达尔文与基督教世界的沟通 他的跨洋策略

Darwin Communicates with the Christian World His Transatlantic Strategy

在达尔文出生的那个年代,没有人会接受关于进化和人类起源的自然主义学说,他在那个时代分享了他关于自然、上帝以及历史的观念。在"贝格尔号"航行之后,他提出的"生命始于同一祖先"理论如何能令人信服,是他面临的巨大挑战。自从达尔文开始进化论的研究之后,他对"我的理论"的推广并非一定意在反驳宗教教义,而是作为宗教和科学的进步。达尔文深信的一条教义,就是人类具有共同祖先或者说所有种族皆兄弟——这可作为废除黑奴制度的一个理论根据。英国已于1838年废除了奴隶制,世界的目光于是转向美国——该国奴隶制正如火如荼,并得到一种支持奴隶制、主张人种多元的新特创论的支持。达尔文的跨洋策略自19世纪50年代开始便深深影响着美国反奴隶制的精英博物学家,他们对共同祖先理论的支持将被用来颠覆这一人种多元特创论——比用《圣经》中那不足凭信的人种同一论更为有效。因此,他的理论可作为道德和科学领域的进步而引起美国基督教世界废奴主义者的兴趣。然而,该策略却从未完全发挥自身所有的潜力,这使特创论在20世纪萌生了新的形式。

Born into a world without an audience for naturalistic theories of evolution and human origins, Charles Darwin came of age sharing many of his world＇ s beliefs about nature, God and history. After the Beagle voyage he faced the challenge of gaining an audience for his private theorizing about life＇ s evolution from ＂one common ancestor＂ .？From the start of his evolution-research he aimed to promote ＂my theory＂ , not necessarily as the negation of religious doctrines, but as a religious- scientific advance. One such doctrine, to which he adhered deeply, was a belief in the common-ancestry or brotherhood of the human races as the moral basis for abolishing black chattel slavery. With abolition complete in the British Empire in 1838, all eyes turned to the United States, where slavery flourished alongside a new slavery- sanctioning, race-pluralist creationism. Darwin＇ s transatlantic strategy from the 1850s was to cultivate elite anti-slavery Yankee naturalists whose sponsorship of his common-descent theory would serve to undermine this pluralist creationism more effectively than discredited scriptural arguments for human racial unity. His theory could thus appeal as a moral-scientific advance to abolitionist Christian America. But the strategy never realized its potential, leaving new forms of creationism to spring up in the twentieth century？