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The religious views of Stephen Gould and Charles Darwin - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or Conciliation?

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1999 by Martin Gardner

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Although science is powerless to furnish ethical rules or proofs of God, neither is it capable of ruling out the possibility of a deity or the existence of moral imperatives based on a common human nature. Here is how Gould accurately summarizes Darwin's acceptance of NOMA:

Darwin did not use evolution to promote atheism, or to maintain that no concept of God could ever be squared with the structure of nature. Rather, he argued that nature's factuality, as read within the magisterium of science, could not resolve, or even specify, the existence or character of God, the ultimate meaning of life, the proper foundations of morality, or any other question within the different magisterium of religion. If many Western thinkers had once invoked a blinkered and indefensible concept of divinity to declare the impossibility of evolution, Darwin would not make the same arrogant mistake in the opposite direction, and claim that the fact of evolution implies the nonexistence of God.

More Articles of Interest: Gould's Separate 'Magisteria': Two Views. - Review - book reviews; You can't have it both ways: irreconcilable differences? - Special Issue:...; Non-overlapping magisteria - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or...; What does the dreaded "E" word mean, anyway; Stephen Jay GouldÂwhat does it mean to be a radical?

Let's turn now to how Darwin himself, in carefully chosen words, expressed his religious opinions, with great humility and honesty, in correspondence quoted by his son. Here is a paragraph from a letter of 1860:

One word more on "designed laws" and "undesigned results." I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can't and don't. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed.

In another 1860 letter, written to botanist Asa Gray, Darwin had this to say:

With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws. A child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by the action of even more complex laws, and I can see no reason why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws, and that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event and consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I probably have shown by this letter.

The religious views of Stephen Gould and Charles Darwin - Special Issue: Science and Religion: Conflict or Conciliation?

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1999 by Martin Gardner

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