A non-Christian vision of nature
Its author's caution and diffidence not withstanding, On the Origins of Species offers of nature a vision fairly fundamentally opposed to that predominant among Christians at the time of its publication. A comparison between the opening verses from Genesisand the paragraph ending On the Origins of Species in its final draft makes this transparently clear.
Darwin insisted on the notion of nature's laws and the transformation of living organisms, thereby opposing the idea of a divine creation and the fixity of the organisms thus created. And yet his hypothesis of the evolution of living things was not new; Jean-Baptiste Lamark's[1] ideas on species transformation, as synthesised in his 1809 Zoological Philosophy had been broadly disseminated over half a century. And several authors, lay and clerics, had set forth, notably in Britain adjusted visions of evolutionism which they thought compatible with the Christian figure of a God, no longer perhaps creator of living things but of the laws regulating their advent and of an overall “Creation” scheme. In 1844 an anonymous book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation caused major ructions in Britain and became a best seller. Its long-mysterious author turned out to be the journalist and publisher Robert Chambers[2]. He offered of evolution a picture accommodating readily enough a wise and good God along the lines found in natural theology.
Darwin would take up part of these data as may be judged by the first and last lines of his concluding paragraph. But the key issue is elsewhere as indicated by the full title of his book: not so much in the fact of biological evolution as in the process of natural selection. Upon reading Malthus in 1838, Darwin had the intuition that demographic pressure was the actual engine of transformation in living beings. Restricted food sources force competition between living beings, a struggle for life. Now this struggle is not conducted on an even playing field for each individual has some minor characteristics (“variations” in the biological terminology of the time) differentiating it within its kind. These variations may or may not give it the advantage in the struggle at the issue of which a “selection” has thus sorted out those able to survive (through reproduction) on the strength of their advantageous variations.
The theory of natural selection represents the most radically new factor and the most difficult to reconcile with a Christian vision of nature because the resulting vision, one of “war of nature [...] famine and death”, is resolved only in an ulterior phase in “the production of the higher animals”. This consequence, “the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving”, Darwin wrote, may have salvaged something of the Deist order. But the proposed vision, founded in struggle and destruction, clashes with that of nature's harmony, the expression Divine goodness, which presided over natural theology.
Another controversial element of Darwin's theory bore on the variations. After much research, at a time when scientists had no valid explanation for the exact mechanisms of heredity or for the inheritance of characteristics, Darwin ended up asserting that variations result from so numerous and complex causes that they may never be explained and that, for want of anything better, it will have to be accepted that they appear “by chance”. Darwinian chance is not ontological but epistemological. It is not useful, Darwin asserted to know how variations occur for the explanation by natural selection to be valid. Now, this introduction of chance in the theory removes all teleology from the “evolution” mentioned in the last line of the quotation: it is impossible to forecast where, in the middle or long term, this evolution process will lead since it is impossible to explain how the variations appear, the preservation of which will be ensured by selection. This negates the vision of a divine creation mediated by natural laws towards perfection and organized according to a grand design. Worse still this deprives humans from their privileged position as the culmination of the “creation” scheme, which had been with Chambers et al. a means to salvage the Jewish and Christian idea of human specificity within nature.
These several points, and notably Darwin's resort to chance, were almost universally not accepted, even by those who would later claim to be Darwinians. Meanwhile Darwin's adversaries who wanted to stress that his theory was not compatible with Christianity made much of them.
