Highlights

Charles Darwin was born. He is of interest to us as a religious community for two connected reasons. The first is that was raised in a Unitarian family which included a number of avowed freethinkers.

Darwin’s mature religious thinking moved from being a kind of deism in mid-life to a principled agnosticism by the time of his old age and death.

his agnosticism did not stop Darwin from feeling strongly that the idea of the theistic Christian God was a morally repugnant one. This was, of course, because in all forms of theism the problem of evil always remains in play.

Darwin helped many within the Unitarian movement begin definitively to move away from theism and towards a position that today we would call religious naturalism (which, by the way, is amenable to the use of the word God but only insofar as it is used in a non-theistic and naturalistic way as you might find in process theology or pantheistic and panentheistic philosophies).

“Religious naturalists take nature to heart. We hold a naturalist view of how things are in the world, and we also see ourselves as religious, in non-traditional ways, as we absorb the wonder of being alive and the order and beauty of the cosmos. We ask “What is?” and “What matters?” questions, seeking answers from natural (rather than supernatural) sources. Our searches are guided by the wisdom that can be found in such human traditions as science, art, literature, philosophy, and the religions of the world (which are also part of nature).”

for a religious naturalist, the core religious narrative around which they gather at this point in time is the story of the universe from the Big Bang to today.

this doesn’t mean that our world’s various ancient religious narratives need be lost or thrown away as utterly useless but they are themselves now understood as being part of nature itself

within a religious naturalist perspective ethics and morality are also generally felt to be emergent natural phenomena rather than eternal verities front-loaded into the world at its very beginning.

Religious naturalism in this developed form is not, of course, the kind of full blown agnosticism adopted by Darwin. However, in toto, it retains a healthy agnosticism at its core

we must always remain careful not to over-estimate the reach and power of the natural sciences

“the information science yields serves to limit possible options, rather than put forward the allegedly correct one”

while Nature — in the broadest possible sense — refuses to explicitly tell us what she is, she sometimes condescends, when we press her tenaciously enough, to let us know a little about what she is not

some elements of present-day scientific knowledge casts serious doubts on such and such Platonic intuitions

Nature is strongly suggesting to us that certain, once central, aspects of our ancient religions and philosophies about which we were once rightly agnostic — such as theism — are today now highly unlikely to be true; they are doubtful enough that, if we wish to continue to live with full pathos and a clean heart, we should seriously consider letting them go and to think about adopting another, basic religious position. For me that “new” position is religious naturalism

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References

Brown, Andrew James. “A Common Ground? A Unitarian and Universalist Religious Naturalist Meditation on Darwin’s 207th Birthday.” Caute, 12 Feb. 2017, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2017/02/a-common-ground-unitarian-and.html.