"Charles Darwin suffered extreme ill-health for most of his working life. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica says, ‘Some of the symptoms—painful flatulence, vomiting, insomnia, palpitations—appeared in force as soon as he began his first transmutation notebook, in 1837. [This is the year after he returned to England from his five-year voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle.] Although he was exposed to insects in South America and could possibly have caught Chagas’ or some other tropical disease, a careful analysis of the attacks in the context of his activities points to psychogenic origins.’ (Psychogenic means originating in the mind or in mental condition.) So then, what caused this condition of extreme stress in Darwin? What was he so worried about?
Darwin knew that his theory was sheer atheistic materialism—a bombshell which when released on Victorian society would undermine people’s faith in God, the Bible, and the Church. In effect, he was shaking his fist at Almighty God. Professor Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge, the foremost geologist of his day and a creationist, recognized this as soon as he read the Origin, about 1861. He wrote, ‘From
Darwin’s chief proponent was the most prominent unbeliever, hater of religion, and arch-enemy of the Church of his day—Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. Sir Julian Huxley, Thomas’s grandson, who gave the keynote address at the centenary celebration of the publishing of the Origin, held in Chicago in 1959, said, "Darwin’s real achievement was to remove the whole idea of God as the creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion."
Psychologically there can be little doubt that Charles Darwin suffered from feelings of guilt. These undoubtedly arose from his desire to escape from God and from the force of Paley’s arguments about design in his Natural Theology. That is, Darwin’s theory of natural selection was his attempt to explain design without the need for an intelligent Designer. Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University concurs; he believes that ‘Darwin constructed the theory of natural selection in large measure as a direct refutation of the argument from design’.
But what if he was wrong? How could he accept the responsibility for what it would do to others? It is little wonder that he ‘broke out in boils’, referred to the Origin as ‘my accursed book’ and seems to have thought of himself as a ‘Devil’s Chaplain’.
November 24, 1859, with the title, On the Origin of Species.
There was considerable trauma associated with this. In the year leading up to publication he was rarely able to write for more than 20 minutes at a time without stomach pains, and he finished the proofs on October 1, 1859, in between fits of vomiting....he wrote to Hooker, ‘I shd [sic] suppose few human beings had vomited so often during the last 5 months.’
We now know that if Darwin could have foreseen coming scientific developments, he would have had good reason to be concerned that his theory might one day be proved wrong.
Gregor Mendel had not yet established and published his work on the laws of heredity and genetics, which said that the characteristics of offspring are passed on from parents according to precise mathematical ratios and do not derive from chance random processes in what Darwin called ‘blending inheritance’.
James Joule, R.J.E. Clausius, and Lord Kelvin were only just developing the concepts of thermodynamics, the first law of which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed (so the present universe could not have created itself), and the second law of which says that the universe is proceeding in a downward degenerating direction of increasing disorganization (so things overall do not of themselves become more organized with time).
Louis Pasteur was just beginning his famous experiments which showed that life (even microbial life) comes from life, not from non-life. The mathematical laws of probability, which show that the odds of life’s occurring by chance are effectively zero, had not yet been applied to the theory of evolution.
Molecular biology, with its revelation that the cell is so enormously complex that it could not possibly have been formed by chance, had not yet commenced.
The fossil record had not yet been investigated sufficiently for palaeontologists to be able to say, as they now do, that chains of intermediate ‘links’ do not exist.
If the Biblical account of creation is true, then there will be a Day of Judgment, for God the Creator has said that He has ‘appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained [namely Jesus]; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He raised Him from the dead’ Acts 17:31." CMI
