Darwin and his religious views

There's a bit of fundamentalist folklore that Charles Darwin had some kind of deathbed conversion and renounced the theory of evolution. Or something like that. When you're just making it up like in the case of the fundis with this story, you can adjust the version to fit the occasion anyway.

Here's one description of the tale and its history: The Lady Hope Story - A Widespread Falsehood (2003) by Simon Yates.

This article gives a good sketch of the way in which Darwin's scientific work actually tempered his religious beliefs: Darwin paid for the fury he unleased: How a believer became an iconoclast by John Darnton San Francisco Chronicle 09/25/05. Darnton writes:

The arguments that were used against [Darwin's theory of natural selection] then are very similar to the arguments of creationism and intelligent design today. The difference is that his contemporary defenders had fewer arrows in their quivers because the means of biological inheritance -- DNA -- had not been discovered.

As he aged, Darwin's atheistic convictions became stronger. He conceded Wallace's point that the phrase "survival of the fittest" (coined by the philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer) was preferable to "natural selection" because it eliminated the idea of an entity doing the selecting.

When he wrote "The Origin of Species" (which appeared in 1859), he probably could "be called a theist," he noted later. But by the time he was in his 60s, receiving visitors at Down House as a famous thinker revered around the world, he readily described himself as a nonbeliever.

In his autobiography, written at the age of 73, he takes Christianity to task and looks upon the religious impulse as something that's simply instinctual, "akin to a monkey's fear of a snake," as his biographer, Janet Browne, noted.

To read Browne's book is to get a sense of a man of steely intellect, brave enough to confront "a godless universe."

Darnton also notes that Darwin did not romanticize Nature, either. He quotes from a letter by Darwin to biologist Joseph Hooker:

What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel works of Nature. My God, how I long for my stomach's sake to wash my hands of it.

Just to be clear on one point: the biographical fact of Darwin's later disbelief in the teachings of Christianity and other religions on the supernatural does not mean that the theory of evolution is inherently atheistic or anti-religious. Sensible Christians long ago made their peace with the theory.

As St. Augustine wrote, the Scriptures are meant to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Since Augustine was a favorite theologian of Martin Luther's, it would be a bit hard for Protestant fundamentalists to argue that he was a promoter of atheism and an enemy of Christianity.