We found a column in the Florida Baptist Witness titled Why should I believe in God? This is not the usual subject matter for this blog, and we’re not interested in starting a debate about why one should or shouldn’t believe.
We’re interested only in one of the preacher’s reasons for believing. The others are the usual ones, well-stated, and you can click over to the Witness to read them for yourself. The part that got our attention is the preacher’s fifth reason. Here it is, with bold font added by us:
Fifth, God’s existence is necessary for a mind to exist to question whether God exists. In an 1881 letter, Charles Darwin expressed doubts about the reason to trust the human mind if evolution is correct. “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
We’ve seen that “horrid doubt” quote before. It’s often used by creationists to imply that Darwin didn’t believe Darwin. In this case, the preacher is using it to show that Darwin himself doubted that evolution could provide us with trustworthy minds. But what did Darwin really say?
We can find that quote in an online collection of Darwin’s writings. It’s here, in a volume by his son, Francis Darwin: Life of Charles Darwin. It has a collection of Darwin’s letters, including one containing the preacher’s quote. It’s a Letter to W. Graham, dated 03 July 1881, written less than a year before Darwin’s death in April of 1882. If you use that link you get the whole book, so you’ll have to find the letter. It’s on page 64, or you can search for “horrid doubt.”
What we’re going to do now is copy from that letter, so that you can see the preacher’s quote in context. We’ll show the mined text in red, and we’ll put some other interesting text the preacher didn’t quote in blue. We won’t skip around (except at the end), but we’ll break Darwin’s text into paragraphs to make it easier to read. Okay, here it comes:
DEAR SIR,—I hope that you will not think it intrusive on my part to thank you heartily for the pleasure which I have derived from reading your admirably-written Creed of Science, though I have not yet quite finished it, as now that I am old I read very slowly.
From that we discern that Darwin is writing to William Graham. A reprint of Graham’s book from the Cornell University Library is at Amazon: The Creed of Science. Let’s read on from Darwin’s letter:
It is a very long time since any other book has interested me so much. The work must have cost you several years and much hard labour with full leisure for work. You would not probably expect any one fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest.
When Darwin disagrees with someone, he is invariably polite about it. We continue, to learn where Darwin doesn’t agree with Graham:
The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this.
Oh dear, the preacher left that out of his essay in the Witness. Here’s more from Darwin, continuing where we left off:
Not to mention that many expect that the several great laws will some day be found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of gravitation — and no doubt of the conservation of energy — of the atomic theory, &c., &c., hold good, and I cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone, destitute of consciousness, existed in the moon?
Interesting speculation. Moving along, with bold font added by us:
But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.
Not the result of chance? Is this Charles Darwin’s letter? Yes, it is. But the editor (Darwin’s son) places an asterisk after that sentence, and at the end of the letter the editor says this, again with bold font added by us:
The Duke of Argyll (Good Words, April 1885, p. 244) has recorded a few words on this subject, spoken by my father in the last year of his life. “… in the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to … observations he made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature — I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away.‘”
A bit of ambiguity for you to ponder, dear reader. We’ll continue the same paragraph in Darwin’s letter where we left off, and this is what the preacher quoted. Remember, this comes right after Darwin said the universe is not the result of chance:
But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
Did Darwin’s remark about a monkey’s mind have specific reference to his “inward conviction” that the universe is not the result of chance, or did he intend it to apply to man’s evolved mind in general? Read it again. We did, and we suspect the “horrid doubt” was solely directed at that “inward conviction,” but we can’t be certain. Well, actually we can be certain, because we know Darwin never doubted evolution, and it’s unlikely that he thought his mind was no better than a monkey’s.
The next part of Darwin’s letter is often quote-mined for a different purpose, but it’s on a different subject so we’ll leave it out. He closes in proper Victorian fashion:
I beg leave to remain, dear sir, Yours faithfully and obliged.
So there you are, dear reader. Did the preacher correctly capture the meaning of Darwin’s letter? Did Darwin actually believe that if evolution were true, our minds couldn’t be useful? We report, you decide.
See also: Shock! Discoveroid Quote-Mining.
Copyright © 2011. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
The writer provides five reasons to believe in god. All are trivial, and disposed of with hardly a thought. They are rationalizations, not reasons.
Ed says: “All are trivial, and disposed of with hardly a thought.”
There is no proof. If there were, then there would be no need for faith.
In the words of the great Samuel Clemens, “Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.”
Believing it is true is something else.
I like to see whether an argument about evolution is just as sound as an argument about reproduction and development.
If our individual bodies are the result of natural processes, how can we trust our ability to think?
What a shame that Sigmund Freud didn’t get engrossed in Darwin’s writings as a youth. If he had picked up on the central question in this post and explored it from Darwin’s perspective, he would never have sent psychology off on the wild goose chase his theory turned out to be.
In other words, he would have invented evolutionary psychology a century earlier. Many of its current speculations and their associated hypotheses would have been proposed much earlier–and by now either confirmed or rejected.
Retired Prof says:
He might have made a botch of it. It would have been better if young Sigmund had become a proctologist.