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==Religious Beliefs==

==Religious Beliefs==

Charles Darwin was a Christian and a Creationist up and through his famous five year voyage on the ''HMS Beagle''. But in the ensuing two years after returning to England (1836 to 1839) at the age of twenty-seven, Darwin abandoned Christianity (1) and [sic] "had become a 'materialist' (more or less equivalent to an atheist" (2). "In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications" (3). According to Darwin, the "manifestly false history of the world" (4) as recorded in the Old Testament and New Testament miracles led him to reject Biblical veracity (5). Eminent Darwin biographer, Professor Janet Browne, sums up Darwin's views concerning religion: Darwin "mapped out a comparitive evolution of the religious sense, proposing that religious belief was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on otherwise inexplicable natural events...In short, he made no secret of his view that he did not believe religion to have any rational foundation at all" (6). Yet, in spite of these views, when he died in 1882 at the age of 73, Darwin was buried at Westminster Abbey next to Sir [[Isaac Newton]].

Charles Darwin was a Christian and a Creationist up and through his famous five year voyage on the ''HMS Beagle''. But in the ensuing two years after returning to England (1836 to 1839) at the age of twenty-seven, Darwin abandoned Christianity (1) and [sic] "had become a 'materialist' (more or less equivalent to an atheist" (2). "In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications" (3). According to Darwin, the "manifestly false history of the world" (4) as recorded in the Old Testament and New Testament miracles led him to reject Biblical veracity (5). Eminent Darwin biographer, Professor Janet Browne, sums up Darwin's views concerning religion: Darwin "mapped out a comparitive evolution of the religious sense, proposing that religious belief was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on otherwise inexplicable natural events...In short, he made no secret of his view that he did not believe religion to have any rational foundation at all" (6). Yet, in spite of these views, when he died in 1882 at the age of seventy-three, Darwin was buried at Westminster Abbey next to Sir [[Isaac Newton]].