Happy Birthday to Charles the Person

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the very same day, February 12, 1809, a fateful day for the world.  That their births mean so much to so many 200 years later reflects far more than their amazing life accomplishments.  With its love of Great Men, history has turned each into a symbol of a major inflection point in the development of Western Civilization, marking the emergence of the Modern in our world.  Lincoln symbolizes the final collapse of slavery as an acceptable practice of Christian people.  Darwin symbolizes the final collapse of the traditional Christian explanation of how the world works.  These historic changes in worldviews originated centuries before their birthday.  Neither Lincoln nor Darwin was a major agent of the change.  But each was fated to drive the final nail.  Neither Lincoln’s presidency nor Darwin’s writings completed the change, but each turned the tide, making it forever impossible to slip permanently backward.

 

It is ironic that Lincoln symbolizes vindication of the Christian concept of the dignity of the individual person, with God-given rights, whereas Darwin symbolizes the Modern concept of a remote God uncaring about the lives of individual persons.  The triumph of Divinely justified abolition was concurrent with the legitimizing of belief that God, even if God exists, is irrelevant to life as we know it.  

 

Darwin Fish vs. Jesus Fish

 

Several years ago, I was driving home from work, a bit too lost in my thoughts.  I had to brake violently to avoid rear-ending a car stopped at an intersection in my California town.  As I recovered my wits and studied the rear-end of the car I nearly smashed, I saw for the first time the Darwin fish – the “Jesus fish” with Darwin’s name instead and little feet underneath, like the familiar figure of a fish sprouting feet to become an amphibian.  I laughed!  And I continued to laugh as I saw more of these Darwin fish on the rear ends of cars around town.  It is a university town, where you expect such clever, irreverent humor.  Over time, I saw the growing bumper battle between the Darwin fish and the Jesus fish, with ever more clever designs, culminating in the Darwin fish opening wide to eat the Jesus fish!  I became concerned.  Too many people are taking this battle seriously, seeing Darwin as displacing Jesus. 

 

This was not the reaction of an offended Christian or shock at such public display of intolerance.  I was reacting to the name Darwin coming to symbolize so much other than the man or even his work.  The Darwin fish proposes an equivalence between Darwin and Jesus.  Darwin the prophet of modernity, Darwin the symbol of Ultimate Truth, Darwin an object of “religious” reverence.  This struck me as profound misrepresentation of who was Charles Darwin and what he himself stood for.  This was not science versus religion or science versus Christianity but Science as a religion competing with Christianity as a religion.  I knew Charles the person would have been appalled. 

 

A Visit to Down House

 

Two years ago, I spent a March day at Down House, Charles’s home for forty years.  No other single house is more closely associated with the work of a great man.  It was a weekday, so I nearly had the place to myself.  Charles Darwin and his wife Emma and his children and his servants and his experiments and his village came alive in my mind. 

 

I prowled the family rooms, furnished almost as they were 150 years ago, imagining I could hear Emma playing the piano in the parlor.  I stood for an hour in his study, just watching Charles in my mind as he worked with total concentration yet smiled when his children came noisily rushing in to find scissors for their project.  I returned a few minutes later to imagine Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker sitting with Charles in rapt conversation.  I stood by the dining table to watch Charles holding court as local magistrate to settle disputes among his fellow villagers.  Then I saw him alone at the table carefully reconciling the accounts of the Friendly Club he helped start so that local laborers could save for their future needs.  I had tea at the kitchen table, where Charles once played a hand of whist for the cook while she tended the stove.  I walked the Sandwalk round and round five times as a snow squall swept through the stand of old trees Charles had planted then changed abruptly to pale Kentish sunshine over the fields that once belonged to the neighbor, Sir John Lubbock. On the Sandwalk, I thought for the first time in years about that near-accident in my own town and then about the meaning of the “Darwin fish.”   

 

In Defense of Charles the Person

 

I am a friend of Charles the person and therefore feel obliged to defend his good name.  Not that I knew him in person!  My great, great grandfather was born in England the same year as Charles.  But I know Charles a great deal better than I know my own ancestor.  His voyage on the Beagle inspired me to travel the world, too.  His evolutionary theory structured my worldview in university and to this day.  To me, however, Charles is more than a voyage and a theory.  Charles is a life-long friend – not a mentor or a teacher or a hero or an icon – a personal friend – like the fantasy friend of a child, I suppose – with passions and aversions, strengths and weaknesses, to which I relate my own.  He is a person with whom I can sympathize but also criticize.  He puzzles yet inspires me.  He makes me smile, and he is exasperating.  We agree, and we disagree.  We walk together in silence.  He speaks, I listen.  He is a personal friend, no less than my deceased father, who is gone, yet with me.  It is a person-to-person connection.  In short, I like Charles Darwin a great deal.  I know him too well to sit by while the modern world enthrones him as its demi-god.  Nor can I idly allow him to be branded the Anti-Christ. 

 

To Understand Charles the Person

 

The Darwin name will be taken in vain regardless of how hard we try to set the record straight, but those of us who honor intellectual honesty and historical accuracy should have ready access to the real man and what were most likely his true views on the issues that are now so controversial.  Surely this better understanding only improves the debate.  We also owe this much to such a remarkable, decent and likeable man. 

 

You might ask what more there is to know about Charles Darwin.  Surely his life and work are among the best chronicled of any historic figure.  What can be added to the numerous biographies based on volumes of personal letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and of course, his many books? 

 

Nonetheless, lots more is being written now, because today is February 12, 2009, the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth.  The world is celebrating as it would for no other scientist, because Darwin has become the patron saint of the secular worldview that needs no god for explanation of past, present and future.  The commemoration will be the occasion for new assaults in the ongoing culture war between evolution and creationism, more generally between secular and religious worldviews.  There will be lectures and symposia, sermons and articles, popular books and television specials revisiting and interpreting the life, times and writings of this iconic figure of the modern (and post-modern) world.

 

Whether the authors are triumphant or defiant in their attitude toward Charles Darwin, the naturalist of H.M.S. Beagle and author of On the Origin of Species will overshadow Charles Darwin the remarkably likeable countryman of Shropshire and Kent, the loyal friend of leading intellectuals around the world, the loving, playful father of accomplished children, and especially the devoted husband of Emma Wedgwood.  The influence of Emma on the career and thinking of Charles goes well beyond her famous roles as hostess and lady of Down House, guardian of his health and spirits, and worrier for his eternal soul as his worldview evolved toward its irretrievable break from Anglican orthodoxy.  She was a devout believer, but as a thoughtful Unitarian, not a rote Anglican.  She was the sophisticated daughter and granddaughter of great industrialists.  She had done the Grand Tour and learned the languages and music of the Continent (in contrast, Charles visited Europe only once, a brief visit to Paris, before his famous voyage, after which he never left England again).  She was keenly interested in the politics and current events of the day.  And she was Charles’s best friend.

 

An Online Book Project

 

As I stood in the parlor of Down House, it occurred to me that Emma and Charles were a couple worthy of a Jane Austen novel.  As I did my five turns around the Sandwalk, I started an ambition to achieve a novelist’s level of sympathy with this historic couple, if only to better understand Charles. 

 

What Charles and Emma wrote about their own personal views gives only partial insight.  Each had personal biases welling up from assumptions, of which even they were mostly unaware.  As we all are, Charles and Emma were children of their time and all that led up to that time.  Therefore, to properly interpret what they were thinking and feeling, we have to explore the history and philosophy and culture and society that influenced their thinking and feeling.  A daunting task indeed!

 

In July of last year (2008), I launched DarwinWatch on which I am posting a series of essays and book reviews I am writing as I read and think on this task.  Someday I plan to meld these into a book, which I may title Walking Fish: Charles and Emma Darwin on the Question of God.  There is no way to know how successful this project might be, but you may find my effort interesting to monitor on occasion.  I welcome your comments. 

 

Copyright 2009 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

 

Science and Religion – Where is the Conflict?

 

“History is often about reminding us of things we’ve forgotten,” said Prof. Lawrence M. Principe of Johns Hopkins University in a course titled “Science and Religion,” one of The Great Courses of The Teaching Company (www.teach12.com), published in 2006.  Professor Principe is both an organic chemist and a historian of science.  He wants to remind us that science and theology have not, historically, been at war with each other.  They have come into conflict over particular scientific or theological positions, but so does conflict arise between scientific positions and between theological positions.  Conflict is typical of intellectual discourse, be it about the natural world or about the world beyond the material we can sense (directly or indirectly).  The two types of truth-seeking have grown up together within Western Christianity with much in common, informing each other along the way. 

Theology Informing Science

Theology pioneered the logical analysis and disputational techniques we think of now as distinctive to rational inquiry, science in particular. More surprising may be that medieval theologians developed the modern preference for explaining natural events in terms of natural causes.  They realized that only natural causation is really comprehensible to the human mind.  While a natural cause, like the wind, may itself have a supernatural cause, like God, only the natural or secondary cause we can comprehend has any explanatory power.  Recourse to the supernatural is pointless, because it is beyond our comprehension.  This is “methodological naturalism,” a practical theological invention that has become the foundation of modern science.  This is not the same as “philosophical naturalism,” which claims the “natural” is all there is, that there is no “supernatural” world.  This is a philosophical, not a scientific, assertion.  The very nature of science puts the supernatural beyond the scope of scientific understanding.

Science Informing Theology

On the other hand, according to Prof. Principe, St. Augustine asserted “the need for up-to-date demonstrated natural knowledge among theologians and exegetes [interpreters of Holy Scripture].”  St. Augustine himself (A.D. 354-430) spent 15 years in rational interpretation of Genesis I in light of Greek philosophy and mathematics and then-current knowledge of the natural world.  He concluded that the universe started in an instantaneous moment of creation and developed over time into what contemporary astronomers could see.  The Big Bang Theory was thus anticipated before medieval times by one of the most foundational leaders and thinkers of Christianity!  Prof.  Principe also claims the idea that living beings could arise naturally from non-living matter would have surprised no medieval theologian.  “Christian theology has proven itself remarkably flexible in its ability to adopt, adapt, and explore new scientific findings— to see in essence what they mean.”  “Theology has come away from the encounter with new views of man’s place in relation to the creator of time, space, and nature.”

A 20^th-Century Conflict – Social and Political, Not Intellectual

What to make then of the conventional wisdom that science and religion are perpetually at odds?  In 12 excellent lectures, Prof. Principe lays out the historical argument that this conflict is more apparent than real and relatively recent historically and surprisingly trivial intellectually.  It seems Charles Darwin was reacting to an unnecessarily narrow and distinctively English Protestant interpretation of God and Christianity.  Moreover, the modern-day conflict between evolution and creationism (or intelligent design) is just that, modern, a phenomenon of the 20^th century, not the 19^th.  And it is more a social and political conflict among naïve interpreters of science and Christianity than it is an intellectual conflict.

Charles Darwin in Proper Historical Context

Before further exploration of the life and work of Charles Darwin after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, I will explore in the next few posts the general history of the relationship between science and religion, using Prof. Principe’s lectures as my primary guide (triangulation from different sources to come later).  As I have argued at the outset of this project, it is critically important to put Charles’s thinking in the proper historical context, so that we understand to what he truly was reacting as he developed his theory of evolution and his ideas about God and religion.

Defining Science and Religion 

Prof. Principe carefully defines his terms.  “The content of both science and religion is made up of statements and claims about the way things are; science, about the way things are predominantly, but not entirely, in the natural world; theology predominantly, but not entirely, about the way things are in the spiritual world.”  They each include both a body of knowledge claims and a set of methods for gaining, assessing, accumulating and integrating the knowledge claims.  Methodologically, good science and good theology are quite similar, even though their knowledge claims are mostly about quite different realms of reality.

Prof. Principe distinguishes religious practice, theology and faith.  Practice refers to “the observances and actions that flow from a religious commitment, for example, attending church, giving alms, praying, fasting at particular periods, moral self-discipline, and so forth.”  Theology “is the intellectual, methodical study of God, the spiritual world, God’s attributes, actions, and relationship to creation [the natural world].”  Faith “is a method of arriving at knowledge claims.  The method is by simple belief, by assumption, or suspended disbelief.”  When talking about the interaction of science and religion, we are very often talking about science and theology and typically in the historical context of Western Christianity, which created the culture within which modern science arose.

Traditional Christian theology generates its knowledge claims not just from faith but also logical argument, deduction, and reason.  Prof. Principe points out that the works of medieval theologians are masterpieces of logical analysis and rational argument.  For example, we scientists often fall back on a logical principle called Ockham’s Razor, named after a 14^th-century Franciscan theologian.  Likewise, science depends on a number of faith statements (implicit assumptions) in order to operate, such as the natural, physical world having an independent existence outside our minds, and that our senses are giving us (directly or through an instrument, like a telescope or a microscope) reliable information about the natural, physical world, and that this real world behaves in ways that are regular and law-like (the rules don’t change every few minutes).  Prof. Principe assures us that these and similar assumptions, or leaps of faith, cannot be proven true.  Nonetheless, they prove themselves useful, indeed essential, for science to progress. We are comfortable with these leaps of faith, because they allow us to generate reliable and useful knowledge claims about the world around us.

No Easy Distinction of Science and Religion

Thus, we cannot distinguish science and religion simply by saying that one is informed by reason alone and the other by faith alone.  Nor can we segregate them by saying the realm of science is the natural or material world that we can observe and the realm of religion is the spiritual world which we cannot know with our bodily senses.  Prof. Principe is careful to say their realms of study are “predominantly, but not entirely” distinct, because there is overlap, and some of the most productive interaction between science and theology has taken place in these overlapping areas. 

St. Augustine and the Two Books

Christian theologians have made testable claims about the natural world, as St. Augustine did regarding the origin and evolution of the universe.  His sources were what he called the Two Books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, the two ways St. Augustine believed by which God reveals himself to humankind (inspiration of scripture authors and creation of the natural world).  St. Augustine’s methods were both faith (Christian belief) and reason (Greek philosophical knowledge drawn from astronomy and other observations of the natural world).  St. Augustine insisted on the unity of truth; if reason tells us one thing and faith tells us another, then this disagreement must be resolved.  There is no teacher of truth but God, he wrote, and since God is omniscient and always consistent, there must be a single truth.  This is a fundamental faith-based assumption that underpins both theology and science; it is a claim that pertains to both the spiritual and natural worlds—here is a major overlap of faith and theology into study of the natural world.  Scientists don’t have to believe in God to make this leap of faith, to assume the unity of truth, but the assumption is fundamentally theological (drawn from knowledge claims about the characteristics of God). 

Unity of Truth

The unity of truth requires St. Augustine to assert that the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture cannot contradict each other.  However, both Books require careful interpretation.  If they appear to contradict, then St. Augustine would insist this is solely because of incorrect interpretations.  Understanding Nature does not reliably come from just using our senses; we have to apply rational analysis.  Understanding Scripture is even more difficult, since the passages have literal, allegorical and moral meanings simultaneously. 

“Literal” Interpretation of Genesis I

Much to my surprise, St. Augustine claimed that the literal meaning is the hardest to get right.  The surprise comes from our modern notion of biblical literalism as “believing every word of the Bible”—the surface meaning of the words.  Prof. Principe points out that for St. Augustine and all theologians until recently, “literal” means “interpretation of a passage in such a way that it maintains its connection to the topic it seems to be describing and assigns meanings to the individual words so that the passage makes sense in relation to other sources of knowledge.”  St. Augustine spent 15 years working out his literal interpretation of Genesis I.  He was not satisfied with his work until it resolved contradictions within the text itself and “provided an account of creation harmonious with both reason and knowledge from other sources” (the Book of Nature, in particular).  Prof. Principe quotes St. Augustine: “Interpretation of biblical passages must be informed by the current state of demonstrable knowledge.” St. Augustine warned against the danger of embarrassing the reputation of Christianity by being ignorant or dismissive of the demonstrated scientific knowledge of the day.  From the viewpoint of traditional Christian theology, science is essential for full understanding of the “literal” meaning of divinely-inspired scripture (and vice versa).

History of Partnership

Science and religion continued in intimate partnership through the medieval apogee of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe and even through the rise of Protestantism and the birth of modern science and the Enlightenment.  Very often the early “natural philosophers” (not commonly called scientists until the 19^th century) were in holy orders, because a position in the Church allowed time and even incentive to pursue knowledge of the natural world and how it works.  Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton saw their scientific work as discovery of the divine rules governing the universe and even the nature of God.  Prof. Principe devoted two lectures to explaining that even the famous conflict between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII was not truly about the resistance of the Roman Church to the heliocentric conclusions of Copernicus and Kepler.  The Galileo affair was driven by personal arrogance and misunderstandings, bureaucratic rivalries, political problems of the Roman Church, and Galileo’s insistence on his theory of what causes the ocean tides, which later was proven wrong, showing the wisdom of Church safeguards against being too quick to rewrite doctrine in response to new scientific “discoveries.” 

Even in modern times, churchmen have been responsible for major scientific advances.  Gregor Mendel’s experiments in breeding garden peas laid the foundation of modern genetics and ultimately the modern understanding of biology and Darwinian evolution by natural selection.  Mendel was also the abbot of an Augustinian monastery in what is now the Czech Republic.  The modern Big Bang theory of an expanding universe began with a 1927 paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest who also had a PhD from MIT and was a professor at the University of Louvain.  In 1960, Lemaître became president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.  Speaking of the Catholic Pontiff, Pope Pius XII endorsed the Big Bang theory n 1951, after Einstein’s endorsement and well before the theory’s full acceptance in 1966 over the competing Steady State theory, promoted by the vociferously atheistic, anti-religious physicist, Fred Hoyle. 

Other Forces Driving the Science-Religion Conflict

Good science does not necessarily beget atheism, nor does formal religion necessarily negate good science.  Scientists and theologians do not now, and history shows they never did, divide into opposite camps.  There was indeed conflict between them but also within the two professions.  The range of responses among theologians to scientific discoveries and theoretical propositions spanned the full range from blind prejudice to full embrace.  In summary, there are other forces at work in driving the Science and Religion Debate besides science and religion. The next blog will explore these other forces and how they have driven the debate into a kind of culture war.

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

Charles Darwin’s life, work and words and their meaning for the Science-Religion Debate: a personal exploration committed to intellectual honesty and historical perspective

Darwin Watch is a double entendre.  You, the visitor, can watch the life, work and words of Charles Darwin unfold in a series of essays and book reviews, starting in 2008.  You can also watch an author build a new book, Walking Fish – Charles and Emma Darwin on the Question of God (to be published by Novalis, if it crosses the finish line).  Along the way, you are invited to help – comment, advise, correct.  Actually, it is a triple entendre, because of the watch-as-timepiece metaphor used to illustrate intelligent design or refute it, from Paley to Dawkins.  But here ”watch” means to watch a life or a book unfold.            

I am the author, Chris Dunford.  What are my qualifications for this audacious project?  Perhaps no more than yours.  I am starting this Web site in my 60^th year.  I have a PhD in evolutionary biology and have contributed to the research literature, but for three decades I have made a living in the world of international development and non-profit management.  This career, and my wife and son, have allowed me to observe many faces of the human condition as well as of the natural world, around the world.  I don’t hope to explain what I’ve seen so much as to understand, in some intuitive way, and share this understanding with you, perhaps saving you considerable effort of your own.  If your curiosity insists, you may know me more deeply by reading another book I’ve authored, Life List – A Birder’s Spiritual Awakening.  This is a very personal exploration of nature (based on a visit to sub-arctic Canada ten years ago) and why it means so much to me, especially at the level of the spirit.  In writing my book, I discovered the conflict and interdependence of science and religion.  Yes, it’s about birding, too, but I promise you won’t have to read much about birds at Darwin Watch. 

Darwin Fish vs. Jesus Fish

 

What you read here is about Charles Darwin, the person.  It is the Charles the person who holds my attention, ever since I had to brake violently to avoid rear-ending a car in my California town.  As I recovered my wits and studied the bumper of the car I nearly smashed, I saw for the first time the Darwin fish – the “Jesus fish” with Darwin’s name instead and little feet underneath, like the familiar figure of a fish sprouting feet to become an amphibian.  I laughed!  And I continued to laugh as I saw more of these Darwin fish on the rear ends of cars around town.  It is a university town, where you expect such irreverent humor.  Over time, I saw the growing bumper battle between the Darwin fish and the Jesus fish, with ever more clever designs, culminating in the Darwin fish opening wide to eat the Jesus fish!  I became concerned.  Too many people are taking this battle seriously, seeing Darwin as displacing Jesus.

 

This was not the reaction of an offended Christian or shock at such public display of intolerance.  I was reacting to the name Darwin coming to symbolize so much other than the man or even his work. The Darwin fish proposes an equivalence between Darwin and Jesus.  Darwin the prophet of modernity, Darwin the symbol of Ultimate Truth, Darwin an object of “religious” reverence.  This struck me as profound misrepresentation of who was Charles Darwin and what he himself stood for.  This was not science versus religion or science versus Christianity but Science as a religion competing with Christianity as a religion.  I knew Charles the person would have been appalled. 

 

In Defense of Charles the Person

 

I am a friend of Charles the person and therefore feel obliged to defend his good name.  Not that that I knew him in person!  My great, great grandfather was born in England the same year as Charles – 1809.  But I know Charles a great deal better than I know my own ancestor.  His voyage on the Beagle inspired me to travel the world, too.  His evolutionary theory structured my worldview in university and to this day.  To me, however, Charles is more than a voyage and a theory.  Charles is a life-long friend — not a mentor or a teacher or a hero or an icon – a personal friend – like the fantasy friend of a child, I suppose – with passions and aversions, strengths and weaknesses, to which I relate my own.  He is a person with whom I can sympathize but also criticize.  He puzzles yet inspires me.  He makes me smile, and he is exasperating.  We agree, and we disagree.  We walk together in silence.  He speaks, I listen.  He is a personal friend, no less than my deceased father, who is gone, yet with me.  It is a person-to-person connection.  In short, I like Charles Darwin a great deal, but I know him too well to sit by while the modern world enthrones him as its demi-god.  Nor can I idly allow him to be branded the Anti-Christ. 

 

My “friendship” with Charles Darwin does not authorize me to tell you what motivated him or what he believed without my going back to the written record, his own books, journals and letters and the writings of his peers, family and biographers.  What a daunting task that is!  I am not a trained historian or biographer, and I still have a day job and a family to care for.  For the most part, I have to depend on others who have done the tedious work of extracting and summarizing what Charles and others actually revealed about the man.  It is a voluminous record, yet very sketchy regarding his religious and philosophical positions.  It requires a good deal of interpolation and interpretation, always subject to personal bias. 

 

A Child of His Time

 

Even what Charles wrote is not the complete key to his train of thought.  He had his own biases welling up from assumptions, of which even he was mostly unaware.  As we all are, Charles was a child of his time and all that led up to that time.  Therefore, to properly interpret what Charles was thinking and feeling, we have to explore the history and philosophy and culture and society that influenced his thinking and feeling.  A daunting task indeed!

 

Charles was born five years before Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.  Charles’s parents’ generation was traumatized by the French Revolution and the following surge of Napoleon’s armies across the Continent.  The society in which he was an impressionable teenager, as all teenagers are, was the society of Jane Austen’s novels.  English culture was absorbing and adjusting to Enlightenment philosophy, its countercurrents, and its conflicts with orthodox Christianity, which overlay the disruption of the traditional social order by the emerging Industrial Revolution and its new classes of beneficiaries and victims.  Just think of the profound influence of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam and Watergate on the assumptions of my generation.  Charles could not have made full sense of our writings on any philosophical issue without knowing these great influences on our worldviews.  Likewise, we cannot interpret Charles without knowing the context of his life.

 

Charles the Family Man

 

And there was Charles’s family.  His enormous physician father, Robert, and physician-philosopher-poet grandfather, Erasmus, who was an early and well-known proponent of evolutionary thought.   And the Wedgwood family of his mother, founders of the famous Wedgwood line of fine china and old-style Unitarians (among the many Dissenter sects of Christianity, tolerated just barely by the Church of England and the Crown).  And there was his brother, Erasmus (Ras to the family) who kept a bachelor’s salon for London intellectuals, including notably Thomas Carlyle and his wife, whom Charles knew fairly well.  And his close friends, Charles Lyell the famous geologist, Joseph Hooker the famous botanist, and Thomas Huxley, the famous anatomist and firebrand advocate of Charles’s theory (up to a point).  And, of course, there was his wife and first cousin and closest friend, Emma Wedgwood, who was well-educated and worldly, having done the Grand Tour of Europe’s cultural treasures while Charles visited Europe only once, a brief trip to Paris a few years before his voyage on the Beagle, after which he never again left England.  To understand Charles, we have to understand Emma, too.  She was religious in a way Charles was not, but she was hardly orthodox.  In the Anglican church of Downe, the Darwin family’s home village for decades, Emma is reported to have regularly required their eight children to turn their backs with her to the altar as the Confession of the Faith was chanted, all the while glaring at the rest of the congregation!  Perhaps this embarrassing scene explains why Charles preferred to stroll the village while the family attended Sunday service.

 

Understanding the Object of Rejection

 

I think understanding the context of a person’s life is particularly important, because as I have repeatedly discovered in my own career, it is often impossible to understand why a person so passionately promotes an idea without understanding what the person is thereby rejecting.  Yet people seldom cite this object of rejection in building the rationale for the idea.  Indeed, the person may not even be fully aware of what is being rejected or perhaps is reluctant to admit it.  Guarding against the strong temptation to psychoanalyze, we can use the context of the person’s life to surmise what the person is likely reacting against and thereby come closer to understanding fully.

 

Learning from Analogy with Ourselves

 

Even if all these pieces of evidence and context can be assembled, there will have to be interpretation – educated guesses – of what was going on in Charles’s mind.  Aside from assembling the pieces, I hope to contribute my own understanding from my “friendship” with Charles.  We learn very often by analogy.  When we cannot directly know the nature of what we are trying to understand, we find an analogy to something we know already and say “if it is truly like this, we can imagine how it would react to that.”  Charles was a well-educated, well-traveled, perceptive and sensitive man, not unlike you and me, perhaps.  If we can establish how he was similar and how he was different from us, we can use ourselves as a useful analogy to make good guesses about how he thought and felt about things about which you and I think and feel.  This must be done very cautiously, guarding diligently against wishful thinking and unconscious bias.  It cannot be fully successful. But it can move us much closer than we were before to understanding the man.

 

Why is this important? 

 

Charles Darwin has become a touchstone for our modern world.  The “bumper battle” of the fish symbols leaves no doubt of this.  Commentators in the Science-Religion Debate, with all its political implications and consequences, often use Darwin as their point of reference, either to support or refute assertions about matters at hand.  The Darwin name will be taken in vain regardless of how hard we try to set the record straight, but those of us who honor intellectual honesty and historical accuracy should have ready access to the real man and what were mostly likely his true views on the issues that are now so controversial.  Surely this better understanding only improves the debate.  We also owe this consideration to such a remarkable, decent and likeable man.  Providing ready access to Charles, the real person, is the ultimate purpose of Darwin Watch. 

  

I am reading a series of books and articles and compilations of letters and will provide you “book reviews” and short essays commenting on what I’ve read.  You may expect to see something new from me at least once a month.  In the process, you will see the “book” take shape.  Your comments, advice, and corrections will help the process along.  Post a comment with your thoughts.  This daunting task cannot be done by one person alone.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)