Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK IMPRESSION
- Introduction: the terrain of revision
- PART I HISTORIANS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
- PART II DARWINISM AND EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT
- PART III THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
- 9 Christian Anti-Darwinism: the realm of certainty and fixity
- 10 Christian Darwinisticism: the role of providence and progress
- 11 Christian Darwinism: the relevance of orthodox theology
- 12 Darwinism and Darwinisticism in theology
- Conclusion: on coming to terms with Darwin
- Dedication
- Notes to the text
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - Christian Darwinism: the relevance of orthodox theology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK IMPRESSION
- Introduction: the terrain of revision
- PART I HISTORIANS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
- PART II DARWINISM AND EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT
- PART III THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
- 9 Christian Anti-Darwinism: the realm of certainty and fixity
- 10 Christian Darwinisticism: the role of providence and progress
- 11 Christian Darwinism: the relevance of orthodox theology
- 12 Darwinism and Darwinisticism in theology
- Conclusion: on coming to terms with Darwin
- Dedication
- Notes to the text
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
PALEY. May I, without impertinence, Mr Darwin, inquire in what sort of estimation you were held among the orthodox Christians of your time?
DARWIN. I hardly know how to answer your question. I enjoyed the friendship of many of them, and incurred, so far as I am aware, the ill will of none. Why should I, indeed? I never assailed their doctrines.
PALEY. But was not the Christian world alarmed by your speculations? Did it not protest against them? Had your contemporaries grown wiser than the Apostle, and did they believe that all danger from philosophy falsely so called had passed away?
DARWIN. No; but they thought, I imagine, that philosophy falsely so called could be exposed as false.
If ever there was a contradiction in terms it must surely have been Christian Darwinism. What concourse could a mere theory of biological development have with a religion which proclaimed God to be Maker of heaven and earth? What constructive relationship could possibly subsist between a theory which taught the survival of the fittest ‘fortuitous’ variations in a brutal struggle for existence and a theology which taught God's designing providence in a creation that he saw was ‘good’? What conceivable logic could there be in uniting a theory of mankind's physical and psychical evolution from lower animals with a belief that human beings were uniquely created in the image of God? The name Christian might have been annexed to anti-Darwinism or perhaps to some version of evolution which did honour to the purposes and character of the Creator, but never, surely, to that theory set forth by the agnostic naturalist Charles Darwin.
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- The Post-Darwinian ControversiesA Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900, pp. 252 - 298Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1979