Quintessence of Dust blogger sfmatheson (http://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/) pointed out an error in one of my previous posts.
Darwin did not say, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
It struck me as incongruent when selecting this quote that Darwin, coming out of a Christian worldview and upbringing, would make the leap to such a bleak assessment all in one go. Turns out my misgivings were correct, and websites quoting Darwin, such as these, are wrong:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_darwin.html
http://thinkexist.com/quotes/charles_darwin/2.html
http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/3417
So who gets the credit for the quote?
Richard Dawkins, cited as "Dawkins, Richard. 1995. River Out of Eden. New York: Basic Books, 133."
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Where does this leave Darwin? Biographer Janet Brown provides this assessment of his thought:
"Darwin's view of nature was dark--black…. Where most men and women generally believed in some kind of design in nature--some kind of plan and order--and felt a deep-seated, mostly inexpressible belief that their existence had meaning, Darwin wanted them to see all life as empty of any divine purpose. Browne, Janet. 1995. Charles Darwin: Voyaging, A Biography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 542.
Darwin was a once-theist, fading-deist, turned agnostic. I think Brown may be over-stating the case of Darwin's bleak view, but I'll leave that for Darwinian scholars to bat around.
If accurate, we could perhaps label Darwin and Dawkins as Bleak and Bleaker.
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For the record, here is a list of sites that CORRECTLY attribute the quote to Dawkins:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/dawkins.htm
http://www.icr.org/article/3513/
http://zanngill.com/6d.html
I could not find a single site that points out this quote being falsely attributed to Darwin. I hope that this post helps set the record straight.
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