Handout #238

Geology and Faith

Darwin's later religious beliefs have been the subject of some controversy, yet this statement in a letter he wrote late in life seems to show his position:

[I feel] the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species, and it is since that time that it has very gradually, and with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then arises the doubt - can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?

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. 

Anglicans and Evolution

Frederick Temple (1821-1902 A.D.), ex-Headmaster of Rugby, Bishop of Exeter and a future Archbishop of Canterbury, shows in this extract from his Bamptom Lectures of 1884 A.D. that a liberal-minded Anglican could come to find little but profit in the theory of evolution: 

In conclusion, we cannot find that science, in teaching evolution, has yet asserted anything that is inconsistent with revelation, unless we assume that revelation was intended not to teach spiritual truth only, but physical truth also. Here, as in all similar cases, we find that the writer of the Book of Genesis, like all the other writers in the bible, took nature as he saw it, and expressed his teaching in language corresponding to what he saw. And the doctrine of evolution, in so far as it has been shown to be true, does but fill out in detail the declaration that we are Fearfully and wonderfully made, marvelous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well' There is nothing in all that science has yet taught, or is on the was to teach, which conflicts with the doctrine that we are made in the Divine Image, rulers of the creation around us by a divine superiority, the recipients of a revelation from a Father in Heaven, and responsible to judgment by His law. We know not how the first human soul was made, just as we know not how any human soul has been made since; but we know that we are, in a sense in which no other creatures living with us are, the children of His special care.

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