Charles and Emma Darwin: The Option to Believe

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Many people look at the world through a scientific lens that seems to forbid religious conviction, but then find themselves drawn by curiosity, if not longing, to the religious worldview. Is this tension inevitable … or unnecessary? The famously successful marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin illustrates the problem. Charles and Emma were very close to each other in social background and knowledge of the world, yet they found it difficult to agree on the Question of God. Were their religious beliefs driven apart more by his science or by their society? Were these potentially compatible, or inherently irreconcilable? Charles and Emma Darwin: The Option to Believe searches for answers in the family’s history and individual personalities, as well as in the cultural, social, and intellectual history of that family’s society. The book also looks back on the Darwins’ predicament from the perspective of modern science and theology and suggests it is society, not science, that creates the modern tension between science and religion. There is an intellectual option to believe in God that seemed unavailable to Victorians like Charles Darwin yet is certainly available to us today.