Ever since The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Charles Darwin's followers have co-opted him as the patron saint of materialism. In False Messiah, longtime Darwinist and agnostic Neil Thomas looks at how Darwinism triumphed, and he challenges the official story with an exploration richly informed by his expertise in rhetoric and cultural history. What of Darwinism's present status? Like Marxism—that other great materialist theory of the Victorian age—Darwinism has become "the God that failed." As Thomas shows, although Darwinism has done incalculable damage to our culture, there is hope for renewal in contemporary scientific findings that are reinvigorating the argument to design as well as in what amounted to an ingenious flanking movement against modern materialism—the spiritually charged philosophy of nature developed in the poetry of William Wordsworth.