Charles Darwin
Faith and Darwin
18/05/11 20:23 Filed in: Human Nature
Many people, especially of the religious persuasion, believe Darwin was an atheist. In fact, Darwin denied this. He wrote in a letter
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God.
In fact, Darwin gave some credence to the design argument for God's existence:
Another source of conviction in the existence of Do ... follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe ... as the result of blind chance.
We should be more careful, then, in what we attribute to Darwin as a belief. While he was not an atheist, Darwin was not a believer either. He called himself an agnostic, which, according to Thomas Huxley who coined the term, means that one asserts the "human inability to solve, by strictly rational argumentation, theistic or theological matters."
Of course, people of faith will say that faith begins just where rational argumentation ends. That is, the whole point of having faith is to believe in something we cannot determine by a rational means.
This attitude diverges from that of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others. For Thomas, we have inductive proof of God's existence through several means, one of which is Darwin's design argument. For Thomas, however, these arguments can only tell us that God exists; they cannot tell us who God is -- we need faith and revelation to do that. Moreover, because the arguments for God's existence are inductive, they do not lead to absolute certainty. There is, then, room for agnosticism within the Thomistic framework. Of course, Thomas would look at this askance and would go on to say that, even without reason, one should believe in God through faith.
Darwin was unwilling to make that leap. Yet, his unwillingness was not anti-religious or fanatical the way that many think. Indeed, his study of evolution opens up new possibilities of faith as well as new ways of understanding God's creativity.
It is faith and reason which helps us to understand how we fit into that evolved world as evolved creatures subject to God's design and grace.
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God.
In fact, Darwin gave some credence to the design argument for God's existence:
Another source of conviction in the existence of Do ... follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe ... as the result of blind chance.
We should be more careful, then, in what we attribute to Darwin as a belief. While he was not an atheist, Darwin was not a believer either. He called himself an agnostic, which, according to Thomas Huxley who coined the term, means that one asserts the "human inability to solve, by strictly rational argumentation, theistic or theological matters."
Of course, people of faith will say that faith begins just where rational argumentation ends. That is, the whole point of having faith is to believe in something we cannot determine by a rational means.
This attitude diverges from that of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others. For Thomas, we have inductive proof of God's existence through several means, one of which is Darwin's design argument. For Thomas, however, these arguments can only tell us that God exists; they cannot tell us who God is -- we need faith and revelation to do that. Moreover, because the arguments for God's existence are inductive, they do not lead to absolute certainty. There is, then, room for agnosticism within the Thomistic framework. Of course, Thomas would look at this askance and would go on to say that, even without reason, one should believe in God through faith.
Darwin was unwilling to make that leap. Yet, his unwillingness was not anti-religious or fanatical the way that many think. Indeed, his study of evolution opens up new possibilities of faith as well as new ways of understanding God's creativity.
It is faith and reason which helps us to understand how we fit into that evolved world as evolved creatures subject to God's design and grace.
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