From the Darwin Correspondence Project via Thony Christie and Matthew Cobb, we have an exchange between Charles Darwin and an anxious believer, desperate to understand how she can comport evolution with her faith.

Mary Boole of London wrote Darwin in 1866, seven years after the publication of The Origin:

Dear Sir

Will you excuse my venturing to ask you a question to which no one’s answer but your own would be quite satisfactory to me.

Do you consider the holding of your Theory of Natural Selection, in its fullest & most unreserved sense, to be inconsistent,—I do not say with any particular scheme of Theological doctrine,—but with the following belief, viz:

That knowledge is given to man by the direct Inspiration of the Spirit of God.

That God is a personal and Infinitely good Being.

That the effect of the action of the Spirit of God on the brain of man is especially a moral effect.

And that each individual man has, within certain limits, a power of choice as to how far he will yield to his hereditary animal impulses, and how far he will rather follow the guidance of the Spirit Who is educating him into a power of resisting those impulses in obedience to moral motives.

The reason why I ask you is this. My own impression has always been,—not only that your theory was quite compatible with the faith to which I have just tried to give expression,—but that your books afforded me a clue which would guide me in applying that faith to the solution of certain complicated psychological problems which it was of practical importance to me, as a mother, to solve.  I felt that you had supplied one of the missing links,—not to say the missing link,—between the facts of Science & the promises of religion. Every year’s experience tends to deepen in me that impression.

But I have lately read remarks, on the probable bearing of your theory on religious & moral questions, which have perplexed & pained me sorely. I know that the persons who make such remarks must be cleverer & wiser than myself. I cannot feel sure that they are mistaken unless you will tell me so. And I think,—I cannot know for certain, but I think,—that, if I were an author, I would rather that the humblest student of my works should apply to me directly in a difficulty than that she should puzzle too long over adverse & probably mistaken or thoughtless criticisms.

At the same time I feel that you have a perfect right to refuse to answer such questions as I have asked you. Science must take her path & Theology hers, and they will meet when & where & how God pleases, & you are in no sense responsible for it, if the meeting-point should be still very far off. If I receive no answer to this letter, I shall infer nothing from your silence except that you felt I had no right to make such inquiries of a stranger.

I remain | Dear Sir | Yours truly | Mary Boole

43 Harley Street | London W.

Dec^r. 13^th. 1866

There are two footnotes here:

Boole was the mother of five daughters. She was employed as a librarian in Queen’s College, Harley Street, London, the first women’s college in England. Although she had no formal teaching duties, she gave Sunday evening talks in which she discussed the relationship of different forms of knowledge. She was especially interested in the psychology of learning and her ideas on child psychology and learning were later taken up by educators in America.

Boole may have come across the remarks on CD’s theory and religion while preparing her book, The message of psychic science to mothers and nurses (Boole 1883; for Boole’s discussion of CD’s theory, see ibid., pp. 33–43). In the preface to Boole’s Collected works (Boole 1931, 1: vii–viii), Ethel Dummer wrote that Boole’s book was a `series of talks to a group of London mothers who, finding their religion threatened by Darwin’s new theories, sought Mrs. Boole’s philosophic wisdom’. Although only published in 1883, Boole’s book was completed in 1868 (see Boole 1931, 1: 81).

Darwin’s attitude toward faith is, of course, a subject of intense speculation, particularly by religious people that want to claim him as a believer.  It’s fairly clear that Darwin didn’t believe in a personal God, at least of the beneficent variety, for he couldn’t reconcile that with the palpable evil and suffering he saw in the world.  At times he’d refer obliquely to a “creator” (as in some editions of The Origin), but I think that, in the end, Darwin was pretty much of an agnostic. (“Agnostic,” by the way, was a word coined by Darwin’s Bulldog: Thomas Henry Huxley).  He didn’t accept any kind of intervening or personal God, but he never said explicitly that he didn’t believe in any god.  That’s about as atheistic as you can get in those days.

But above all, Darwin didn’t want his theory, which he so desperately wanted people to accept, mixed up with Christianity, which could prevent that acceptance. Rather than try to reconcile these magisteria, or say that they were in conflict (that was Huxley’s job), Darwin simply made polite noises and punted. That’s evident in his response to Boole, penned the very next day (ah, for the British mail of yore!).  He is, as always, perfectly polite:

In other words, Darwin wanted to wash his hands of the whole science-and-religion issue, but he wasn’t about to admit of a personal God.  Note that he claims that a) the issue of free will is insoluble, b) there is no obvious meeting point between science and faith, c) the problem of conflict is not alleviating by saying that humans were created instead of evolved from simpler creatures, and d) the pain and suffering in the world are not consistent with an omniscient deity (he probably should have added “omnipotent and benevolent” as well).

While looking up Huxley, I found that despite his attacks on faith and on preahers, he himself seemed to be a bit of an accommodationist. This quote, from his The interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature (1885), could have easily been mouthed by Stephen Jay Gould. It’s the precursor of NOMA—that is, up to the very last word!

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science – theology – with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.

I expect that, in light of the above, someone (I can guess who) will fault me for admiring Huxley despite his accommodationism. All I can say is that I can admire someone despite their having views with which I disagree. Is that so hard to understand?  And one can’t forget that word “ignorance” in Huxley’s quote, hanging there like an ironic exclamation point.

[EDIT: As poster thonyc points out below, this correspondence was ferreted out by J F Derry, author of Darwin in Scotland. He made the discovery whilst researching his forthcoming book The Dissent of Man, and his name got lost in retweeting and mailing – MC]