Darwin's "Scoffer" Roots

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers,... 2 Peter 3:3

"Prior to Darwin's birth and throughout his formative years, England

was experiencing an evangelical revival. Very few were not, in one way or another, exposed to this influence. It is reasonable to  suppose that the young Darwin was included in or at least aware of this movement. There was, however, an opposing influence close to his own family that would certainly have discouraged any association or inquiry into evangelical Christianity. That influence was the Unitarian Church.

From the beginning of Christendom there have always been those individuals within it who have found it not only difficult to believe certain parts of the faith but who have actively and openly spoken out against it. Arius, in the third century A.D., could not accept the idea of three persons in one God...These are the views of the Unitarian Church today. With all this denial it may be wondered what they regard as their purpose in meeting; inquiry shows that their principal concerns are humanitarian and social issues.

John Biddle (1615-62) is regarded as the founder of English Unitarianism... many were converted through active Unitarian missionary efforts and teachings by men of such intellectual caliber as the founder of modern chemistry, Joseph Priestley, in England, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in America. The first Unitarian church building was opened in London by a liberal defector from the Anglican Church in 1773. King's Chapel in Boston was the first Unitarian church opened in America about a decade later. Soon after this, however, the famous divinity school of Harvard University, founded in 1816, became the center of Unitarian thought.

Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809, the second youngest of six children...The source of family income, which was not inconsiderable, derived from the ills of the local populace since the father, Dr. Robert Darwin, had one of the most successful medical practices in provincial England. 

Dr. Darwin had married the daughter of the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood, but she died when Charles was five, and until he was eight he was educated at home by his elder sister, Caroline. 

From his eighth to ninth years, he attended his first day school, kept by a Unitarian minister, and then went to Dr. Butler's famous Shrewsbury grammar school for the next seven years, where virtually the entire curriculum was given over to Latin and Greek.

Dr. Darwin sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, to spend three years as a pre-divinity student....the age of twenty-two he was all set, at least on paper if not entirely in spirit, to become Rev. Charles Darwin in some Anglican country church....circumstances conspired in a most unexpected way and he found himself on board the HMS Beagle as official scientist, then called naturalist, to set sail on a voyage of exploration around the world that would last five years; the date of sailing was December 1831....he enjoyed Paley so much that he read another of Paley's works, Natural Theology, even though it was not required reading.

Charles Darwin never actually knew his paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, as he died seven years before Charles was born. However, the liberal and evolutionary ideas of Erasmus undoubtedly influenced the young Darwin. 

Erasmus was a physician, something of a poet, an instrument of the Industrial Revolution, and author of a massive two-volume work Zoönomia (1794-96); this work contained within it the essence of the theory that his grandson would announce to the world half a century later. Charles always had a great respect for his grandfather and in spite of the latter's evident racey lifestyle -- he acknowledged two illegitimate daughters -- he had a German biography translated, thus perpetuating the memory of his grandfather among English readers....Robert Darwin, Charles's father, was even less orthodox in his faith than his grandfather Erasmus...

The young Darwin met several geologists, zoologists, and botanists

of his own age whose discussions were keenly Lamarckian. It was during this period that he found time to read his grandfather's then widely read Zoönomia. Interestingly, grandfather Erasmus, Unitarian Joseph Priestly, and geologist James Hutton had all attended the same university in their youth and, it can be concluded from their writings, had abandoned any belief they had ever had in the orthodox Christian faith.

The Genesis Flood was a supernatural event, and with Lyell's Principles of Geology before him, Darwin had the choice to interpret what he saw as the result of natural forces over a long period of time or as the result of supernatural forces acting over a short period of time, and comparatively recently....during this period of meditation on the species problem, he read Patrick Matthew's Naval Timber and Arboriculture. .... 

In 1844 Darwin wrote a second essay and contracted the expression further to "natural selection". 

Darwin began to keep his "secret" notebooks on the transmutation of species. The date he started these notebooks is known precisely, July 1837, which coincides nicely with the publication of Blyth's articles in the then popular Magazine of Natural History. 

Darwin knew that the idea of transmutation, that is, the imagined change of, for example, a reptile into a bird over a great many generations, ran counter to every other scientist of that day. He was no doubt also aware that what he was thinking was shocking and, in a sense, blasphemous by virtue of his removal of God the Creator further and further away from his Creation.

The Darwin family was intimately associated with the Wedgwood

family, the same family of Wedgwood pottery fame today. Old Josiah Wedgwood was a Unitarian and friend of Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, while the chemist Dr. Joseph Priestley (a Unitarian of missionary zeal) was included in this circle of friends. Josiah's oldest daughter, Susannah, had married Robert, the son of Erasmus, and was thus Charles Darwin's mother. 

Thus, Charles married his mother's niece. On the eve of the marriage Darwin's father had counseled him to conceal from his future wife his religious doubts and beliefs, since he had found by experience that a husband seldom managed to convert his wife to skepticism.

Another cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, wrote extensively on this principle and openly advocated selective breeding programs for the creation of tomorrow's elite ruling class. 

We now know, of course, that inbreeding of this sort is positively dangerous because of the likelihood of expressing mutant genes, resulting in physical and mental disorders of the offspring. 

Highly inbred animals are known to be temperamental and prone to sickness. 

Darwin's idea of inbreeding to produce superior stock can be seen

to be a complete disaster in the case of his own ten children. Of the ten, one girl, Mary, died shortly after birth; another girl, Anne, died at the age of ten years; his eldest daughter, Henrietta, had a serious and prolonged breakdown at fifteen in 1859. Three of his six sons suffered such frequent illness that Darwin regarded them as semi-invalids while his last son, Charles Jr., was born mentally retarded and died in 1858, nineteen months after birth.

Darwin received Wallace's "Sarawak" paper in 1855, which came as a shock, because he realized that someone else was as close as he was himself to the answer to life's riddle. His friend and mentor, Charles Lyell, persuaded him to begin writing a book immediately on all that he had thus far discovered. 

Three years later, in 1858, he received a bigger shock when Wallace's "Ternate" paper arrived, giving the entire theory complete with the elusive "key", the survival-of-the-fittest as the mechanism by which selection took place and caused one species to diverge to another. Darwin was now persuaded by his friends, Lyell and Hooker, to stop work on the "big book" and prepare instead an abstract, a shorter version, for publication as quickly as possible. In what was described as a "delicate arrangement", Lyell and Hooker then conspired to present to the Linnean Society meeting on 1 July 1858 Darwin's 1844 sketch (which did not mention divergence), followed by Darwin's copy of his letter to Asa Gray of 5 September 1857 (which purportedly did mention divergence), then finally Wallace's "Ternate" paper of March 1858.

The book caused a public uproar, scathing newspaper articles appeared, and it was soundly denounced from virtually every pulpit; nevertheless, it is notable that neither the Origin nor the Descent of Man ever appeared on the Catholic Index. This is surprising since Charles Darwin's work was more damning to Christian orthodoxy than his grandfather's Zoönomia. Placed on the index in 1817, Zoönomia was still there when the final edition of the index was published in 1948. It is evident, then, that a radical change in policy with regard to origins had occurred within the Vatican sometime between 1817 and 1859.

If the notion of the evolution of man's mental faculties was implicit in the Descent, it became explicit the following year, in 1872, when Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in which he moved into an area that today would be considered essentially psychological. 

Darwin is, in fact, considered to be the "father of psychology" by the faithful (Zusne 1975, 112); a moment's reflection on, for instance, Freudian psychology will show it to be strictly based on Darwinian principles.

Darwin family have always emphatically denied any suggestion that Darwin was a Christian. Certainly, there is no indication from Darwin's correspondence written from September 1881 to a few days before his death seven months later, that he even acknowledged the existence of God."
MindsOfMen