He was therefore compelled 'to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man' because of that, he felt it proper to be regarded a theist.īut that was not the end of Darwin's long engagement with the idea of God. In particular, he thought it was nearly impossible to regard the physical universe, life, and man's consciousness as the result of pure chance. At the time he was writing the Origin, he tells us, he found other reasons for believing in the existence of God. He came to regard the Old Testament's history of the world as 'manifestly false.' The more he understood the natural world and its laws the more incredible the biblical miracles appeared to be, and he realized that the gospels were not demonstrably contemporary with the events that they described, and therefore questionable.Įventually Darwin 'came to disbelieve in Christianity as divine revelation.' He remained 'very unwilling to give up my belief' yet, 'disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.' It is important to note that his most decisive objections to Christianity were primarily of an ethical order he found in particular that the idea that nonbelievers were to be everlastingly punished a 'damnable doctrine.'Īlthough deeply dissatisfied with Christianity, he was not done with God. In the following years, doubts began to accumulate in his mind. The discoveries resulting from that voyage provided much of the empirical basis for his theory of evolution. He had boarded that vessel on 27 December 1831 as a naturalist - officially as a 'gentleman companion' to the Captain - for what was meant to be a two-year voyage to remote parts of the world, which eventually lasted five. for quoting the Bible as an unanswerabe authority'. He writes in the Autobiography that when sailing on the Beagle, he was 'quite orthodox and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers.
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In his self-portrayal, the young Darwin evinces a strong faith in Christianity and regards the Bible as the very word of God. It may be useful to note here that Darwin's early education, including his years at Cambridge, proceeded along religious lines, and he was preparing to become an Anglican minister. This kind of interventionist God was criticized by Descartes, Leibniz, and others on the ground that it portrayed a poorly built universe that demanded a continuous tinkering on the part of God to function: and what kind of omniscient and all powerful God would have to do that? However, for Newton the God of these thinkers came too close to rendering the very idea of a Creator ultimately unnecessary: and much of the following developments vindicated his concerns.īut what were Darwin's own views regarding religion? The best source in this regard is his Autobiography 1809-1882 (in Barlow, 1958) - meant to be read only by his family -, composed between 18, toward the end of his life. Without continual divine involvement, the universe would eventually collapse for instance, the orbits of planets have to be divinely maintained. Once created, the universe required no further intervention from God, and could be understood entirely in terms of mechanical principles derived from an observation of physical phenomena.īy contrast, Newton's God remains actively involved in the universe He created. These learned men were deists, for they limited the role of God to the establishment of a mechanical universe. In an important explanatory note in his Principia, Newton outlines his views of God's role in creation, which is markedly different from that of other important philosopher-scientists of that era, such as Descartes, and Leibniz (who independently co-discovered calculus). Recently uncovered theological writings reveal Newton's profound interest in the Bible, especially its chronology and prophecies.
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He believed that Jesus, although the Son of God, was not himself divine, and best regarded as a prophet. Newton maintained his allegiance to the Anglican church, yet rejected one of its fundamental tenets, that of the Holy Trinity. He shared with these giants a generally Christian faith, as well as a propensity to develop personal views on key dogmas of this faith which were often at variance with the orthodoxy of the Denomination to which they ostensibly belonged.
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Newton was fiercely religious: a true theist, just like other promoters of the scientific revolution: Galileo, Kepler, and Bacon. However, Newton emphatically denied any incompatibility between his work in the physical sciences and his research on these subjects. What is rather less known is that Newton pursued lifelong interests, and produced an enormous amount of writings, on subjects as diverse as alchemy, prophecy, theology, biblical chronology, the history of the early church, and more indeed, his work on these subjects quantitatively vastly exceeds his scientific contributions.