Charles and Emma Darwin's Marriage of Science and Faith

In 1836, when Charles Darwin returned to England from his five-year voyage around the world, which included his famous visit to the Galapagos Islands, he was already seeing life and creation in a new way. And as he courted Emma, he also was secretly scribbling notes about a new idea, his theory of evolution, in leather-bound notebooks marked "private."

Darwin realized that his view of creation would rock the faith of Emma and almost everyone in England, and as he prepared to propose to her, he agonized. Charles' father advised him to keep his ideas. "Conceal your doubts," he warned.

But Charles couldn't do that. He was too honest. He told Emma of his doubts about the veracity of the Bible and of his growing skepticism about religion.

Emma said she would marry him anyway. She prized his candor, and she knew he was a good and moral man. But in a letter she sent him soon after their engagement, she told him that she was sad that "our opinions on the most important subject should differ widely."

This was the first of several letters about religion that Emma wrote to Charles during their lives. She urged him not to close the door on faith. And she shared her fears that they would be separated for eternity. Charles always listened to what she had to say, and they talked about the problem. He kept each letter close. He wrote on one of them, "When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed and cried over this. C.D." On another he wrote, simply, "God bless you."

Commenting on his wife, Charles Darwin wrote on page 97 of The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: "I marvel at my good fortune that she, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality, consented to be my wife. She has been my wise adviser and cheerful comforter throughout life, which without her would have been during a very long period a miserable one from ill-health. She has earned the love and admiration of every soul near her."

Randal Keynes, in Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution. 2002. pg 5 wrote of a conversation Charles had with Emma before their wedding: "Excuse this much egotism, I give it to you, because I think you will humanism me, and soon teach me there is greater happiness, than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude."

Charles had chosen Emma, and she had said yes in large part because they had known each other their whole lives. But they didn't really know each other. It was a big leap to go from being friendly cousins to being husband and wife ... Emma wrote to Aunt Jessie later that she was 'too much bewildered all day to feel my happiness.'" Deborah Heiligman wrote in Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith. 2009. pg. 56.

"On Jan. 29, 1839, in the little chapel in the English village of Maer, a religious, 30-year-old woman named Emma Wedgwood put on a green silk dress and got married. She believed firmly in a heaven and a hell. And she believed you had to accept God to go to heaven. She married Charles Darwin." Since the Darwin's and Wedgewood's were close and they were first cousins, Charles and Emma knew one another since they were children.

"Charles and Emma had 10 children together. Three of the children died; the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie, broke their hearts. That loss could have driven them apart forever. It strengthened Emma's faith and all but closed the door on God for Charles. But they fought for their marriage. The day after Annie died, Emma wrote to Charles, "You must remember that you are my prime treasure (and always have been)."

"Darwin worked for decades on his theory. He tried to make his argument as strong and solid as possible, and he also aimed not to offend. He showed Emma drafts, and he worked harder on a passage when she wrote in the margin, "a great assumption." In 1859, as he finally readied "The Origin of Species" for publication, he gave the manuscript to Emma. She was always his best and most trusted editor. As she read the argument that essentially took God out of creation, she did not ask Charles to soften it at all. In fact, she helped him strengthen his book by making the language clearer. (She also cleaned up his spelling and punctuation.)

"Through the years, the two continued to talk and listen to each other about this "most important subject," as Emma called it. She encouraged him not to approach religion in the same way he approached science. What leads to faith, she said, is "feeling, not reasoning."

"After he became famous, people often wrote to the sage of Down House and asked him what he believed about God. Usually Darwin demurred. And he echoed Emma. He said his views were of "no consequence to anyone except myself" and that the question of religion was for theologians, not for scientists. Still, he often pointed to his friend, the American botanist Asa Gray, who was both an evolutionist and a theist.

"Charles and Emma were married for 43 years. In his last years, Charles renewed a fascination with worms and wrote "The Formation of Vegetable Mold through the Action of Worms with Observations on Their Habits," a bestseller in its day. Emma, never much interested in science, found herself joining him in his obsession. They spent hours together watching the worms in the garden of Down House, side by side.

"Although they never were able to see eye-to-eye on the question of religion and God, they were able to reach their hands across the gulf. In the end, each of them accepted and, it seems, truly understood what the other believed.

"If it is a sign of intelligence to be able to hold two opposite thoughts or opinions in your head, then it is a mark of a successful marriage to be able to truly see the other person's point of view. This is also the mark of a successful society.

"There is an apocryphal story that Darwin accepted God on his deathbed. The true story is this: When he suffered his last and fatal heart attack, Charles told Emma that he was "not the least afraid of death." And as he slipped away, he told her, "Remember what a good wife you have been to me." Emma held Charles in her arms as he died."

Darwin's Transformational Contributions to Understanding Life on Earth

Darwin stands as the greatest transformative hero of modern biological history. His "Origin of Species," of course, is what he is best known for. This volume, colossal in scope yet minutely detailed, laid the foundations of modern biology. Here, Darwin presented extensive and compelling evidence that all living beings — including humans — have evolved from a common ancestor, and that natural selection is the chief force driving evolutionary change. Sexual selection, he argued, was an additional force, responsible for spectacular features like the tail feathers of peacocks that are useless for (or even detrimental to) survival but essential for seduction." Darwin, more than any other figure in human history has lead humanity's understanding of the fundamental processes of life on the Earth. In addition, to possessing such a sharp and prodigious mind that uncovered many of the planet's secrets, Darwin was also "a humane, gentle, decent man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend." Darwin was one of those most uncommonest of individuals who was both very friendly and approachable and intellectual having "corresponded with lofty men of learning, but also with farmers and pigeon breeders." And despite accounts to the contrary, Darwin was often viewed as a recluse but served as a local magistrate who presided over cases in his dinning room.

Darwin was against slavery and identified with the abolitionist movement. Once, when describing his strong opposition to slavery Darwin commented: "Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal .... It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty."

Darwin engaged in a very idealistic, passionate approach to science that was able to fit together many far-reaching grand themes of science with "the minutiae of nature — shells of barnacles, pistils of flowers." He developed the field of inquiry known as biogeography (the study of the distribution of life forms over geographical areas as a methodological approach to investigating evidence that supports evolution.

Darwin " published important work on subjects as diverse as the biology of carnivorous plants, barnacles, earthworms and the formation of coral reefs. He wrote a travelogue, "The Voyage of the Beagle," that was an immediate best seller and remains a classic of its kind. And as if that was not enough, he discovered two major forces in evolution — natural selection and sexual selection — and wrote three radical scientific masterpieces, "On the Origin of Species" (1859), "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871) and "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872). "

Before Darwin's monumental work "Origin of Species" "similarities and differences between species were mere curiosities; questions as to why a certain plant is succulent like a cactus or deciduous like a maple could be answered only, "Because." Biology itself was nothing more than a vast exercise in catalog and description. After the "Origin," all organisms became connected, part of the same, profoundly ancient, family tree. Similarities and differences became comprehensible and explicable. In short, Darwin gave us a framework for asking questions about the natural world, and about ourselves."

Darwin "was not right about everything. How could he have been? Famously, he didn't know how genetics works; as for DNA — well, the structure of the molecule wasn't discovered until 1953. So today's view of evolution is much more nuanced than his. We have incorporated genetics, and expanded and refined our understanding of natural selection, and of the other forces in evolution.

"But what is astonishing is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw. His imagination told him, for example, that many female animals have a sense of beauty — that they like to mate with the most beautiful males. For this he was ridiculed. But we know that he was right. Still more impressive: he was not afraid to apply his ideas to humans. He thought that natural selection had operated on us, just as it had on fruit flies and centipedes.

"As we delve into DNA sequences, we can see natural selection acting at the level of genes. Our genes hold evidence of our intimate associations with other beings, from cows to malaria parasites and grains. The latest research allows us to trace the genetic changes that differentiate us from our primate cousins, and shows that large parts of the human genome bear the stamp of evolution by means of natural selection."

A finding that might not have surprised Darwin, but would have left him quite unsurprised.

*Special Thanks to Patricia Wroblewski, my Muse, for her remarks on the intuitive nature of Darwin's imaginative insights into his explanation of what he knew and his foresight.