ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin lost his daughter Annie in 1851. Darwin spent the last weeks at Annie's bedside as she suffered terribly. The Darwins' suffering and grief are an example of the gradual loosening of the long-held Christian idea of life after death; of the idea that earthly suffering is temporary and that meekly submitting to it gets rewarded after death. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment created the initial conditions for secularization in the West. Fear of death, the desire for immortality, the socio-economic alienation of vast masses of people that made them put their faith in something beyond this life – all these were actual psychological and sociological drivers. By the time Annie died, Darwin had surely arrived at those conclusions. "Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete", Darwin wrote when his own unbelieving father died in 1848. Charles didn't believe there was a divine or any other purpose to suffering and loss.
