Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, seven years before Mary Baker Eddy began her own quest to probe the scientific basis of her healing. Darwin’s ideas disquieted many Christians, who felt deeply disturbed at the implications of his book. They did not want to believe that if all nature was part of an evolutionary process, there was no particular design or purpose involved. This contradicted an interpretation that had hitherto been widespread—that a divine intelligence must be behind the exact fit to the ecological niche of many species.
After Darwin, thinkers had to grapple with the idea that the variety and wonder of nature had no plan to it at all; that it was the end-product of a struggle to survive in a competitive environment, in which by chance some mutations in the reproductive process gave certain individuals a variant that proved able to assist their survival and perpetuation of themselves, perhaps resulting in their evolution into a distinct species.
The conventional religious view was that the human species, albeit fallen from grace, was still the center of history, watched over by Providence, and capable of redemption through the atonement of Jesus Christ, including his resurrection after death. But the implication of Darwin’s discoveries, which he was personally reluctant to spell out, was that humans, too, were a result of evolution from their nearest animal neighbors, the higher primates, and this made many doubt how there could be any divine design in the creation of the universe, or its development over time. It is still an uncomfortably bleak view for many Christians.
