The old argument from design in Nature as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.[1]
An incidental allusion, in a letter of 1857,[2] shows that he had come to look upon a belief in design and a belief in natural selection as alternatives, and mutually exclusive. But here Darwin began to realize the contradiction in which he was involved. On the one side his theory was opposed to Paley's, on the other it was saturated with teleology. "The endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with,[3] the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backward and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity,"[4] the fact that "the mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed"[5]—these had to be set off against "the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering,[6] and the a priori unlikelihood that an omniscient Being should have willed the world as we know it. In 1860, the year after the publication of the "Origin of Species," Darwin had reached the stage of utter bewilderment:
I grieve to say [he writes to Asa Gray] that I can not honestly go as far as you do about design. I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I can not think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I can not look at each separate thing as the result of design.[7]
And in an earlier letter of the same year he says:
I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I can not see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I can not 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 believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I can not anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me.[8]
Elsewhere he says of this suggestion, "I am aware it is not logical with reference to an omniscient Deity."[9]
