Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Darwin & God


Because Darwin advocated natural processes for explaining life on Earth, rather than invoking the special creation of every organism by a omniscient being, another widely held misconception about Darwin was that he did not believe in God.

In fact, Darwin was a deeply devout man who studied to be a clergyman at Cambridge, but who also had his faith severely tested by several personal tragedies including the death of three of his children.

Near the end of his life, Darwin described himself as an agnostic—one who concludes that God is "unknowable", that humans cannot prove or disprove the existence of a God. He wrote, ""I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."

Darwin never lost his sense of wonder at the beauty and intricacy of the natural world and strove to uncover the natural laws that resulted in what he described at the end of his book “Origin of Species” as “endless forms most beautiful"

Photo credit: http://caxton.emich.edu/guide/images/darwin-god.jpg

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