Darwin and the Dark

• 
• 
• 
• 

By Jennifer Woodruff Tait

It was years ago, but I still remember: staring out of the window of a dormitory, looking as  the snow fell on the hilly ground and blanketed the leaves, wondering if I would ever sleep again. Walking down sunny sidewalks, passing people who smiled and talked and appeared to be normal, while so tormented by the grief inside that I could not speak normally to them in return. Lighting a candle and sitting before it, Bible and book of prayers in hand, with the words on the page as dead as if they were written on a gravestone. I was at a Christian school, preparing for the Christian ministry. And God was as lost to me as if I had been on a desert island.

I thought of all this again now, after several decades, for the oddest of reasons: because I have been reading about Charles Darwin. Soon Christian History Magazine will be releasing an issue dedicated to the spectrum of responses among Christians that Darwin provoked when he released his “bombshell,” the book Origin of Species, in 1859.  From the original publication of the book through its increasing visibility in the 1870s (which is when Darwin explicitly incorporated humans in his theory of evolution by natural selection), up to battle lines being drawn between faith and science as the twentieth century dawned, all the way to the 1925 Scopes Trial over the teaching of evolution in the public schools, we have many stories to tell you and many new people to introduce you to. 

One thing I knew very little about, and was surprised by, was Darwin’s own story. Surprisingly, it resonated with my own. He was raised in a Christian world where the emphasis was on the order and beauty of the universe, where philosopher William Paley’s argument that design in nature implied a divine designer, that if you found a watch on the beach you would assume a watchmaker had made it, and that this was proof for the existence of God, was on everyone’s lips. 

But the struggles in nature that Darwin observed on his trip around the world in the Beagle, and the suffering that dogged his own life—persistent ill health and the death of his beloved daughter Annie—seemed to show him little design, little proof, little hope. In a sense both the development of his evolutionary theory, and his personal departure from orthodox Christianity, had the same root—a root Christian theologians, philosophers, apologists, and pastors through the ages have wrestled with, written about, and pondered: the problem of evil. Time and time again, in the story of those who have either departed faith or who have had difficulty ever adopting it, that question looms large. It loomed large for me as I sat in front of my candle and could no longer pray.

Many wise and helpful answers have been given to this question over the centuries by our fathers and mothers in the faith. And they can be consoling ones. But to each of us at some point comes that moment when neither wise answers nor consolation are enough. What is said to us and done for us then, how the suffering Christ becomes real to us and somehow is suffering with us in the darkness, can mean more than all the apologetics in the world.

I don’t have an easy answer for how things might have been different in Darwin’s story. Nor do I have an easy answer for how things might have been different in my own. But I invite you, as you read the issue, to remember that divine design can sometimes be very hard to see. And also to remember that Jesus is Lord even in the dark.