and now... the one you've been waiting for...
Saint No. 1: Charles Darwin
"An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
- Richard Dawkins
True. As far as it goes. But not the whole story.
Before our story starts, there is a geologist who has written a book called The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes now in Operation. I know, as a title it sucks, but at least the important information is right there at the top: "by Reference to Causes now in Operation." That right there was part of a Victorian paradigm shift in science. It was the equivalent of GalileoNewton's deciding to assume that the same physical laws held true in space as did on Earth; Lyell decided to discuss what might have happened if the same physical laws, etc. affected the Earth in the past as are affecting it now. In other words, no "Then a miracle occurred."
(It is impossible to underestimate the impact on science of ruling out "This happened because of supernatural forces which We Are Not Meant to Understand" as an explanation for natural phenomena.)
There is also a largely discredited French botanist and zoologist of the previous generation, who has come up with the novel idea that organisms do not remain the same from generation to generation, but instead "improve." This is not in any way a well-established or popularly accepted idea.
You are an amateur naturalist. It is the late 1830s, and you have taken the "gentleman scientist" idea more seriously than your family had hoped - you have spent half the decade sailing around the Galapagos Islands, industriously and carefully collecting and cataloguing all kinds of biological species. Among the specimens which you have discovered are a number of finches which all vary from each other across the islands, and yet resemble the only species of finch on the mainland closest to the Galapagos. "Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends," you write in your notes.You are a believer in Lyell and Lamarck; you began the Beagle's journey as an ardent Christian and indeed a theological student, but the things you saw in those years have convinced you of the great age of the Earth, and you are no longer quite sure of the literal truth of everything in the Bible. You have seen pigeon fanciers carefully cross-breed a sport into a new strain of pigeon; later you will confess to a botanist friend the heretical opinion that "I am almost convinced, (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable." As far as you know, though, there is no finch breeder in the Galapagos carefully selecting which finches to breed from and which to cull, to create a new species perfectly suited to whatever food sources happen to exist on their particular island.
Then you read the work of a political economist who wrote that there are more people who want food than there is food to go around, and that some people are going to starve to death. And all the pieces come together for you.
There doesn't need to be a breeder. As long as the Galapagos finches have more babies than is necessary to replace themselves (which they do: finches, for example, lay four to six eggs in a single clutch, and may have multiple clutches per year) many of those babies are going to die. And - this is so simple it's hard to believe no one has thought of it before - the ones that survive are going to be the ones that are best suited to the island they happen to be on. Or, to put it in your own words: "In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species."
There wasn't a separate miracle to create each finch species on each Galapagos island. There was only this ruthless competition.
You are a well-respected man in scientific circles, a friend of Lyell's, a member of the Linnean Society. Do you rush out to publish this theory? Not a bit of it.
In fact you do not give in and publish until 1858, when your young colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, then travelling through and studying the Malaysian archipelago in much the same way that you studied the Galapagos twenty years earlier, sends you a copy of his essay "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type". He has independently made the same connection; the cat is out of the bag; so you present Wallace's essay, together with extracts from the book you've been putting evidence together for and working on for twenty years, to the Linnaean society. You pull together On the Origin of Species within a year. And the controversy around your name fires up and never dies down again.
You knew this would happen. You knew that the murder you were confessing was the murder of the idea of God. The more you have learned about the natural world, the less you have been able to hold on to your own belief in God. You did not want to give up your Christianity; but belief in a God who cares about the fall of a sparrow is incompatible with understanding of a world whose beauty and breathtaking complexity have been perfected only as the result of blind and cruel competition among random variations.
You don't push this idea ("It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science."). You let other people argue it out. You live quietly, and publish your books, and let them change the world.
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