ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author would like to give an account which makes the interplay of ideas — both positive and negative—between scientific and religious thought in Charles Darwin’s philosophy intelligible, by providing evidence that there is a self-undermining dynamics of ideas between belief and science. The relationship between science and belief in Charles Darwin’s thought is much more intricate than one might assume solely on the basis of a general conflict of supposedly opposing ideas. Darwin’s theory of evolution is itself not a creatio ex nihilo, but one of the greatest empirical, and also theoretical, syntheses known in the history of ideas. In Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, the main arguments for divine revelation were based on empirical evidence for the literal historical truth of Christian miracles. Although Darwin’s biological theory of pan-adaptationism and of an unchangeable law of natural selection was based on Paley’s natural theology, it nevertheless became a main cause for Darwin’s loss of faith.
