Darwin’s religious beliefs

The conventional wisdom is that Charles Darwin was a Christian whose scientific discoveries led him away from God.  But does the evidence support that view? From Theist, Agnostic, Atheist: Will the Real Charles Darwin Please Stand Up?:

Some , like Alberto Kornblihtt, rather naively claim, “Darwin believed in God and his body is buried in Westminster Abbey.”  The standard rendering of Charles Darwin’s faith, however, is that it was a slow imperceptible slide into unbelief. On that we have Darwin’s own word. On religious matters he said, “I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convinced me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.”

But if you read Darwin’s earlier writings you’ll discover that the statement in bold is almost certainly and deliberately false.

This received canon notwithstanding, others are less convinced. Stanley Jaki has noted: “The publication in full of Darwin’s Early Notebooks forces one to conclude that in writing his Autobiography Darwin consciously lied when he claimed that he slowly, unconsciously slipped into agnosticism. He tried to protect his own family as well as the Victorian public from the shock of discovering that his Notebooks resounded with militant materialism. The chief target of the Notebooks is man’s mind, the ‘citadel,’ in Darwin’s words, which was to be conquered by his evolutionary theory if its materialism were to be victorious.”

Go read the whole article.  It is quite compelling.

Is Darwinian evolution compatible with theism? It surley was never intended to be and certainly never intended to be compatible with Christianity, though Darwin was more than willing to enlist religious allies on its behalf.

. . .

So Darwin’s cagey religious minimalism would almost surely have stumped everyone on “To Tell the Truth.” Depending on the question he could appear weakly agnostic or even theistic at times. It is only after looking carefully at his private notebooks and matching his early experiences with his later writings that a coherent pattern emerges. Once identified as an undogmatic atheist or an agnostic atheist the real Charles Darwin can then stand up.

Even in Darwin’s day Liberal “Christians” rushed to support his views.  Darwin wanted his theory advanced by all means, so he accepted the support even while disbelieving in theistic evolution.

Once the theory was accepted,” Wiker adds, “the theistic patina would be ground away by the hard, anti-theistic core of the argument.

Go see the movie Expelled! and note how the Darwinists are still treating Liberal Christians as useful idiots in advancing their worldview.

Whether Darwin was honest about the impact of his religious views on his science is irrelevant as to whether the evidence supports his overall theory (it doesn’t).  But it is useful to explode the myths perpetuated by false teachers who would rather preach on Darwin than Jesus. 

While Darwinism doesn’t require atheism, atheism does require Darwinism.  That is why the New Atheists defend the Darwinian dogma with a ferocity that would make a stereotypical fundie Christian blush.