Darwin Versus Christ

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Slide 33

Darwin’s own experience

Slide 34

Slide 35

Darwin’s own experience

Slide 36

Charles Darwin was raised

within Unitarianism

on Sundays his mother

Susannah, daughter of

the noted Unitarian

Josiah Wedgwood,

regularly took her

children to the

Unitarian chapel

Slide 37

Darwin’s own experience

in 1827, as he prepared to

study for the Anglican ministry,

Darwin investigated, and

appeared to be comfortable with,

Trinitarian orthodoxy

(Adrian Desmond and James Moore.1994. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented

Evolutionist. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. 48ff.)

even as late as the mid-1830s,

when aboard the Beagle,

Darwin was “heartily laughed at

Slide 38

during and after his Beagle voyage,

Darwin was progressively becoming

more and more agnostic

he gave up any trust in the

Old Testament as a divine

book, he rejected miracles,

he dismissed the credibility of

the gospels, and he “gradually

came to disbelieve in Christianity

as a divine revelation.”

Slide 39

by 1851, when his favourite

daughter died, Darwin had lost

any vestige of Christian faith

“Annie’s cruel death destroyed

Charles’s tatters of belief in a

moral, just universe. Later he

would say that this period

chimed the final death-knell for

his Christianity, even if it had

been a long, drawn-out process

of decay. . . . Charles now took

his stand as an unbeliever.”

Slide 40

in 1876 (six years before

his death) Darwin wrote:

“The old argument from

design in Nature, as given

by Paley,which formerly

seemed to me so conclusive,

fails, now that the law of

natural selection has been discovered.”

Slide 41

It is true that Darwin was willing to use the term “Creator” at the conclusion of his Origin of Species (published in 1859).

But it seems that, at best, he was acknowledging merely the possibility of some sort of “First Cause” or “philosopher’s God.”

Slide 42