Darwin's Battle--Part 2

Darwin gathered an immense amount of material during his trip. Back home in England, his probing mind drew him evermore deeply into the mystery. He gradually developed (over 20 years) his theory of evolution—although he did not use the term “evolution.” He preferred to describe it as the “origin of species by natural selection.” He was not introducing evolution to the world—which had much earlier been proposed—as a means by which species originate. What he did introduce was a concept that came into direct conflict with established religion.

Darwin was saying that nature selected which changes will survive and which will perish. When those spontaneous changes are passed on from parent to child and grow over time to create new kinds of critters, a new species is born. God had not laid out every tiny and final detail; instead, Mother Nature has decided as she went along, and is continuing to decide. In other words, God is not a micro-manager; the task is accomplished by the natural world, which has an unsettling way of operating in a seemingly random or even mindless manner. The problem many people had was accepting that this seemingly haphazard process could have led to such an intelligent result.

He couldn’t have published his book at a worse time or place than England in 1859. The advanced scientific community was already beginning to find itself engaged in a growing struggle with the Anglican Church. Most of the “scientific” studies of the natural world in Darwin’s time, however, were being conducted by parish priests. They had the time between Sundays to study bugs and animals and trees and to ensure that their findings were disseminated in accordance with the church’s philosophy. England was definitely a God-fearing country.

Another dogmatic belief that English society had adopted was the pastoral viewpoint that, not only was nature fixed and final, but that it exhibited evidence of God’s peaceful Earth—wherein the lion reclines with the lamb and all critters are benign comrades. The English pastoral garden scene (long before having been rid of any big carnivores) was envisioned to be, like the scene on Noah’s Ark, one in which all creatures got along in polite fashion.

Darwin’s insight shattered both of these perceptions. Not only was the natural world’s progression wrenched from the purview of God, but natural selection was far from a peaceful process. He found the so-called Peaceful Kingdom to be a battleground, wherein competing species were “red in tooth and claw.” Constant killings occurred; often brutal and without compassion.

These two findings were a hard sell to English society. Organized religion—already beginning to feel suspicious about science—resisted these radical ideas, and fought back. The struggle continues 150 years later. It’s not that Darwin’s conception was all that radical, as much as that it shattered the dogmas of a fixed, pleasant world. It was the rigid viewpoint of the religious establishment that was being challenged. And that establishment did not release its grip without a fight.

It is sad that so many people today—mostly because of fundamentalist religious interpretations—continue to oppose evolution. Of course, most spiritually and religiously mature people are completely acceptable of evolution… it’s the close-minded, literalist faction that insists on the old perception.

Evolution is an elegant and beautiful process. It is one that a truly wise designer God would have set up, and then sat back and watched the show. The process envisioned by Darwin is far more intelligent than any so-called “intelligent design.” It does not exclude the divine; it only relieves the divine from and endless process of micro-managing.