History of Creationism - Age of Darwin

Age of Darwin

The decades following Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species, in 1859, saw the overwhelming majority of North American and British naturalists accept some form of evolution, with many liberal and educated churchmen following their example, and thereby rejecting a biblically literalist interpretation of Genesis. Although Darwin's work rejected "the dogma of separate creations," he invoked creation as the probable source of the first lifeforms ("into which life was first breathed"). This led Asa Gray, who was both religiously orthodox, and Darwin's most prominent American supporter, to suggest that Darwin had accepted "a supernatural beginning of life on earth" and that he should therefore allow a second "special origination" for humanity. Darwin however rejected this view, and used uncompromisingly naturalistic language in place of biblical idiom, starting with The Descent of Man in 1871.

Darwin's book caused less controversy than he had feared, as the idea of evolution had been widely popularized in Victorian Britain by the 1844 publication of Vestiges of Creation. However, it posed fundamental questions about the relationship between religion and science. Though Origin did not explicitly deal with human evolution, the jump was one both supporters and opponents of the theory immediately made, and the idea that man was simply an animal (common descent) who had evolved a particular set of characteristics — rather than a spiritual being created by God — continued to be one of the most divisive notions of the 19th century. One of the most famous disputes was the Oxford Debate of 1860, in which T.H. Huxley, Darwin's self-appointed "bulldog," debated evolution with Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. Both sides claimed victory, then the controversy was overshadowed by the even greater theological furore over the publication of Essays and Reviews questioning whether miracles were atheistic, bringing to a head arguments in the Church of England between liberal theologians supporting higher criticism, and conservative Evangelicals. The essays were described by their opponents as heretical, and the essayists were called "The Seven Against Christ."

In 1862, the Glaswegian physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) published calculations, based on his presumption of uniformitarianism, and that the heat of the sun was caused by its gravitational shrinkage, that fixed the age of the Earth and the solar system at between 20 million and 400 million years, i.e. between ~3,000 and ~70,000 times Ussher's value. This came as a blow to Darwin's anticipated timescale, though the idea of an ancient Earth was generally accepted without much controversy. Darwin and Huxley, while not accepting the timing, said it merely implied faster evolution. It would take further advances in geology and the discovery of radioactivity that showed that the sun was in fact heated by nuclear fusion that demonstrated the present estimated 4.567 billion years, or ~700,000 times Ussher's value. A way to measure the age of the universe would be discovered by Edwin Hubble in the 1930s, but due to observational constraints, an accurate measurement of the Hubble constant would not be forthcoming until the late 1990s, giving an age of the universe of approximately 13.73 billion years or some ~2,000,000 times Ussher's value.

The Swiss-American paleontologist Louis Agassiz opposed evolution. He believed that there had been a series of catastrophes with divine re-creations, evidence of which could be seen in rock fossils. Though uniformitarianism dominated ideas from the 1840s onwards, Catastrophism remained a major paradigm in geology until replaced by new models that allowed for both cataclysms (such as meteor strikes) and gradualist patterns (such as ice ages) to explain observed geologic phenomena.

In 1878, American Presbyterians held the first annual Niagara Bible Conference, founding the Christian fundamentalist movement, which took its name from the "Five Fundamentals" of 1910, and came to be concerned about the implications of evolution for the accuracy of the Bible. But by no means all orthodox Presbyterians were opposed to evolution as a possible method of the Divine procedure. Dr Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary objected in 1874 to the atheism he considered inplied in the naturalistic explanation but both he and Dr B. B. Warfield were open to its possibility/probability within limits, and most churchmen sought to reconcile Darwinism with Christianity.

Darwin died in 1882. In 1915, Elizabeth Cotton, Lady Hope, spread rumors that he had repented and accepted God on his deathbed. Lady Hope's story is almost certainly false, and it is unlikely that she visited Darwin as she claimed.