This year, 2009, marks both the 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150^th anniversary of the publication of his master work, On the Origin of Species. People around the world are celebrating with lectures, exhibits and festivities. Here in Houston, there will be a year long celebration called Darwin 2009 with events planned at organizations throughout the city.

Along with the festivities and celebrations, a host of scientific publications have featured articles reappraising Darwin’s scientific contributions and reaffirming his genius. We know of course that there were gaps in Darwin’s knowledge, but the great discoveries of the twentieth century in genetics and molecular biology have done nothing to undermine his original insights. Even the most unanticipated discoveries in the life sciences have supported or extended Darwin’s central ideas—that all life is related, that species change over time in response to natural selection and new forms replace those that came before.

On the religious front, these twin anniversaries have provided the occasion for religious liberals of many denominations to reaffirm the compatibility of faith and science, to reassert the necessity of teaching evolution in the public schools and to resist the domination of local school boards by Creationists. Unitarian Universalists stand firmly in that company and Mark and I have been lending our voices and support to such organizations as the Clergy Letter Project, the Texas Freedom Network and Evolution Sundays which serve to further those ends.

But beyond activities to preserve religious freedom, these twin anniversaries also provide an occasion for religious liberals to reassess Darwin’s impact on theology. This is perhaps especially relevant for us as Unitarian Universalists, because, while Darwin was not a Unitarian, per se, he did have strong Unitarian connections. Both sides of his family, the Darwins and the Wedgewoods, were Unitarians, with the exception of his grandfather Erasmus who was a freethinker. Darwin was baptized in the Anglican church, probably as a bow to social pressures, but his mother took him to Unitarian services throughout his childhood. Throughout his life, many of his closest friends and scientific confidantes, in addition to his extended family, were Unitarians.

As an adult, Darwin’s religious views underwent considerable metamorphosis. Although he remained nominally an Anglican, largely in deference to his wife Emma’s traditional piety, by the time of the publication of Origin he characterized himself as an agnostic and from 1849 he would take a walk on Sundays while his family attended church. Darwin’s religious journey was influenced in part by personal events. His father died in 1848 and two years later his beloved ten year old daughter, Annie, died. Neither of them had made a profession of Christian faith, yet Darwin could not think for a moment that these two were suffering the eternal torment Christianity prescribed for non believers. But by far the greatest spur to Darwin’s religious development came from his own scientific discoveries. Indeed, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, when finally published, rocked the entire religious world to its very foundations. It was in large part because Darwin knew his views were heretical that he hesitated to air them publicly until he had utter confidence in his conclusions.

Popular conception would have it that Darwin’s theory of evolution crystallized during his visit to the Galapagos Islands on his five year journey as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. The Galapagos specimens were decidedly important, particularly their distinctive distribution among the different islands of the archipelago. Not long after his return to England as he pored over them, he wrote in a notebook, “one species does change into another”. But, as if he had an inkling of the upheavals to come, he followed that observation with “cuidado”, the Spanish word for “careful.” It would be twenty more years before he felt confident enough to go public with his theory.

Inured as we are to the implications of evolutionary theory, it is hard for us to appreciate how seditious Darwin's ideas were in the context of his times. But we must remember that in the 1840's the Creationist idea of the origins of the natural world was still dominant. To be sure, the simple Biblical view that every species had been created during a single week was being challenged by geological findings. The discovery of many now extinct fossilized species and the correlation between the complexity of fossils and the date of the geological strata could not be reconciled with a single act of Creation. There were various theories advanced to account for these facts, but there remained two propositions that everyone of influence took for granted, everyone that is except for Darwin. One was the pro­position that each species is distinct from all others and unchanging. And the second proposition was that all organisms are part of a divine plan of ever-growing perfection which culminated in the special creation of human beings, the most perfect species of all. Even for those who talked of “evolution,” human beings were still the apex of the natural order and God was their direct creator, even if that special creation might not have taken place literally in the first week of Genesis time.

The truly heretical element of Darwin's thinking was his idea of the mutability of species—that one species could slowly change over time into another, or indeed several species, by a purely natural process. The conclusions Darwin was reaching, thus, raised especially sensitive issues when it came to the origin of human beings. He wrote in one of his notebooks in 1838: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of the deity. More humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals.”

You see, what Darwin knew, and what his opponents would voice once Origin was published, was that the mutability of species threa­tened to undermine the entire basis of British society. If human beings were not specially created by divine action but had evolved from lower forms, then the whole hierarchical structure of the society was called into question. In this world view, man (and I use the term purposely here) was the crown of creation, second only to the angels in the divine scheme of things. Women and people of color were at best viewed as a kind of sub-species, not as intellectually endowed or as emotionally fit as men. Men had dominance over nature and all below them. Moreover, the established order of privilege and inherited wealth was also considered divinely ordained. Theology and the authority of the Anglican church conspired with government to keep the lower classes, with their radical demands for equality, in check. In short, God was believed to have actively ordained both the natural and social hierarchies. To accept Darwin’s theories would mean, as one critic proclaimed, that the chain of command from God down through the priesthood into nature would be snapped and with that would come, “the end of civilization.”

No wonder Darwin hesitated. In the mid 1840's, he wrote that his conviction that species are not immutable was “like confessing a murder,” that publishing his ideas would be “suicidal.” While privately he worked out the details of his novel thoughts, publicly he was mum, only disclosing himself, and then very discretely, to his closest friends. He felt compelled to pursue the truth, but he knew that if his ideas were to be taken seriously, his evidence needed to be unassailable. And so he plunged into the study of domestic animal breeding, finding an analogy in artificial selection for his theory of variation through natural selection. He devoted eight full years to documenting minute anatomical variations in barnacles, thus boosting his taxonomic credentials. In an effort to prove his theory about how seeds might be dispersed from one location to another, even across ocean waters, he systematically soaked seeds in brine for varying lengths of time and recovered seeds from the feces and regurgitations of birds and then planted them to see if they would sprout. He sought samples and scientific advice from correspondents all around the world. And, again and again, he returned to the specimens from the Beagle voyage, the Galapagos’ finches and mockingbirds and the fossils of giant sloths and giant armadillo-like creatures he’d unearthed in Argentina, specimens which he had suspected very early on would, “undermine the stability of species.”

By the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, Darwin's systematic examination was, to many, indeed unas­sailable. Yet the reaction was hardly wholesale approval. The Anglican oligarchy accused Darwin of dethroning God and sinking the human race into a cesspool of bestiality. Even some of the liberal scientists who could accept Darwin's conclusions as applied to all other species aside from human beings still wanted to preserve a special act of Creation for human beings alone.

Well, as we know, Darwin’s evolutionary theory did not bring civilization as it was then known crashing down—not immediately anyway. But it did put cracks in the foundations of racial, gender and class bias. And it had huge repercussions in the religious landscape of the late 19 th century. Some religious bodies, particularly in the U. S., were so threatened that they would have nothing to do with this new science and so retreated into a hardline literal reading of the Bible. What we now know as Fundamentalism dates from this time period. More moderate denominations responded by drawing careful lines of demarcation between religion and science, regarding them as separate modes of knowledge with religion dealing with spiritual reality and science with material reality and never the two shall meet. The most serious attempt to integrate evolutionary theory with theology came, not surprisingly, from Unitarian and Universalist quarters. Rather than retreat into Fundamentalism, or walling religion off from science, Unitarianism and Universalism chose to meet the challenge of evolution head on. The dialog of our faith tradition with evolution would play itself out in many different arenas over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century. It would not leave our faith tradition unchanged, but we were greatly assisted in this endeavor by our long heritage of insistence that religious truth must be congruent with direct experience of the world. By the end of the 19th century, the engagement with Darwinian theory had expanded conceptions of God and human responsibility for both Unitarians and Universalists and it had started Universalism down the road beyond Christianity, something which had begun in Unitarianism with the Transcendentalists in mid century. Most simply stated, both branches of our heritage interpreted evolution theistically, arguing that science and religion need not conflict, but rather are complementary enterprises—that science speaks of the how of things, religion of the source of things. God was not responsible for an instantaneous creation, as put forth in Genesis, but was rather continuously at work in the universe through the process of evolution. Moreover, both denominations recognized by the turn of the century that they no longer expected God to intervene in human history, but that human beings were responsible for building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth with human hands. Furthermore, if evolu­tion stressed the environmental determinants of identity, and if all human beings were descendants of the same ancestry, then it was not enough for the church to strive for the betterment of the individual, but the church had to be involved as a social change agent working for justice and equality for all.

Unitarianism and Universalism were changed by the insights of Darwin. But their adaptation to evolution was not a capitulation. Rather it was a natural outgrowth of ideas that had characterized Unitarianism and Universalism from their inception: beliefs in the power of human reason, the dignity of all humankind, and the relevance of religion to social problems.

I think we can be deservedly proud of how Unitarian Universalists responded to the new science and proud, too, of Darwin’s connections to Unitarianism. But I wonder, have we fully grasped the theological implications of Darwinism even now? Have we truly incorporated Darwin’s insights about the nature of human beings: that we are a creature among creatures, that we share the same DNA with all living things? That we did not arrive on this earth fully formed by some Creator’s magic touch, but that our very body parts evolved from other creatures’ bodies, creatures who trembled up from the sea to walk and to fly? That our ears are an adaptation of a reptilian jaw, for example? Or that our larynx is no different than that of a chimpanzee, except that it descends a half inch after our birth, enabling us to speak? Have we fully grasped that human beings arose as a result of random creativity and that therefore there is nothing necessary about human existence? We need not have been.

And have we fully incorporated Darwin’s insights into our ideas about God? Our nineteenth century forebears were ahead of their time in their conception of God as the impersonal intelligence behind evolution, but even that construction now seems insufficient. It seems no longer possible to conceive of God as outside of nature, for what else is there than the stuff of this universe which gave us birth?

Does evolution diminish us, as so many in Darwin’s time believed? Has God been dethroned, casting us into a cesspool of bestiality? Or does our very embeddedness in a natural world that can accomplish such amazing feats as create life from the muck and the slime—life which arose to see and know and love—does that not give us cause for wonder and reverence no less distinct than if God had reached down and fashioned us from the dust? Examine any single iota of this natural world of which we are apart and it gives unceasing cause for amazement—and to think that we have been blessed to be a part of it all! And is it any less a majestic notion of God to see God as the immanent, inherent potentiality of life which has evolved over billions of years and through millions of incredibly diverse forms, than to see God as a being on a throne looking down from heaven? Where does what is holy begin and end? Every single aspect of the creation is shot through with holiness.

Human beings need not have been. But that we are—and that, even though we arose by chance, nonetheless, the world is astonishingly hospitable to us. Is this not cause for joy, for awe, for a sense of the immensity of the gift we have been given? Sing that we live, indeed. Sing and dance and love this holy world.

Major Sources:

Charles Darwin, A New Life, John Bowlby, New York, W. W. Norton, 1990

Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, New York, Penguin 1992

“Darwin’s Originality,” P. J. Bowler, Science, January 9, 2009

“What Darwin Didn’t Know,” Thomas Hayden, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2009

“Darwin’s First Clues,” David Quammen, National Geographic, February 2009