What Is Darwinism?

Charles Hodge published What Is Darwinism? in 1874, near the end of a long career as professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the leading Reformed theologian in America. Darwin's Origin of Species had appeared fifteen years earlier, and The Descent of Man in 1871; by the early 1870s the questions they raised were no longer confined to naturalists but pressed upon pastors, students, and ordinary believers. Hodge, who had already treated creation and providence in his Systematic Theology, wrote this short book to answer a question many were asking and few were defining: what, precisely, is the theory, and what does it mean for Christian belief?

Hodge's first move is definitional. He examines Darwin's own statements and sets out the theory's essential features: the descent of all living things from one or a few primordial forms, the operation of natural selection as the mechanism of change, and the insistence that the variations on which selection works are undesigned, arising by chance rather than by purpose. He treats the third element as decisive. A great deal of the book is a careful, courteous critique of the scientific case, but its theological center is the claim that a process governed by undirected variation excludes design, and that excluding design is atheism in effect, whatever the intentions of the one who proposes it. His famous answer to the title question is that Darwinism is atheism.

The argument is more precise than that sentence suggests. Hodge does not condemn the study of nature, nor does he insist on a particular reading of Genesis that forbids an old earth or even the development of species by secondary causes under divine guidance. His objection falls on the denial of teleology, not on the idea of change over time. He also repeatedly distinguishes Darwin's theory from the facts it seeks to explain, and he presses the point that a theory should be tested by its evidence and its coherence rather than accepted because it is fashionable. The book is therefore at once a piece of apologetics, a lesson in how a theologian should read a scientific claim, and a defense of the argument from design that Hodge held to be both biblical and rational.

The work has remained a reference point for over a century. It is a clear example of the older Princeton approach to science and Scripture, and it shaped later conservative Protestant debates over evolution, even among those who came to different conclusions than Hodge did. Readers will also find that its definition of terms, and its insistence on separating the observed from the speculative, still sharpens discussion.

Who should read this: students of American theology and the history of the science-and-faith debate, and pastors who want to see how a major nineteenth-century theologian reasoned his way into the conversation. It is not a guide to current biology, and readers hoping for engagement with modern genetics or the fossil record will find it dated. Nor is it the book for someone seeking a mediating or theistic-evolutionist position; Hodge's conclusion is firm, and the book is best read as a historical argument to be weighed rather than a settled verdict to be adopted.