Russell B. answered • 03/14/22
The Real Publius
The most immediate and obvious connection between Darwin and The Bible is his background as a non-conformist Unitarian who, at one time in his life, was prepared to go to seminary.
This non-conformist background itself is a good sub-point to hit on, because the non-conformist and Unitarian traditions arose out of a German movement called Pietism that emphasized personal study of religious materials over institutional dogma. This freed him on one hand to look at the bible in new and unusual ways, which brings us to the framework of evolution.
The Progressive, or sometimes derisively referred to Whiggish outlook on history is deeply rooted in a Christian understanding of history. The Book of Genesis presents God's creation of the universe as a progressive event, beginning with the creation of a celestial heirarchy and ending with the creation of the smallest units of analysis, induvidual organisms.
However atheist the Romantic and Enlightened theorists became, they remained locked in this linear, progressive narrative, and Darwin's version of natural selection and speciation is heavily indebted to the celestial heirarchies of Christian thought as originally laid out in Genesis. (This is three if you are counting).
A fourth, more direct application of this general observation, is that Darwin's assumption that all of the animals on Earth are descended, at most, from four or five progenitors. Evolutionists today consider this to be a kind of hokey bit of Darwin, but we can see that he is once again trying as hard as he can to fit his theory into a canonical Christian understanding of history. The narrative of Genesis necessarily creates this single-point origin of life, and Darwin himself seems unable to have conceived multiple points of origin for evolving species. To flesh this out some, he was able to recognize divergent evolution of finches, and of horses and dogs. But he has a hard time squaring the possibility that life began twice.
The last, and probably second most obvious point of Biblical comparison is a negative one. Darwin and Huxley, and their whole cohort of theorists, were patently unconvinced by what Voltaire would call a "sacral" or "sacred" narrative about natural history, and sought to create a "profane" or materialist interpretation of biblical events. This is the aspect of his work that recent acolytes like Dawkins have hewed to closely. There is a lot of negative Christianity in the polemics of latter day Darwinians that belies the biblical orientation of their arguments.
