Life of Charles Darwin

I was at the Gordon Connell Board of Trustees meeting last week, and I've just got to tell you one story. Ken Shigamatsu, who is a pastor in Vancouver, Canada, he's of Japanese extraction, but has been in Vancouver for some time now, his church decided they were going to try some different music in their church. And one Sunday there, the music required a set of drums on the podium. A lady came walking into the sanctuary, stopped, saw those drums, turned to the custodian who was in the sanctuary and said, if Jesus saw those drums, he would roll over in his grave.

when I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained, what is man that you take thought of him, or the son of man that you care for him? And yet you have made him a little lower than God or heavenly beings, however you're going to translate that Hebrew word there, and crowned him with glory and majesty. Let's pray. Lord, we worship and honor you, the creator of the universe. We honor you for the beauty we see in nature, the order, the design.

We thank you that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, the intricacy of the human body, the complexity that you have given us to be able to live and act and move in this world. It is a wonder. We see it in the life of a newborn babe. What majesty you must have to be able to create so magnificently. Guide us in our study today and for the next few weeks.

For as in Christ's name we pray, Amen. When the Arts and Entertainment Network did their biography series, they had a panel of experts that selected the 100 most influential people of the last 1,000 years. And if you watch that series over the course of several weeks, they started at number 100 and worked all the way up to the person they believed to be the most influential person in the last 1,000 years. Number one on their list was Johann Gutenberg, who invented the printing press in 1454. Number two was Sir Isaac Newton, who really was the first to discuss and develop the understanding of the law of gravity.

Number three was Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, the great Reformation leader of the 1500s. on the list was Charles Robert Darwin. He lived in the era of Queen Victoria. She was crowned June 28, 1838 at age 18 as Queen of England. He lived during the era of the Potato Famine in 1845 in which 700,000 primarily Irish folks lost their lives.

He lived during a century of unrest and of challenge to the Anglican Church of England. It was a time when science was on the rise and many were disgusted and fed up with what they saw as the corruption and the obstinacy of an Anglican Church that still had much power in the 1800s. It is to the life of Charles Darwin we turn today. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be asking the question, is it time to slaughter the sacred cow? A look at the issue of Darwinism.

Today, we look at his life. Next week, we will look at his teachings. What did he actually teach? Week three, we will ask the question, problems, and difficulties with what he taught. We'll probably watch a little video along the way, and then we'll have a session in which I'll wrap up with some concluding thoughts.

But today, his life. It's a day on which two famous men were born.

One, almost universally revered, was born in this country, in Kentucky.

February 12, 1809, 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Another man born in England, admired by many, despised by others. Few are neutral, it seems, when it comes to the other man that was born on February 12, 1809. His name was Charles Robert Darwin. He was born near Shrewsbury in England on the bank of the Severn River.

He was baptized in the Anglican Church as an infant. His parents were Robert and Susanna Darwin. Susanna was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood. Some of you know about Wedgwood, China. He was, this is the founder.

Josiah Wedgwood was a famous potter. His daughter Susanna would marry a gentleman named Robert Darwin. And Robert and Susanna would become the parents of Charles Robert Darwin.

Susanna, her father Josiah Wedgwood was a Unitarian. And she was raised in the Unitarian Church. So Charles Darwin's mother was a Unitarian. That means she didn't believe in the Trinity. That means she didn't believe that Jesus was divine, but she was a devout Unitarian.

And she would take her son, Charles Robert, to the Unitarian Chapel every Sunday until she died when he was only eight years old. His father, Robert Darwin, was a physician.

Robert's father was named Erasmus Darwin. So Charles Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was an atheist. He said, what need do we have of Christianity when one can sup on the milk of science? Did not the priestess of nature explain all things, even creation itself?

As Adrian Desmond and James Moore noted in their biography on Darwin, and this is a biography I would recommend if you really want to get deeply into Darwin's life and teachings. This is about a 700-page biography in which they quote from many of Darwin's letters and writings. But in this book, these two biographers on Darwin said of Erasmus, Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus worshipped in the temple of nature. For him, reason was divine and progress was its profit. Darwin's grandfather would sire a dozen children by his two wives.

His first wife died and two more children by his governess. He enjoyed composing erotic poetry. He was an unusual man for his day. Robert Darwin, the father of Charles Darwin, was a portly, overbearing, quite judgmental father. particularly after his wife died.

When he lost Susanna, when Charles Darwin was eight, Robert became even more overbearing with his children. He had a tiny falsetto kind of voice. He was not a real strong voice apparently. His son Charles was a frustration for him because Charles was in his early years a slow developer. But Charles had at an early age a great interest in collecting things, related to plant life and animal life and Charles would collect shells and he would collect remains of animals and he would go out and collect plants and he loved being in the woods and hunting he was something of a daydreamer he liked to tell tall tales he would make up these stories that at first you might think he was telling you the truth but as a child he liked The biographers say he liked inventing deliberate falsehoods in order to gain the spotlight.

For example, on one occasion he stole something from his father and hid it, and then a day or two later he came and declared he had found what the thief had stolen, so that he would get praise from his father for having found it. The death of his mother was a difficult event. When she died, Robert Darwin brought his children in to see the body of their mother. She was at that time dressed in a black velvet gown. After the funeral, Robert Darwin would not permit his children to speak the name of their mother.

He was so overwhelmed and hurt by her loss. But it was very difficult for the children. Can you imagine having lost your mother and then not being able to even speak her name in the household? About a month after his mother's death, Charles Darwin was at school and he witnessed another funeral. A soldier was being buried in a nearby cemetery.

And as he watched the soldier being buried and then heard the reports of the rifles as they did a salute to the soldier, of the loss of his mother just welled up and he just lost it. Young child, age eight. He was educated beginning at Shrewsbury College, which was sort of like a high school. He was a very poor student. Charles did not do well.

In fact, he did so poorly that when he was 16 years old, his father, Robert, told him, Charles, you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. His father decided he was going to try to force his son Charles into a reputable career, and he decided that reputable career was to be a physician like himself. Robert Dorn was a physician. So Charles Dorn was sent off to Edinburgh College to study medicine. At age 16, Charles Darwin was actually seeing poor people and treating them as patients, even though he did not yet have any medical degree.

But he hated medical school. When he watched an operation, it would make him nauseous. And he soon determined in his own mind he did not want to be a physician. It's interesting, when he was at the University of Edinburgh, he did develop a close friendship with a gentleman named Robert Grant. Robert Grant was an uncompromising evolutionist and strongly anti-Christian.

Yes, he was an evolutionist. Charles Darwin was not the first one to propose the notion of revolution. He's going to be the first to tell us how evolution occurred. and that's going to be his real mark as a writer and as a scientist. Charles Darwin will tell the world how he believed evolution occurred and it will be his thoughts about how it occurred that will really capture the imagination of the scientific world.

But he met Robert Grant, this uncompromising evolutionist, strongly anti-Christian, and he would, with Robert Grant, study animal and plant life. Charles loved to go out into the swamps and look for animals and plants. He liked to go out into the tidal pools of the rivers and of the sea to look for shells and mollusks and so forth. It just intrigued him. And you can see he's not yet found what he would view as what he really wanted to do.

His father's trying to force him into being a physician, and he just gets sick when he's around people who are being operated on. So his father said, well, he's not a success in medical school. He did so poorly there. It was obvious he wasn't going to be a physician. So his father decided in 1827 that he had finally found the profession that would suit Charles.

He was unsuccessful as a student at Shrewsbury College. At medical school, he was unsuccessful. But there was a place for him. As the biographers say in the biography of Darwin, there was a safety net to stop second sons becoming wastrels. And that safety net that Robert Darwin found was the Church of England.

Was the church not a haven for dullards and doddlers, Robert Darwin said? The Anglican Church, fat, complacent, corrupt, lived luxuriously on its tithes and endowments as it had for a century. I want him to be a preacher. What a view about the church. But it tells you something about the view of the Anglican church in that day.

It was viewed as fat and corrupt and complacent. Ministers were not, in many respects, diligent in their task as they should have been. So Charles Darwin was then sent off to Cambridge to study, to become a minister in the Anglican church. Before he entered Cambridge, interestingly, Darwin read a book called Evidences for Christianity. It was written by the Reverend John Byrd Sumner, and it was the best defense of the Christian faith that Darwin had ever read.

In that, Sumner argues that Christianity meant that either, excuse me, he said that those who argued against Christianity that either Jesus did not exist or that he actually lived but was not the Son of God, just an imposter.

Sumner, in his Evidences for Christianity, said, to say Jesus did not exist was absurd. And Darwin agreed at that point in time that it would have been absurd to say Jesus did not exist. So, Sumner said, the skeptics about Christian faith have to say Jesus deceived himself, The Gospels make it clear that this is highly improbable because you have people coming to faith in Christ when he performs these miracles and the evidence for him being who he claimed to be was just overwhelming. After Darwin finished reading the book, he concluded that we have no right to deny the possibility of such events as recorded in the Gospels about Jesus Christ. So finding nothing he could not believe in, college at Cambridge to study holy orders to become a minister in the Anglican church that's interesting isn't it Darwin going to be a minister in the Anglican church while there he studied more about the Christian faith and he studied about the theology about creation he read a book by Paley called evidences that defended the Christian faith and in that book Paley argues that animals including human beings are complex mechanisms from the divine workshop.

They are so obviously designed, he said, there has to be a designer. But at Cambridge, Darwin was exposed to a different view of the Christian faith. He ran into people like Reverend Robert Taylor, who had been an Anglican minister but rejected the faith. Taylor now was so vociferous in his objections to Christianity that he even taught that God and the devil, as he said, were one and the same and that hell and hellfire are in the original, nothing more than names and titles of the supreme God. For this, this Reverend Robert Taylor was dubbed the devil's chaplain.

this former reverend actually issued a newspaper at Cambridge called The Devil's Pulpit. And he hated Christianity and all things Christian. Now, what did Darwin learn from him? Well, he saw the extent of opposition to the Christian faith that came from people like Taylor, but he saw what happened to people like them. Even though there were many who were, quote, Anglican, who were departing from the faith, these attacks on the church and the teachings of the church.

And the Reverend Robert Taylor, this devil's chaplain, was really, the powers at be really squelched him. They went to the person who was renting him his quarters and told him they had to kick him out. And they did. And ultimately, this Reverend Robert Taylor ends up leaving town in disgrace. face. And Darwin learned, if you have things to say that are directly opposed to the church, you better be careful. And in his life, as he began to develop some of his thoughts, he would keep many of them to himself for many, many, many years. At Cambridge, Darwin also met Professor Henslow, a botanist, and Adam Sedgwick, a geologist. And it was there with them that he developed his real interest in life. He liked looking at beetles and looking at all the different types of beetles and how they were made and the intricacy and the different varieties. And any animal just caused him to want to dig further and deeper to analyze how it was put together, how did it compare to other or similar type animals. And he developed this voracious appetite for exploration, collecting animal specimens, examining them, and he became largely self-taught a real expert in nature and in animal life and in plant life.

When he completed Cambridge, he had now finished the training to be a minister, he was asked to sign the 39 articles of the Anglican Church. This was a confession of faith that anyone who had finished preparation for the ministry was asked to sign. And Darwin signed it. It's interesting, the first of the articles says in part, There is but one living and true God, the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. It's an article to which Darwin signed his name saying at that point he believed.

But shortly after he finished Cambridge, the great opportunity of his life was the invitation to take a voyage. And this voyage is going to be crucial, crucial in Darwin's developing ideas about how animal life developed. It was a voyage on the HMS Beagle. heard of the voyage on the Beagle? A few of you? Well, he was invited by the British Admiralty to accompany Captain Robert Fitzroy, who was 26 years old, on a journey that was expected to take about three years. Fitzroy wanted a gentleman to accompany him on the trip, someone with whom he could converse on the long voyages, and it would be helpful if this person was a naturalist who could do some exploration as they traveled to different The Beagle was a small ship, 90 feet long by 24 feet wide.

I don't guess that's too small, but it's not huge either. Darwin was recommended by Professor Henslow to be the person to accompany Captain Fitzroy. Darwin's father at first objected. He saw here was another opportunity for his son to just waste his life going off on some adventure. But ultimately his father was persuaded that this was a real opportunity and consented for Darwin to go.

So Darwin on December 27, 1831 set out on a voyage on the HMS Beagle that would take him on a five-year worldwide voyage. This was a huge undertaking. him. He would not return to England to his home until October the 4th of 1836, almost five years after he left. This would be a trip that would take him to South America, to the Galapagos Islands, to the Pacific Islands, to Haiti, to New Zealand, to Australia, to South Africa. And on this journey, Darwin was collecting specimens of animal life and plant life, recording his observations, finding fossils on the trip and he would keep them and preserve them.

As he would go on the trip he would ship some of these specimens back to England to be preserved until he returned from the trip and he could do more study. He would go to places like Tierra del Fuego where he would see human beings but human beings that in his view that were so savage that they could hardly be viewed as more than animals. his thought process that maybe the distinction between animals and humans is not as great as some would say because he saw what he viewed to be a race of men so savage that he could hardly classify them as human. It was a dangerous voyage. There are times on the voyage, if you read the story about the voyage, where Darwin was quite heroic at times in saving his party from some danger.

He could have easily lost his life at some points during the trip. But he made it, and he returned. He returned with a disease, though. It was later that folks looking back on the type of illness that Darwin had throughout his lifetime, they determined that he must have contracted what is called Chagas disease during this voyage that took him to some very tropical places. Chagas disease was a tropical disease that would afflict Darwin for the rest of his life after this trip.

It would be a disease which would cause him fatigue, painful intestinal discomfort, frequent vomiting throughout the rest of his life, sleeplessness at night. It was a very painful result of the trip that he took. But this trip was a monumental event. England knew about this voyage. It was touted and when he returned he was really sort of welcomed as a returning hero along with Captain Fitzroy for this amazing journey that they had taken. For the next 10 years of his life Darwin would catalog, study, review, and make analysis of all the animal life specimens and all of the plant life that he had seen and collected on this trip and it would that he would really be developing his thoughts and his views about the development of species throughout the world.

Now, let me pause a minute and shift gears and talk about his marriage and his children. I'm going to have to pick up the pace here just a moment. He was married to Emma Wedgwood. Remember, his mother was a Wedgwood. Emma Wedgwood was his first cousin, so he married a first cousin.

Emma wrote throughout her lifetime several letters to Charles and I want to read you just a few of them because when I read these I was amazed to see the kind of letters that Charles Darwin received from his wife. Before they were married she wrote him a letter and she was troubled about his views at this point about religion. And listen to some of what she wrote to him. Will you do me a favor, she asked her husband-to-be, yes, I am sure you will, is to read our Savior's farewell discourse to his disciples, which begins at the end of the 13th chapter of John. It is so full of love to them and devotion and every beautiful feeling.

It is the part of the New Testament I love best. This is a whim of mine. It would give me great pleasure, though I can hardly tell why. Unwittingly, and this is the biographer talking now, unwittingly, Emma had pointed him to the gospel that Caroline, that was Charles Darwin's sister, had suggested he read a decade earlier at Edinburgh. It was Jesus' emotive farewell before his crucifixion with its new commandment to love one another.

As you know, John 15 says, I am the vine, you are the branches. And it goes on to say, If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and is withered. And men gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. The biographer says, The farewell discourse might have been full of love, but this was the fiery underside. and Charles could have hardly missed the warning.

He doubted the existence of hell. He doubted the existence of a soul. And in fact, this gospel would always stand between him and his wife, Emma. But he sent Emma a warm reply to the letter and she took comfort that at least he had entered into her heart's concern a little more. So that's before marriage.

Then shortly after marriage, here's a letter. The biographer says,

And interestingly, the letter reduced Charles to tears, and he was never to forget it. He actually kept this letter that his wife wrote shortly after their marriage for the rest of his life. And near the end of his life, I'll tell you what he wrote on this letter toward the end of his life. The question that divided them, as Emma called it, was not whether the Bible was an unimpeachable divine revelation. He already doubted that, understandably, given his integration into some of the thinking he was doing.

But the question that divided them, as Emma called it, was whether he would spend eternity in heaven or hell.

And then one last letter. This is toward the end of her life, much later in their marriage. Their children had been sick. they'd actually lost a child that I'm going to tell you about in just a moment.

And she wrote him this letter.

She said, When I see your patience, deep compassion for others, self-command and above all gratitude for the smallest thing done to help you, I cannot help longing that these precious feelings should be offered to heaven for the sake of your daily happiness. I often think of the words, thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee. It is feeling and not reason that drives one to prayer, she wrote to Charles. Charles had done with Christianity, the biographer writes, damned hell's torments, but Emma was now urging prayer for his present happiness, not as insurance against future suffering. She wished him to find the meaning of his pain in an afterlife where their love would go on forever, was dim. Charles scrawled on this letter, God bless you, as a reply to his wife.

In the end, all that stood between Charles' grief and his thoughts of oblivion was Emma's, his wife's unshakable faith. He became twitchy whenever she left him alone. Later in his life, he just had to have his wife near him all the time. He was sick. He had been through a lot

Emma and Charles would have ten children one Emma would die as an infant but it was the death of Annie that would really crush Charles she died when she was ten years old Charles was there with her his wife Emma was eight months pregnant so she couldn't be at the place where the doctors were working with their daughter Annie so Charles was there with his sister-in-law would and let me just read you a portion annie had developed there was something going on in her intestines and and the biographer never tells us exactly what the disease was but she was vomiting diarrhea fever and here are is what the biographer says about those last few moments of her life darwin is here with her annie is 10 years old tuesday had been the turning point but anna Annie did not improve. Violent diarrhea set in, and with each bout, she lost strength. Charles was fatigued. By the morning of Wednesday, April 23, she lay tranquilly, her breathing soft and gentle, her wasted body a jagged outline beneath the sheets. The wind played at the curtains beside an open window.

Her breathing became shallower. Fanny came in. The wind picked up. the bed. Annie lay still, unconscious.

It was just twelve o'clock midday. Thunder began to sound. Great peals above them. The mighty knell of nature. They edged nearer and heard the breathing stop. She was dead.

Charles kissed the shrunken little face one last time and then hit himself by the window. It was raining now, pouring. The sodden landscape, a graveyard of extinct life, made a mockery of his bitter tears. This was the end of the road, the crucifixion of his hopes. He could not believe the way his wife Emma believed, nor what she believed.

There was no straw to clutch, no promised resurrection. Christian faith was futile. He wrote his wife Emma who was not there when Annie died and he said how desolating to think of Annie's frank and cordial manners. I don't ever recall seeing the dear child naughty. God bless her.

He sobbed at last.

We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife. He was distraught.

Well, it would be in 1859 that Darwin would write, finally,

the book entitled Origin of Species, 1859. He came to his conclusions about 1839, but for nearly 20 years, he kept them secret, sharing them only with a very, very, very small group of folks. But when he learned that somebody else was about to publish something similar, he decided to go ahead and publish. In this book, 1859, Origin of Species, he doesn't talk about how man came or man developed. That would come in a book in 1871 called The Descent of Man.

The species went on the selling block. November 22, 1859, the first edition sold out the first day. It was a wildly popular book. There would be six editions, the sixth edition coming in 1872. And Darwin, for that book, would be both revered by some and reviled by others.

it was a it's a fascinating book to read there's much detail in it and next week we're going to talk about some of the

conclusions that he reached just two or three thoughts and I'll close in just a moment he got a letter from Karl Marx you know Karl Marx sort of the idea man behind communism Karl Marx wrote a book called Das Kapital, he sent a copy to And he wrote a letter back to Marx that said, Our respective efforts toward the extension of knowledge will in the long run add to the happiness of mankind.

Well, the end. Darwin, by the end of his life, was a self-designated agnostic. That was a term coined by his friend Thomas Huxley.

agnostic mean he didn't believe he didn't know whether there was a god or not but he had no sufficient proof to conclude that there was one Darwin would complete his autobiography in 1881

and then he would die on April the 19th of 1882 let me just read you one other portion here if I can put my fingers on it.

He's working on his autobiography.

As he thinks about it, tears were flowing again. Tears at the thought of parting from his wife, Emma. he thought about the tears that Annie, his daughter, had shed kissing her mother goodbye before going to die. He reached for Emma, his wife's beautiful old letter. You remember the letter she wrote him right after they were married?

He had kept this letter. This is now the year 1881, near the end of Darwin's life. He reached for Emma's beautiful old letter preserved with the other mementos beside his manuscript. of her fears for him and her undying love. Dwelling a moment on his daughter Annie's face, he scratched miserably at the bottom of this letter that his wife had written him.

When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cried over this. It was the only comfort that he could give her.

And then here's his death.

Charles awoke in a daze asked to be propped up he recognized the children and embraced them with tears Frank spooned some soup and brandy for him while Henrietta his daughter lightly rubbed his chest then the nausea struck and convulsed him again oh God he cried helplessly oh Lord God and began to faint in just a few moments he lost consciousness was hopeless. There was only the deep breathing that precedes death. Emma, his wife, cradled his head on her breast, swaying gently, her eyes closed. His life ended at four o'clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, April 19, 1882. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a place reserved for the elite who died in England.

He was praised from pulpits all over England in the Anglican Church. As his coffin was lowered into the vault, the choir sang,

His body is being buried, but his name liveth evermore. The closing words of the biography by Adrian Desmond and James Moore are these. Society would never be the same. The devil's chaplain had done his work.

Society would never be the same. The quote, devil's chaplain had done his work.

That's a brief review of Darwin's life. Next week, his teaching. Lord, help us as we seek to understand a subject that has been so difficult for our culture, been the cause of so much heartache and debate. I pray particularly as we begin to look at what Darwin taught next week that you will help us to be discerning, wise, and understanding. But at the end of this day, it is my prayer that we will know the God that we serve and what he's like and what he has done.

For it's in Christ's name we pray. Amen.