Religious views of Charles Darwin

To Darwin, natural selection produced the good of adaptation but removed the need for design,[9] and he could not see the work of an omnipotent deity in all the pain and suffering such as the ichneumon wasp paralysing caterpillars as live food for its eggs.

[21] Natural history had grown from the idea that the different kinds of plants and animals showed the wonder of God's creation, making their study and cataloguing into species worthwhile.

When Darwin proved unable to persevere at medical studies, his father sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican parson.

During Darwin's second year, the harmony was disturbed when Cambridge was briefly visited by the Radicals Richard Carlile and the Revd Robert Taylor on an "infidel home missionary tour", causing a stir before being banned.

Paley saw a rational proof of God's existence in the complexity and perfect adaptation to needs of living beings exquisitely fitted to their places in a happy world, while attacking the evolutionary ideas of Erasmus Darwin as coinciding with atheistic schemes and lacking evidence.

[25][30] He also read Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative, and the two books were immensely influential, stirring up in him "a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.

"[26] Darwin planned a visit to the tropics before settling down as a clergyman, and on Henslow's advice studied geology with Adam Sedgwick, finding about the ancient age of the Earth,[31] then went with him for two weeks surveying strata in Wales.

[33] He saw landforms as supporting Lyell's Uniformitarianism which explained features as the outcome of a gradual process over huge periods of time, and quickly showed a gift for theorising about the geology he was examining.

Around 1825 both Lyell and Sedgwick had supported William Buckland's Catastrophism which postulated diluvialism to reconcile findings with the Biblical account of Noah's ark, but by 1830 evidence had shown them that the "diluvium" had come from a series of local processes.

[6][37] In Australia, reflecting on the marsupial kangaroos and potoroos, he thought them so strange that an unbeliever "might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work; their object however has been the same & certainly the end in each case is complete'", yet an antlion he was watching was very similar to its European counterpart.

[40] FitzRoy too had seen geological features as supporting Lyell's timescale, and on his return to England extracts from his diary stressing the immense age of the Patagonian raised beaches were read to the Royal Geographical Society,[41] but he married a very religious lady and in his Narrative of the voyage added a supplement regretting having "remarked to a friend" that these vast plains "could never have been effected by a forty days' flood", remarks he ascribed to his own "turn of mind and ignorance of scripture" during the voyage.

Again he discussed his ideas, and about ten days later she wrote, "When I am with you I think all melancholy thoughts keep out of my head but since you are gone some sad ones have forced themselves in, of fear that our opinions on the most important subject should differ widely.

[53] On 11 January 1844 Darwin mentioned his theorising to the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, writing with melodramatic humour "I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression' 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals' &c,—but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his—though the means of change are wholly so—I think I have found out (here's presumption!)

During Annie's long illness Darwin had read books by Francis William Newman, a Unitarian evolutionist who called for a new post-Christian synthesis and wrote that "the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil".

[61][62] In 1860 seven liberal Anglican theologians caused a much greater furore by publishing a manifesto titled Essays and Reviews in which they sought to make textual criticism of the Bible available to the ordinary reader, as well as supporting Darwin.

"[citation needed] It argued that the Bible should not be read in an entirely literal manner, thus and would in the future become "a bogey of Christian fundamentalists ... but this was only because Western people had lost the original sense of the mythical.

[65] Even when writing On the Origin of Species in the 1850s he was still inclined to theism, but his views gradually changed to agnosticism: Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight.

This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.

Ffinden now usurped control of the village school which had been run for years by a committee of Darwin, Lubbock and the incumbent priest, with a "conscience clause" which protected the children from Anglican indoctrination.

Though Darwin no longer attended church, he was willing to give patronage to Non-conformism, and the family welcomed and supported the work of the Non-conformist evangelist J. W. C. Fegan in the village of Downe.

[79] When Brodie Innes sent on a sermon by E. B. Pusey, Darwin responded that he could "hardly see how religion & science can be kept as distinct as he desires, as geology has to treat of the history of the Earth & Biology that of man.— But I most wholly agree with you that there is no reason why the disciples of either school should attack each other with bitterness, though each upholding strictly their beliefs.

It is an old doctrine of mine that it is of foremost importance for a young author to publish ... only what is very good & new ... remember that an enemy might ask who is this man ... that he should give to the world his opinions on the deepest subjects?

While Francis Galton thought it a "good séance", Darwin later wrote "The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe such rubbish"[84] and told Emma that it was "all imposture" and "it would take an enormous weight of evidence" to convince him otherwise.

Aveling and Büchner questioned what would have happened if Darwin had been given that advice before publication of the Origin, and had confined "the revolutionary truths of Natural and Sexual Selection to the judicious few", where would the world be?

"[93] Darwin's Westminster Abbey funeral expressed a public feeling of national pride, and religious writers of all persuasions praised his "noble character and his ardent pursuit of truth", calling him a "true Christian gentleman".

At first he had been unwilling to give up his faith, and had tried to "invent evidence" supporting the Gospels, but just as his clerical career had died a slow "natural death", so too did his belief in "Christianity as a divine revelation".

He was quick to show Emma's side of the story and pay tribute to "your mother, ... so infinitely my superior in every moral quality ... my wise adviser and cheerful comforter".

[94] This included statements discussed above in Autobiography on gradually increasing disbelief, and others such as the following: The "Lady Hope Story", first published in 1915, claimed that Darwin had reverted to Christianity on his sickbed.