Darwin seems like a pretty miserable guy. (On the finer things in life)

Happy Dude.

I’ve been reading a lot.  Right now I’m at a steady pace of a book per week.  This week I have been spending my leisure hours diving into Desiring God by John Piper.  Piper’s a brilliant and inspiring dude, but what brings me to my blog today is not one of the ideas from his book but a quotation in Piper’s book from Charles Darwin.

The quote is thus (taken from Darwin’s autobiography):

Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare…. Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight.  But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.  I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music…. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did…. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive…. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of nature.

I was absolutely fascinated when I read this.  We all know Darwin as the mind behind the famed Theory of Evolution, but I never would have guessed that he was plauged by such misery of spirit in his later life.  The existence that Darwin describes is very dark indeed.  I’m chilled to imagine being resricted in my very being from enjoying nature, music, and literature.

To break things down a little bit, I like music a lot.  I spend a lot of time listening to music, a fact that anyone who knows me can attest to.  I’m listening to music right now (“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” Jersey Boys Soundtrack).  I think music is one of the most beautiful expressions of praise known to mankind.  And by praise I don’t mean just for the Creator–although I believe that that is the ultimate purpose for music–but also for just about anything you can think of.  A common example is praise for a woman’s beauty or just the feelings of love in general.  The song I’m listening to right now is an example of this: “Pardon the way that I stare, there’s no one else to compare,  the sight of you makes me weak, there are no words left to speak.  At long last love has arrived, and I thank God I’m alive. You’re just too good to be true, I can’t take my eyes off of you.” Although I don’t have anyone in my life to whom I could sing this song with sincerity, I can tap into these feelings through the beautiful expression that is music.  The singer of this song is expressing praise for this woman.  That’s what praise is: thinking that something is so awesome that you could just sing about it or tell some random person about how awesome that something is.  People praise all kinds of different things in music–sometimes in good taste and sometimes not–but it’s praise all the same.  For example, this little diddy by Baby Bash was at the top of the charts a couple years ago: “She moves her body like a cyclone, And she makes me want to do it all night long, Going hard when they turn the spotlights on, Because she moves her body like a cyclone.”  A little different than the first example, but I hope you recognize the point.  Music is an expression of praise.  I like it a lot.  I like worship music most because the subject of God is easily the subject to which I can most freely and whole-heartedly attribute praise.  He’s the only one who deserves it after all.

Nature, the second of Darwin’s lost joys, is a profound source of delight for me.  A couple weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and was unable to get back to sleep.  So I went out at about 4:30 in the morning to take my dog Maggie on a walk. It was still dark, but the first traces of the golden glow were appearing on the eastern horizon.  I got to watch the first moments of the sunrise from a park nearby my house.  It was breathtaking.  I saw a bunch of animals too, which I also think are amazing.  A turtle.  A bunch of tiny frogs (like really tiny; about the size of a pencil eraser). And a bunny.  Not to mention all the little birds flying around singing their songs to usher in the new day.  The chorus of birds was all that you could hear.  It was beautiful.  To see one of those birds hopping from tree to tree and singing for no other reason than their apparent joy in a new day was a precious experience.  It was a good morning.  Sucks for Darwin, who apparently lost the “exquisite delight” that nature used to give him.

Poetry (a stratum of the larger category of Literature) is Darwin’s third lost delight.  Poetry is often another forum for expression of praise.  My enjoyment of poetry and literature is similar to that of music.  But the novel I find particularly fascinating as far as literature is concerned.  The abilities and reaches of the human imagination are astounding.  To think that a person can think up imaginary people and give them thoughts and feelings and motives!  I stumble at some of the author’s apparently limitless genius.  Ayn Rand wrote an 1100 page novel called Atlas Shrugged.  1100 pages! And she made it all up in her head! Crazy! You may think this is dumb.  But if you stop and marvel at the depths of the human imagination it is truly truly amazing.  It all points to the Creator after all.  Poetry or otherwise–Darwin unfortunately couldn’t enjoy these.

Maybe you have noticed the common link between these three categories.  They all are connect by a sense of wonder.  An awe with something that the viewer (or consumer) finds marvelous, but it all points back to the Creator. Darwin couldn’t enjoy these things.  He also couldn’t understand why. He said that his mind had seemed to “become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”  This seems to a mundane existence indeed.  Now let’s try to link this to Darwin’s life.  Darwin gave his life to trying to explain the phenomena in the universe–a noble and fascination vocation to be sure.  He was brilliant, but brilliance apparently does not guarantee happiness. At some point, Darwin must have transitioned from explaining the universe to explaining away the universe.  He wanted an explanation for his own existence, the most fascinating of all phenomena, and arrived at the theory of Evolution.  He explained away his own existence, concluding that his own being was the loftiest of all thruths.  This, I believe, is why Darwin became so miserable.

The pinacle of human desire is to explain the unexplained.  A.W. Toser puts it more eloquently than I ever could, so I’ll just let him do the talking for a second:

[There is a] bent toward origin-seeking so deeply ingrained in all intelligent beings, a bent that impels them to probe ever back and back toward undiscovered beginnings.

Humans love to marvel at things they don’t understand.  Who has not had the experience of walking outside at night and looking up into a clear sky and thinking, “WOW.”  I believe that this desire to probe into “unknown origins” is designed to point us to our Creator.  He is the end to which we work with of our fascination with mystery.  As Augustine said, “thou has made us for thyself O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”  Arguably the most deep human desire is the desire to understand.  But for some reason, we have been wired to find immense pleasure in the process of seeking out understanding.  Sounds like creative genius to me.  This is where Darwin went wrong.  He arrived not at the mysterious Creator but at an end of all mystery.  Therefore, he lost his joy.

For the heart that arrives at the conclusion of a God (Which I think is the only logical conclusion; “Only the fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.” Psalm 53:1) this pleasure that we take in seeking knowledge will never end!  That person can then lose themselves in the mysteries of God himself!  They can eternally delight in the creation because it points them to the Creator that they can never understand.  “At your right hand are pleasures forevermore” -Psalm 16:11.

For Darwin, this pleasure was lost because the mystery was lost.  Poke around in the Psalms for a little bit and see the delights found for a person who seeks after God and loses themself in His mystery.