The Neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural history and experimental genetics forged in the 1930s and 1940s is what today passes as modern evolutionary theory, the first paradigm to encompass all the biological sciences. Charles Darwin had proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection in the mid-nineteenth century, largely by empirically extending Thomas Malthus's anti-welfarist tract An Essay on the Principle of Population from human beings to the rest of the animal kingdom (see social science). Thus, the only sense of progress countenanced in the theory was material survival, and even then understood in terms of number of oftspring visà-vis the carrying capacity of an uncontrollably changing physical environment.

While Darwin's theory of evolution is normally seen as having dealt a death blow to theology's involvement in scientific matters, it is better seen as marking a radical shift in theological orientation. Whereas earlier creationists such as William Paley had expected the divine plan to be inscribed in the design of particular organisms (much as a watch bore the touch of the watchmaker), Darwin, following the example of Malthus (himself an ordained minister), displaced the problem of meaning to an indefinite future, as might be expected of an exceptionally radical Calvinist who wanted to reinforce the idea that divine and human knowledge differ in kind, not degree.

In any case, it is fair to say that Darwin demonstrated a way of doing science that, pace Newton, aimed to do justice to the phenomena of nature without pretending to enter the mind of God.