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."

Is History Dependent on Scientific Methodology Or Are Sciences Historically Directed?

When we last discussed the historian's craft to borrow the title phrase made famous by Marc Bloch we delved into the relationship between time and space and we drew the comparison they have to the landscapes produced by cartographers. But unlike the cartographer, the historian does not gaze upon a vista of terrain that he can put down onto paper. The historian, instead, must deal most often with the residues left from the past. These residues of the past give a structure that exists through time and give the historian the ability to draw inferences from what has survived to the present.

The most obvious distinction between history and science comes with the very practice of science: The workings of the scientific method are such as to achieve consensus by many scientists testing the resultant facts brought by scientific inquiry over time. Science gains its particular distinction from other modes of human inquiry because science is structured in such a way that it must assemble reproducible results. When the matter of human activities over time are studied; science and its methodology prove less capable of providing consensual knowledge; instead, science can only serve as a model for historians in search of a method that would bring continuity to their practice because the sciences, in particular the sciences were becoming more methodologically historical.

With the discovery of 'deep time' in geology and evolution of organisms in biology from the late 18th century to the mid 19th century, the immutably static and timeless nature of science suddenly took on a significance that could actually be measured by aspects of change and development. By the time quantum mechanics were being discussed in the early 20th century, the importance of relativity of measurement had been added to the way in which science viewed the universe. The importance of these changes to the way science developed as a means of inquiry meant that scientists had constituted science as a means of deriving structures from processes: The end result of these developments was to make science a form of historical inquiry.

Much like scientists, historians engage in thought experiments and it is what makes the past inseparable from the present inhabited by the historian. And the historian must employ a delicately constructed yet powerful imagination to make the narrative about the past sufficiently prescient to the reader. History can only be truly constructed from sources that firmly place it within the milieu of the period being studied; it is certainly not an artistic representation because of this dependence on source materials. So when we question whether history is a science we must include in our inquiry what separates 'actual replicability' of precise means and methodologies from 'virtual replicability' associated with thought experiments.

Metaphorically, the cartographic association to the elements of time and space analyzed by history is important to reintroduce here. Maps are dependent on the degree of believability that they can bring to their human observers and that is achieved through a process the begins with the mapmakers assimilation of a real landscape or territory through a process of representation that results in the actual persuadability of the map.

The correlation to historical methodology takes a similar path in that the historian will begin the recounting of the past by using archival sources that are interpreted through the historian's particular perspective is employed and readies the history to be presented for the judgement of a human audience which will employ a collective as well as individualized view of the historian's completed work.

Missing from the work of historians distinctive from that of social scientists is the absence of 'scientifically-based' equations, graphs, matrices, and the other social science-based modes of proving their inquiries. The distinction between the way history is done and social science is done brings to the forefront of our discussion the question of whether there is such a thing as an independent variable. Historians do not do history with their attention focused on independent and dependent variables. Historians deal with the interdependency of variables by searching for and connecting them through their passage through time and thus there is no need to create this bifurcation of interdependency into independent and dependent variables. The thought that all variables are dependent on all other variables becomes key in understanding the specific difference between how history and the social sciences operate and is akin to the difference between how a reductionist and ecological view of reality differ and will be the focus of a future discussion.

A Reasoned, Rational Scientific Approach Debunks the Noah's Ark Myth Once Again

"This has nothing to do with questions about where all the water came from, where it went, and how all those animals got into the ark. It's about the sedimentary evidence that shows there never was."

This is the second part of the Noah's Flood debunk. It's only showing two aspects of this myth which are easily blown out of the water ... sedimentary rock formations and the sorting of fossils."

Captivating Evidence of Evolution

Brandon Keim, writing in the WIRED SCIENCE BLOG posts an entry based on the work of “the editors of Nature (who) compiled a selection of especially elegant and enlightening examples of evolution. The Nature editors explain that the goal of their endeavor is “for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection." And is presented at a time when numerous skeptics continue their battle against the global acceptance of evolution. Keim adds that the twelve examples of evolution play a role that goes beyond the often dry and uninspiring findings of science. “They are, quite simply, wondrous — glimpses through an evolutionary frame of life's incredible narrative, expanding to fill every possible nook and cranny of Earth's biosphere. The examples provided by Nature succeed by “stir(ring) passion about the scientific validity of evolution without first captivating minds and imaginations. And this is a fine place to start.” So point your browser to this link that I’ve provided and dare yourself to consider the wondrous creation that evolution has brought to the Earth.