More on Darwin
[previously: How Darwin Lost his Religion]
Commenter Mark writes: "I expected the answer would be 'evolution removes the need for God as creator'. But no – the issue was something else entirely (theodicy)".
The theodicy problem was formulated at least as early as Epicurus (d. 270 B.C.), so was Darwin's (1809-1882) atheism independent of his theory of evolution? The rest of the letter suggests that the title of my previous post was a bit misleading, and that evolution played a role in addition to theodicy. Here is the relevant section in full:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.
Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws,—a child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by action of even more complex laws,—and I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.
This passage is clearly based on the assumption that living things appear to show evidence of design; it is very hard to believe that the heart effectively pumps blood because of mere random chance. Without the theory of evolution, the appearance of design in nature leads to traditional theism. But, we might reconstruct Darwin's thinking, once you have the theory of evolution, you no longer need to be convinced by the argument from design. So you are free to jettison the (at least seemingly) inconsistent beliefs that natural evil exists but that the deity is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient.