DARWIN’S LOSS OF FAITH
After Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882, his friends arranged to have the body buried in Westminster Abbey. It was only 16 miles by horse-drawn cortege from Down, Darwin’s village home in the Kent countryside, to the Abbey. But by the light of polemics in Darwin’s day — not to speak of the Niagara of religious- scientific turbulence since then — the intellectual distance between Down — standing for the fearless pursuit of nature’s secrets — and Westminster Abbey — standing for traditional orthodoxies in church and society — seems much, much greater. Without necessarily solving the puzzle, Desmond and Moore (Darwin) expertly exploit diaries, letters, autobiographies, and corroborating testimony to make the plausible case that Darwin gave up on Christianity in the spring of 1851. Although Darwin was a theist of some sort in 1859 when the first edition of Origin appeared, and no more than an agnostic even in old age, scholars have long realized that somewhere…
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