News at Eleven: So bang went any possibility

in believing in the literal truth of every word of scripture. At the same time, there came the even more troubling revelation of the fossils, that the species, far from being created whole and finished, as in Milton's evocation in Paradise Lost, in fact came and went. There were many obsolete animal forms revealed in the fossils. What did this revelation do to the hope that not a sparrow falls to the ground unseen by a loving providence?

From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She [Nature] cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go."

Tennyson imagines Nature looking at "Man, her last work" and being bemused by his faith in a god.

from The Guardian: Tennyson's In Memoriam: a farewell to religious certainty

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