Digging Up Darwin's Ghost

Charles Darwin published his culture-shaking Origin of Species in 1859. It immediately provoked a passionate controversy. This is hardly surprising. The Darwinian culture shock can be compared to an earlier one: the Copernican one. Copernicus made people see the earth as one of several planets circling the sun, rather than as the center of the universe. Darwin placed humanity squarely within the animal kingdom rather than outside it as its master. Both radical changes in worldview upset everyone, but the more recent one more directly challenged the traditional understanding of the Bible, especially the creation accounts in the Book of Genesis. The Copernican view of the solar system makes it difficult, for example, to accept a Biblical story in which the sun stood still. However, there are not too many such stories. The Darwinian account of evolution radically questioned the Biblical story of the creation of Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago. The Victorians argued about all this to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. Today, more than 150 years later, Darwin’s ghost is still rattling in the attics of the culture, especially in those attics inhabited by Evangelicals. Liberal Protestants quite early came to terms with evolution, except for its application to society by so-called Social Darwinism, which used the notion of the survival of the fittest to justify the most ruthless capitalism—in direct opposition to the Social Gospel favored by many if not most liberals. Catholics have been less bothered by evolution—their, as it were, cognitive anxieties circle around the Church rather than the Bible.