I. Intro
Michael Huemer over at Fake Nous has a cool series of posts where he summarizes his academic philosophy papers in a fun-to-read way. I’ve published much less than Huemer, and his papers are all much better; for that reason, I’m going to start converting my papers in to blog posts like he does, so no-one will have to read the originals.
First on the list is “Darwin’s ‘Horrid Doubt’, in Context”. I published this History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences in 2021, towards the end of secondary school. I’m still reasonably happy with it, but you can tell it was written by a 17-year-old with zero decorum (“I am not, in any way, shape or form, throwing shade on either Fales’s or Kraemer’s papers”; “This is not meant to be a dig at Plantinga’s argument”; at one point, a wise reviewer had to talk me down from passing comment on the “Santa-like” beard of one of Darwin’s contemporaries.)
Anyway, here’s the thrust of what I wrote.
You probably didn’t know, but the Darwin of whom I speak is Charles Darwin, a noted biologist. In 1881, having published On the Origin of Species 22 years earlier, Darwin wrote the following in an 1881 letter to William Graham:
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?
Fast forward a bit, and 21st century Christian philosophers and apologists are quoting this passage all over the shop, in support of the view that if our cognitive faculties evolved by way of unguided evolution, we’d have no reason to think they’re reliable at forming true beliefs.
The trend started with Alvin Plantinga who quoted the letter in support of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. He wrote:
“Darwin…seem[s] to believe that (naturalistic) evolution gives one a reason to doubt that human cognitive faculties produce for the most part true […] beliefs: call this ‘Darwin’s Doubt’.”
In a later book, Plantinga rightly walked this interpretation back, footnoting—for reasons I’m about to mention—that:
Darwin probably had in mind, here, not everyday beliefs such as that the teapot is in the cupboard, but something more like religious and philosophical convictions.
Sadly, no one reads the footnotes, and apologists have been inadvertently ripping Darwin out of context ever since. Guilty offenders include: Denyse O’Leary of Evolution News, John Haught of Commonweal Magazine, David DeWitt of Answers in Genesis, and Joe Carter of The Gospel Coalition (I’m not singling out these names in particular; they just happened to show up on the first page of Google.)
So, what was Darwin’s Doubt a doubt about? Let’s look at the primary sources.
II. Letter to Asa Gray: 22 May, 1860
In a letter to Asa Gray, Darwin vents about a common criticism of the Origin; that it was somehow ‘atheistic’. “I am bewildered”, Darwin wrote. “I had no intention to write atheistically”. Despite this, Darwin admits, he couldn’t honestly claim he was a theist either: “There seems to me too much misery in the world”—“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice”. Not sure what to think, Darwin took the stance for which, 9 years later, the Darwinian intellectual T. H. Huxley coined the term ‘agnostic’:
“I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope & believe what he can”
Darwin’s point: just as Newtonian physics is beyond the ken of the canine brain, the God question is beyond the ken of the human brain. The cross-species analogy is telling: just as canine brains haven’t evolved the capacity to understand Newton, human brains haven’t evolved the capacity to figure out whether God exists.
III. Autobiographies
The same theme crops up in Darwin’s Autobiographies, written in the Spring and Summer of 1876. In the section on “Religious Belief”, Darwin recounts the process by which he “gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation”.
Factors included were: the problem of religious diversity (“is it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, would he permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, &c., as Christianity is with the Old Testament.”), the incredibleness of miracles, the unreliability of the Gospel accounts, the “damnable doctrine” of Hell (according to which “my Father, Brother, and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished.”), and the problem of animal suffering (“for what advantage can there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?”).
On the flip side, however, one theistic consideration that impressed Darwin followed
from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.
“But then arises the doubt”:
can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? […] The mystery of the beginning of all this is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain Agnostic.
By “grand conclusions”, here, Darwin doesn’t mean conclusions of any kind, full stop. The doubt is more local than that: Darwin’s Doubt, like before, centres on abstruse metaphysical and theological conclusions, like that there is or isn’t a God.
IV. Letter to William Graham: 3 July, 1881
In 1881, William Graham published The Creed of Science: Religious, Moral, and Social, n which the philosopher, political economist, and mathematics lecturer critiqued the emerging scientific naturalism of the day, a creed that drew strength from Darwin’s discoveries.
In July of that year, Darwin sent Graham a letter of his thoughts on the “admirably written” book (“It is a long time since any other book has interested me so much”.)
Despite Darwin’s reservations about the book (“chief” among them being his doubts about Graham’s claim that laws of nature imply teleology), he readily admits to Graham that: “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”.
At this point, just as before, Darwin’s Doubt emerges:
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?
The same sentient shows up in a separate letter to T. H. Farrer, a civil servant and statistician who’d also read The Creed of Science with great interest. After half-agreeing, half-disagreeing with something Farrer had claimed about “Chance”, Darwin opined:
The whole question [of whether the universe is a product of chance] seems to me insoluble; for I cannot put much or any faith in the so-called intuitions of the human mind, which has been developed, as I cannot doubt, from such a mind as animals possess; & what would their convictions or intuitions be worth?— There are a good many points, on which I cannot quite follow Mr. Graham.
In context, it’s clear that the “convictions” and “so-called intuition” Darwin worried about weren’t convictions or intuitions of any kind; they were only the kinds of abstruse theological convictions and metaphysical intuitions Graham had sought to validate in his book.
V. Outro
According to about a gazillion online apologists, ‘even Darwin himself ADMITTED’ that if our cognitive faculties arose through a blind, undirected evolutionary process, they can’t be relied on to track truth. This claim is false. Darwin did worry that evolution might not have given us reliable, truth-tracking cognitive faculties in a narrow sense, but only when it came to forming abstruse metaphysical and theological beliefs. This doubt is much less radical, and much more plausible generally.
Very interesting, and news to me. Also disappointing how so few people look this up.
There is a version of the argument that precedes Plantinga - Lewis' Argument from Reason, which you can find in his 'Miracles' book. I think the argument's validity is independent of the exact thoughts of Darwin.
All the same, I don't personally build my faith on it, since I don't take too much to that foundationalist approach. Where I do think it is a useful argument is as reason to doubt the materialistic position - the materialist cannot be sure that their beliefs are correct. They should thus remain at least sincerely open to the possibility of supernaturalism.