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==Religious Beliefs==

==Religious Beliefs==

Darwin's upbringing was a mix of Unitarian and Anglican Christianity. Throughout his life, he began to steadily drift away from Christianity and in particular trusting the accounts of the Old Testament, a process which began as early as his journey on the Beagle. Late in life he described himself as an agnostic, but always rejected the idea that he did not believe in God, accepting instead that there must have been some Prime Mover. He also remained actively involved in his local parish and never officially left his church. His wife, Emma, was throughout her life a faithful Unitarian.

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 during the same timespan he [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, many things written in the Bible is what caused him to lose his faith. He cited the "manifestly false history of the world" (4) as recorded in the Old Testament and New Testament miracles as reasons for rejecting 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.

 

 

 

1. Mayr, Ernst ''Growth of Biological Thought'' (1982:402).

 

2. Mayr, Ernst ''One Long Argument'' (1991:75).

 

 

4. Barlow, Nora (editor) ''The Autobiography of Charles Darin'' (1958:85).

 

 

6. Browne, Janet ''Darwin, The Power of Place'' (2002:341)

== External Links ==

== External Links ==

*[http://creationwiki.org/Darwin%27s_Illness Darwin's illness - CreationWiki]

*[http://creationwiki.org/Darwin%27s_Illness Darwin's illness - CreationWiki]