with Darwinism. Most histo-
rians of evolution and Christianity—indeed of science and religion generally—
have focused on intellectual issues and have largely ignored or downplayed
experiential factors; they have treated spiritual and emotional crises as mere
“decorative episodes” in the lives of their subjects. But, as Robert J. Richards
has argued in one of the few historical studies to highlight the importance of
psychological crises in the lives of scientists, emotions have often been as
significant as ideas.^9 To identify as clearly as possible some of the actual roles
that evolution played in creating and resolving spiritual crises, I examine how
four scientific Americans, who together nearly span the spectrum of reactions
to evolution, wrestled with the teachings of Christ and Darwin: Joseph LeConte,
George Frederick Wright, J. Peter Lesley, and George McCready Price.^10