The Evolving God: Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion by J. David Pleins, and: Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel by Anna Neill (review)

The two books under review are valuable contributions to the growing body of scholarship examining the impact of evolutionary thought on the arts and human sciences in the nineteenth century. They also provide further evidence to bolster recent interpretations that cast doubt on the traditional image of a Victorian intelligentsia split neatly into two polarized camps—religiously devout conservatives and secular scientific progressives. Many scholars now agree that even those thinkers who abandoned the teachings of orthodox Christianity or any organized religion often continued to search for spiritual insight or some ultimate center of meaning that scientific materialism could not provide. The traditional narrative of secularization is giving way before a more complex story highlighting the importance of religious pluralism, eclecticism, and experimentation in Victorian culture. These two studies exemplify this trend.

In The Evolving God, J. David Pleins examines Charles Darwin’s enduring engagement with religious and theological questions. Pleins’s brief monograph traces the development of Darwin’s thought on religious issues from his early study of the natural theology of William Paley and others, to his speculations on religion and morals during his five-year voyage on the Beagle, and finally to his mature thoughts on the relevance of religious questions in the light of his theory of evolution. While much previous scholarship has focused on the drama of Darwin’s own loss of Christian faith, Pleins seeks to tell a different (and in some ways more interesting) story about the great scientist as a lifelong “seeker” who never lost interest in the religious issues that engaged his fellow Victorians (x). In Pleins’s account, Darwin was a man who “thought seriously” about and “sought far and wide for new perspectives on religion” throughout his life (108).

Beyond this claim, which is argued persuasively and documented thoroughly, Pleins also wishes to construct a case for Darwin as the author of a theory that religion itself evolves. To this end he presents a focused and detailed account of Darwin’s encounters with various cultural others, including the so-called primitive inhabitants of Tiera del Fuego, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as Roman Catholic colonial societies in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina—experiences recorded in his account of the years spent on the Beagle. The young naturalist took particular interest in the religious practices of the people he met. For example, he observed that the Fuegians buried their dead in caves or forests but apparently without any distinctive rites. Indeed, the only form of prayer or ritual that he observed was “the muttering of the old man before he distributed the putrid blubber to his famished party” (qtd. in Pleins 10). In contrast, he found that Maori funeral rites were highly elaborate and their burial grounds were held too sacred for anyone to venture there on profane business. Darwin also attended several Roman Catholic services where he admired the decorations of the churches and the fervent expressions of emotion by the worshippers. At the same time, he deplored the slavery on which colonial societies relied and the genocidal policies against native people that they pursued. Where English colonists settled, however, Darwin detected at least the beginnings of progress, and he spoke admiringly of the positive contributions of English missionaries in eliminating practices such as human sacrifice and cannibalism. In fact, because of his experience, Darwin became a lifelong supporter of the Church of England’s South American Missionary Society.

As Darwin encountered these varieties of religious practice he also wrestled with the deeper meaning of his own experiences, pondering the problem of evil in the aftermath of an 1835 earthquake that he witnessed...