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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Charles Darwin's views on religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Darwin's views on religion

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Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who proposed the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

Charles Darwin's views on religion have been the subject of much interest. His work which was pivotal in the development of modern biology and evolution theory played a prominent part in debates about religion and science at the time, then in the early twentieth century became a focus of the creation-evolution controversy in the United States.

Charles Darwin had a non-conformist background, but attended a Church of England school.[1] With the aim of becoming a clergyman he went to the University of Cambridge for the required BA degree, which included studies of Anglican theology. He took great interest in natural history and become filled with zeal for science as defined by John Herschel, based on the natural theology of William Paley which presented the argument from divine design in nature to explain adaptation as God acting through laws of nature.[2][3] On the voyage of the Beagle he remained orthodox and looked for "centres of creation" to explain distribution, but towards the end of the voyage began to doubt that species were fixed.[4][5] By this time he was critical of the Bible as history, and wondered why all religions should not be equally valid. Following his return in October 1836, he developed his novel ideas of geology while speculating about transmutation of species and thinking about religion.[6]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin's_views_on_religion



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