Before Darwin, and after

Christopher Hitchens's interesting collection of "essential readings for the non-believer" (published in 2007 under the catchy title, The Portable Atheist) includes an essay by George Eliot (1819-1880) ridiculing the evangelistic career of the Reverend John Cumming (1807-1881)—originally published in 1855, in the Westminster Review.
    It is tonic to realize how energetic the criticism of religion was even before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.  Readings in Hitchens's collection include essays by Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) (from his Theologico-Political Treatise), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) ("Of Religion," from his Leviathan), David Hume (1711-1776) ("Of Miracles," from his Natural History of Religion), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) (from his treatise, The Necessity of Atheism). Reading Shelley's poetry hadn't prepared me for his biting, self-assured prose (written at age about nineteen).

    And these critics included at least one brave woman; "George Eliot" was Mary Anne Evans's pen name:

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?
    ...Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood...So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible.

While finding that text from George Eliot on the web (since I no longer have the library's copy of Hitchens's book), I came upon this interesting bit on ethical arguments against religion in Victorian Britain:

As David J. DeLaura and a number of other historians of Victorian intellectual life have pointed out, many Victorian atheists and agnostics abandoned Christianity for a particularly Victorian reason: They found it immoral!

The loss of religious faith in such representative early Victorian aginostics as F. W. Newman (John Henry Newman's brother), J. A. Froude (brother of Newman's close friend, Hurrell Froude), and George Eliot was not due, in the first place, to the usually suggested reasons—the rise of evolutionary theory in geology and biology and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Indeed, in each life the dominant factor was a growing repugnance toward the ethical implications of what each had been taught to believe as essential Christianity—especially the set of interrelated doctrines: Original Sin, Reprobation, Baptismal Regeneration, Vicarious Atonement, Eternal Punishment. [p. 13 of DeLaura's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969]

    George MacDonald, for example, left his Congregationalist pulpit because he could not accept that God would damn for all eternity babies who had not been baptised before their death, and similar repugnance proved the straw that broke the camel's back for Ruskin. In St. Paul and Protestantism, Arnold "contemptuously rejects the 'monstrous' vision of a capricious God who deals in election and predestination and cruelly emphasizes the crass commercial quality of the Puritan catchwords, 'covenant,' 'ransom,' 'redeem,' 'purchase,' 'bargain.'"

Rev. Cumming seems not to have abandoned Christianity, but rather championed it, or at least some of its parts that weren't Roman Catholic.

    Cherry picking is alive and well. In Gainesville, Florida, evangelical pastor Terry Jones is all for religion and God and holy books, just not Islam and Allah and the Koran, copies of which he might yet decide to burn tomorrow.