Credit: "This View of Life," Natural History Magazine, July 1995
Early in his life, Charles Darwin was ambivalent about God and science. In his later years he decided against the Christian God, as evidenced by his confessions in his autobiography by Nora Barlow. These anti-Christian musings were left out of early editions of the biography as they were considered politically incorrect in Victorian age England, but were included in later editions of the biography.
A major difficulty for anyone who confronts the issues of truth in a complex world is how to reconcile the appearance of design in nature with the impersonal individual struggle for survival of macro-evolution. Charles Darwin, the founding father of evolution complained of this difficulty to his associates T. H. Huxley and Asa Gray,
“I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about Design… I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of Design (1860)[1]
“With respect to Design, I feel more inclined to show a white flag than to fire my usual long-range shot. . . If anything is designed, certainly man must be: one’s “inner consciousness” (though a false guide) tells one so; yet I cannot admit that man’s [the male sex] rudimentary mammae [breast tissue] were designed. If I was to say I believed this, I should believe it in the same incredible manner as the orthodox believe the Trinity in Unity. You say that you are in a haze; I am in thick mud; . . . yet I cannot keep out of the question. My dear Gray, I have written a deal of nonsense.”[2]
About the issue of design vs. random chance events Darwin professed ignorance,
“Again, I say I am, and shall ever remain, in a hopeless muddle.”[3]
Darwin chose to leave himself in a muddle concerning the appearance of design in a world, which he ultimately refused to acknowledge might have been designed. For many, as for Darwin, the cosmos is just too precise, the timing too delicate, life too complex and marvelous to represent the product of random development from chaos according to fixed laws and natural selection acting upon random mutations. But they share Darwin’s muddle when it comes to a personal creator, and they are bewildered by the plethora of humanly contrived religions with their conflicting and often outrageous claims. Like Darwin, they take refuge in a “hopeless muddle” for which Huxley coined an erudite term–agnostic.
But agnosticism is simply a sophisticated Greek-derived word for the “thick mud” (read “quicksand”) in which Darwin struggled and sank. The word gnosis in Greek means “knowledge,” and the prefix a means “without” or “absent.” Simply put, the agnostic is one who takes the most important questions in life (Who made me? Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? What happens to me when I die? etc.) and takes a stand on the base of ignorance! Sinking in a thick mud, agnostics declare that there is no absolute or ultimate truth–everything is relative to them. Truth relates only to the fleeting natural world discoveries of materialistic science, but ultimate eternal truth is ignored through willful ignorance. Such temporal and often temporary truth in the material realm, without eternal truth, leaves many today in the thick mud of despair of our postmodern age.
As Darwin sank further in the thick mud of agnosticism he declared that he lost his aesthetic appreciation for music and poetry,[4] which are arts and disciplines that touch upon eternal truth. As a man is progressively enveloped in the quicksand of materialistic naturalism, his senses of higher things are obscured, as he painfully admits,
“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
[1] Darwin, Francis. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Volume II. D. Appleton & Company, 1919, p.146. (Bold emphasis added)
[2] Ibid. pp.174-175. (Bold emphasis added)
[3] Ibid. pp.146.
[4] Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Edited by Nora Barlow.
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