On Darwin's loss of faith

A commenter (Steve of the SENTinel) on my last post about the new movie on Darwin, noted the following: "Darwin's loss of faith was driven more by his daughter's death than by his science. Maybe the science gave him an intellectual footing, but his daughter was the emotional & volitional impetus." I don't think that this is the case given what I have read of his autobiography.

For a man as minded to the cultivation of evidence as he was, the feeling of anger or repudiation of a God that he had grown up with and minded as a voyager on the Beagle would not be enough. His daughter's death may have provided him late in life with some conviction or, as Steve calls it, "emotional & volitional impulse," about his agnosticism; perhaps it would be something to the effect that he would believe that a God such as the one who created and ruled over a universe such as ours is a monster (and I don't say that he said or believed this). But evidence would inevitably be the thing that persuaded him, and much of that would have to deal with the absence of any independent evidence for any particular religion, that the argument from design was flawed and that natural selection accounted for the variation of life, and much evidence that there was nothing like justice to be found in nature outside of human culture. In what follows, I will paraphrase some of Darwin's points from some of his Life and Letters.

While he was aboard the Beagle for two years, he thought much on religion. He started as a scripture-quoting youth (was even mocked for it some) who ended up doubting. Why should we believe in Christianity when we don't believe in the visions or revelations of "Hindoos?" Like David Hume, Darwin wondered why we should accept at all that miracles which are the basis of the Christian faith. As total violations of "the fixed laws of nature" there remains no good reason to believe. He wrote, "But I found more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress."

But it was not just this lack of evidence for the texts themselves. Darwin well-knew William Paley's argument from/to design whose antecedents go back to at least the Greeks. In short order, Darwin relegated them to the dustbin of history. He wrote, "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, that in the course which the wind blows." Though design may be lacking, and with it we might think purpose, that did not relegate happiness to the abyss. He believed that it followed from sentient beings' existences and survivability "that all sentient beings have been formed [by natural selection] so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness." In short it seems that survival of sentient species correlates with pleasure and happiness such that the subjective experiences of pleasure and happiness accompany survival. But what of suffering?

Darwin was well-acquainted with suffering. His own daughter died very young. However, he saw suffering that extended well beyond his own life. Every day humans experience anguish. This, he argued, has been seen as means for the moral improvement of us and our fellow people. In the day-to-day observation of our world, though, we seem to be the only ones who might be improving, so to speak, from what we learn from the experience of suffering. In the long scheme of history and pre-history, no species seems to have been sapient (knowing) of their own senescence. Their suffering has served no moral purpose nor some sort of meaning. In a way, all of prehistory has been in vain to the human observer. If we are made in God's image, then God seems to have spent an awful lot of time building a quite tortuous planet (not to mention practically a whole universe inhospitable to humans).

He also dispelled the notion that one's subjective feelings about God are no indication of God's actual existence. They are, quite simply, subjective feelings and "inner convictions." The power of one's passion for something is no piece of evidence for whether it is real or not. I was the line party organizer in my area for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy releases. Yes. I am that big of a dork. :-) But I can assure you that my love for Middle Earth does not have anything to do with its existence as a thing outside of my imagination, the shared imagination of other fans, or of Tolkien's writings.

Quite naturally, this subjective feeling of God's existence is concomitant with their belief in immortality of the soul. Darwin found this equally unlikely as God's existence.

Finally, he seemed to find some possibility that there was a God of the "First Cause." He neither embraced nor totally rejected this possibility, writing,

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

So it would seem that the volitional impulse was not merely Emma's death but the long acquaintance with the myriad complications of life. Clearly he wondered about suffering and happiness and how that might relate man to God, man to nature, and nature to God. He also, though, very clearly looked at the ethical aspects of nature noting that it lacked the subjective/intersubjective qualities that human beings so desire. Certainly the long sweep of the Earth's existence held no evidence of a God because it was full of a) meaningless suffering and b) was accomplished by the course of natural selection. Individual human experiences remained unable to show that God existed because they were either prone to error (miracles), personal delusion (inner convictions), or a lack of evidence (belief in immortality or of any god vs. another or others).

To close, I would say that given his arguments as I know them, it doesn't really matter what the volitional impulse was because it doesn't make his argument. Darwin was a master of integration who refused simple explanations. Having rejected others' personal "inner convictions" regarding faith I suspect that he wouldn't allow his own to color things too much either. His case for agnosticism is strong and built on reason, evidence, and the believer's lack of both.