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In considering the religious implications of the theory of evolution, it is illuminating to consider in greater depth the religious attitudes of the theory’s architect. Charles Darwin’s thoughts and feelings on how science and religion might be reconciled—in his own home and in the larger society—were complex and evolved over time.

Darwin matriculated at Cambridge University in theology, but he did so only after abandoning his medical studies at Edinburgh University because of his distaste for the barbarity of surgery. Darwin’s famous grandfather Erasmus, and his father Robert, both physicians by trade who were deeply schooled in natural history, were confirmed freethinkers, so there was no doctrinaire pressure on the young Charles to choose theology.

In point of fact, Darwin’s selection of theology as his primary course of study allowed him to pursue his passion for natural history through the academic justification of studying “natural theology”—he was far more interested in God’s works (nature) than God’s words (the Bible). Besides, theology was one of only a handful of professions that a gentleman of the Darwin family’s high social position in the landed gentry of British society could choose. Finally, although Darwin belonged to the Church of England, membership was expected of someone in his social class.

Still, Darwin’s religiosity was not entirely utilitarian. He began and ended his five-year voyage around the world as a creationist, and he regularly attended religious services on board the Beagle and even during some land excursions in South America. It was only upon his return home that the loss of his faith came about, and that loss happened gradually—even reluctantly—over many years.

Darwin’s God and the Devil’s Chaplain

Nagging doubts about the nature and existence of the deity chipped away at Darwin’s faith as a result of his studies of the natural world, particularly many of his observations of the cruel nature of the relationship between predators and prey. “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” Darwin lamented in an 1856 letter to his botanist mentor Joseph Hooker. In 1860 he wrote to his American colleague, the Harvard biologist Asa Gray, about a species of wasp that paralyzes its prey (but does not kill it), then lays its eggs inside the paralyzed insect so that upon birth its offspring can feed on live flesh. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent 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,” he reflected, “I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed.”1

Pain and evil in the human world made Darwin doubt even more. “That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes,” he wrote to a correspondent. “Some have attempted to explain this with reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and they often suffer greatly without any moral improvement.” Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? “The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.”2 The death of Darwin’s beloved ten-year-old daughter Anne put an end to whatever confidence he had in God’s benevolence, omniscience, and even existence. According to the great Darwin scholar and biographer Janet Browne, “this death was the formal beginning of Darwin’s conscious dissociation from believing in the traditional figure of God.”3

Throughout most of his professional career, however, Darwin eschewed the God question entirely, choosing instead to focus on his scientific studies. Toward the end of his life Darwin received many letters querying him on