Ask a museum why Charles Darwin believed what he believed, and you will get a tidy answer: the evidence. He looked at the natural world, the story goes, and he followed the data wherever it led, at whatever cost to his own comfort.
Darwin’s own pen gives a different answer. It gave that answer in a passage his family kept out of print for seventy years.
A Grave in 1851
The history first. In 1851, Darwin’s beloved ten-year-old daughter Annie died after a long illness. By his family’s own testimony, and by the account of every major biography, whatever remained of his Christian faith died at her bedside.
What followed was not the cool neutrality we associate with the scientist. It was grievance. A father had lost his child and could not forgive the God he had been told allowed it. I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it without sympathy. I have buried people I loved, and I know what the argument with heaven sounds like at three in the morning.
What Emma Cut Out
When Darwin’s Autobiography was published in 1887, his widow Emma had the rawest passage about Christianity removed. She feared its effect. For seventy years the public read a version of Darwin’s life story with his sharpest words about the faith taken out.
Not until 1958 did his granddaughter, Nora Barlow, restore the text. Here is what the family censored, Darwin writing on the doctrine of judgment:
“I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true.”
In the same passage he called the doctrine of everlasting punishment “a damnable doctrine.”
The Hinge Is a Wish
Look closely at that sentence, because this whole article turns on one word. He did not write that he found the evidence insufficient. He did not write that the facts compelled him. The sentence turns on the word wish.
That is a statement of desire. It was recorded by the theory’s own author, about the faith his theory displaced, and it tells us that he did not merely conclude Christianity was false. He did not want it to be true.
We have met this pattern before in this series. The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel admitted in print, “I hope there is no God.” Unbelief has motives too. We are endlessly reminded that believers want heaven to exist, as though wanting settled anything. It is only fair to notice that unbelievers have wants of their own, and that at least two prominent ones wrote theirs down. Darwin, to his credit as a record-keeper if nothing else, documented his.
Compassion and Clarity
A grieving father who could not forgive God is a man who deserves compassion, and I extend it sincerely. I know something of that grief. Nothing in this article is meant to mock him.
But compassion does not require us to accept the museum version of events. Do not let anyone tell you the theory was born in a laboratory, the pure product of dispassionate observation. Part of it was born at a graveside. Darwin himself left the record, and his family thought it dangerous enough to hide for seventy years.
Next in this series: the final verdict. I will assemble the whole record in one place, say plainly what it proves and what it does not, and announce the trial that comes next: the evidence itself.
Sources for this article: The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, unexpurgated edition, edited by Nora Barlow (Collins, 1958), including Barlow’s account of the excised passages; Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution (2001); Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (1997), chapter 7.
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