charles_darwin

Primary Documents Relating to Darwin and Darwinism
resulting, not from will and wisdom, but from necessity. Nature
is substituted for God, and an unalterable succession for the
ever-present agency of the Creator and Ruler of the universe.
Thus has science been robbed of half its glory; its views have
been narrowed and often obscured; and truths which ought to
have roused a world to the admiration of Eternal Power and
Goodness, have been employed to lull the soul into a practical
atheism.
Source: William Paley, Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence
and Attributes of the Deity. Collected from the Appearances of Nature
(London: R. Faulder, 1802), 1–2, 7–8; and Henry Brougham and
Charles Bell, Paley’s Natural Theology: with Illustrative Notes, etc.
(New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1855), I: 24–25.
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Document 3: Lyell on the Age of the Earth
and Uniformitarianism
An important foundation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection
was the idea that the Earth was very old, millions of years as
opposed to thousands: one book that helped Darwin to formulate
this idea was Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology
(1830–1833). Lyell argued that geological change such as the creation
of mountains occurred very slowly and uniformly over millions
of years. For Darwin, this long period of time was sufficient for some
species to change into another species.
In this excerpt from his book, Lyell explains why it is difficult,
if not impossible, to argue that geological formations such as mountain
ranges could have developed in a short period of time (as other
geologists at the time suggested).
He who should study the monuments of the natural world under
the influence of a similar infatuation, must draw a no less exaggerated
picture of the energy and violence of causes, and must
experience the same insurmountable difficulty in reconciling the
former and present state of nature. If we could behold in one
view all the volcanic cones thrown up in Iceland, Italy, Sicily,
and other parts of Europe, during the last five thousand years,
and could see the lavas which have flowed during the same period;
the dislocations, subsidences and elevations caused by
earthquakes; the lands added to various deltas, or devoured by
the sea, together with the effects of devastation by floods, and
imagine that all these events had happened in one year, we must
form most exalted ideas of the activity of the agents, and the