Darwin's faith and belief

From Dinesh D'Souza at TownHall.com...

It was in 1859—exactly a century and a half ago—that Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, perhaps the most controversial book of the past millennium and the work that has since made Darwin the patron saint of modern atheism. According to Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”...

So does a belief in evolution automatically lead to disbelief in God? Actually, Darwin didn't think it did. Darwin was not an "intellectually fulfilled atheist"; rather, he called himself an "agnostic."...Moreover, Darwin didn't boast about his unbelief; rather, he approached it with marked public caution. Shocking the mores of traditional believers may be Dawkins' thing but it certainly wasn't Darwin's...

Here we must distinguish between Darwin the scientist and Darwin the unbeliever. Darwin, who was raised Anglican and even considered becoming a clergyman, did eventually relinquish his Christian faith. But he did not do so because of evolution...

When his young daughter Annie died at the age of 10, Darwin came to hate the God whom he blamed for this. This was in 1851, eight years before Darwin released his Origin of Species.

Around the time of Annie's death, Darwin also wrote that if Christianity were true then it would follow that his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and many of his closest family friends would be in hell. Darwin found this utterly unacceptable, given that these men were wise and kind and generous. Darwin's rejection of God was less an act of unbelief as it was a rebellion against the kind of God posited by Christianity....

Now when Darwin published his work on evolution, the American biologist Asa Gray wrote Darwin to say that his book had shown God's ingenious way of ensuring the unity and diversity of life. From Gray’s point of view, Darwin had exposed divine teleology. Darwin praised Gray for seeing a point that no one else had noticed....To the end of his life, Darwin insisted that one could be "an ardent theist and an evolutionist."

This history is important because we can embrace Darwin's account of evolution without embracing his metaphysical naturalism and unbelief. Dawkins, Provine and others are in a way confusing the two faces of Charles Darwin. They are under the illusion that to be an evolutionist is essentially to be an atheist. Darwin, to his credit, rejected the equation of these two stances as illogical, even if he didn't always maintain, within his own life, a clear distinction between his science and his animus toward God.