In the polemical world of T. H. Huxley liberal reconcilers of Christianity and evolution could be nothing but an ‘army’ bent on blending scientific truth with theological error. Their exploits were simply ‘pseudo-science’, the neutralising of issues as plain as black and white. Huxley was of course mistaken, though his caricature has persisted in a military metaphor. The reconcilers did not always confront clear-cut issues, much less did they blur them. One might well argue that they ‘engaged the advance lines of the realistic modern mind’, but to chide them for a ‘strange insensitiveness to all the implications of science’ and for a delusive belief that they had ‘made contributory to their faith the grand army of scientific inquiry’ seems altogether unjust. Scientists themselves, most of whom were overtly religious, could hardly agree on the theological ‘implications’ of their theories. The ‘grand army of scientific inquiry’ never did exist.

If there is but one passage in all Darwin's publications that set the stage for the discussion of evolutionary theory in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, it is this paragraph from the conclusion to the last edition of the Origin of Species (1872).

For one hundred years it has been fashionable to employ military metaphors to characterise the religious debates over evolution in the later nineteenth century. Implicit in this historiography of ‘conflict’ and ‘warfare’ is the positivistic assumption that science and metaphysics, evolutionary theory and Christian theology, can or should be divorced. This book undertakes a revision of the received historiography by describing its polemical origins and baneful effects and by offering an interpretation of Protestant responses to Darwin that shows their affinities with the metaphysical and theological traditions from which Darwinism and post-Darwinian evolutionary thought derived.

In offering a non-violent interpretation of the post-Darwinian controversies this study supports and enlarges the standard revisionist thesis that Christian theology has been congenial to the development of modern science. What M. B. Foster, R. K. Merton, and R. Hooykaas inter alia have argued concerning the rise of physical science and technology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – namely, that the Christian (and especially the Reformed) doctrine of a contingent creation, ordered and superintended by a perpetual Providence, has led to the adoption of empirical methods in science and the extension of causo-mechanical explanations of nature – is here applied to the rise and spread of theories of biological evolution in the later nineteenth century.

It is an agreeable irony that T. H. Huxley, the incubus of late- Victorian theology, concluded his pioneering essay, ‘On the reception of the “Origin of Species”’, with an allusion to the biblical metaphor of wine and wineskins. It is at once more ironic and less agreeable that in this context he obliquely credited the ‘happy ingenuity’ of his generation for discovering that the new Darwinian wine was of the same vintage as older causo-mechanical explanations of natural phenomena, and thus that older theological bottles, ‘rightly viewed’, had been made expressly to contain it. Less agreeable, this latter irony, because it violates most of the preconceptions which, until quite recently, have been fostered by accounts of Christian responses to Darwin in the later nineteenth century.

Britain's leading Lamarckian was Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). His System of Synthetic Philosophy (1860–96) set forth a physical law which determined the evolution of ‘definite, coherent heterogeneity’ throughout the universe; his life-work proceeded from beginning to end on the assumption that biological adaptation occurs primarily through the inherited effects of environment and habit.

Metaphors are indispensable figures of speech. By them the abstract is made concrete, the dull and dead is recreated with interest and vivacity, and the complex is cast in recollectable form. What would literature be without the elaborate metaphors of Dante's Commedia and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the enchanting allegories of George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, and the evocative modern parables in Abbott's Flatland and Orwell's Animal Farm? Likewise metaphors, or ‘models’, are vital to the scientific enterprise. Without the model of ocean waves Huygens might not have formulated the wave theory of light; without the ‘billiard ball’ model of molecular collisions, the kinetic theory of gases would be difficult to explain; and apart from Bohr's planetary model of the atom, the development of atomic theory could have been greatly retarded.

Yet particular metaphors are always dispensable, if not in literature, whose themes are eternal, then in science and the philosophy of science, where discovery and understanding are often contingent on the model or metaphor employed. Thus Darwin acknowledged that the term ‘natural selection’, which he conceived by analogy with the ‘artificial selection’ of breeders, was less satisfactory than Herbert Spencer's phrase, ‘the survival of the fittest’, after Alfred Russel Wallace pointed out that this was ‘the plain expression of the fact’.

The last of Darwin's works directly concerned with organic evolution was the Descent of Man. From the time of its publication until his death in 1882 Darwin occupied himself with long-standing researches which served to illustrate the broader significance of his theory. The first and last fruits of his labour – The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) and The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (1881) – had a psychological interest. Other volumes reported his work on plants: Insectivorous Plants (1875), The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1875), The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), and The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877).

The works of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) have been cited more frequently than read, and read far more often than understood. Religious reactionaries and the sycophants of scientism have alike forced Darwin to serve their dubious ends, while even persons of moderation have represented as Darwinism either more or less than the primary texts allow. Under these circumstances, which have only lately begun to change, a just understanding of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection must be founded on Darwin's statement of it. Fortunately, there is at least one passage in the Origin of Species that remained substantially unaltered throughout the book's six editions (1859–72), which distils the essence of Darwinism into less than five hundred words.

If ever there was a contradiction in terms it must surely have been Christian Darwinism. What concourse could a mere theory of biological development have with a religion which proclaimed God to be Maker of heaven and earth? What constructive relationship could possibly subsist between a theory which taught the survival of the fittest ‘fortuitous’ variations in a brutal struggle for existence and a theology which taught God's designing providence in a creation that he saw was ‘good’? What conceivable logic could there be in uniting a theory of mankind's physical and psychical evolution from lower animals with a belief that human beings were uniquely created in the image of God? The name Christian might have been annexed to anti-Darwinism or perhaps to some version of evolution which did honour to the purposes and character of the Creator, but never, surely, to that theory set forth by the agnostic naturalist Charles Darwin.

Darwin's theological perplexity and his eventual uneasy agnosticism might be better construed as evidence of the incompleteness of his work than as proof of its essential heterodoxy. Such at any rate is an interpretation which Darwinian commentators, old and new, would seem to allow. Huxley thought that evolution by natural selection is ‘neither Anti-theistic nor Theistic’, that ‘it simply has no more to do with Theism than the first book of Euclid has’. Chauncey Wright argued forcefully for the metaphysical ‘neutrality’ of the theory. David Hull has remarked that ‘the development of evolutionary theory since Darwin might well be described as a scientific theory in search of a metaphysics’. And in his Providence Lost Richard Spilsbury has written of contemporary Neo-Darwinians in much the same vein in which Geoffrey Wells wrote of Darwin forty years ago. ‘The fragmentary man’, said Wells, ‘can only manifest a fragmentary truth’. Darwin was ‘a specialist getting on with his job, in a sociological, political, and religious vacuum’. He was ‘incomplete’, and ‘Darwinism accordingly inadequate as a philosophy by which men may live’.

Of course Darwinism has never been held in a ‘vacuum’, apart from ultimate beliefs, nor has it ever been purged of its metaphysical susceptibilities.

For more than forty years after the publication of the Origin of Species evolutionary thought in Britain and America was in a state of great confusion. Theory vied with theory, philosophy with philosophy, to explain the manner in which life and matter had assumed its present forms. The theory of natural selection, which in Darwin's view described ‘the most important, but not the exclusive’, means of organic modification, was subjected not only to base and baseless theological attacks, but to some well-founded scientific criticisms.