USA: Darwin was ready to abandon his theory. It is not the strongest who survive. What did Darwin really say about evolution? Did Darwin abandon the theory of evolution?

It really doesn't matter if he has already renounced or has not renounced his Theory (only in the understanding of his personality and in relation to himself). Darwin did everything so that people could use his opinion to justify themselves. The theory does not provide any masses of scientists and the basics of biology (do not confuse genetic changes within a species (a rabbit into a fluffy rabbit, a hunting terrier into a Yorkshire terrier) with the transformation of a monkey into a person, no such evidence has been found, nothing like this has been created). And regarding the origin of man, everything is simple: either God created and then you can talk about Love for each other, that it’s bad to lie, to mock a person, a pussy, a dog, a fish - it’s not acceptable that it’s not good to have sex with anyone ( and not only because of syphilis and gonorrhea), everything else is morally meaningless, because. Fyodor Mikhailovich has already written: "If there is no God, everything is permitted." I see no other reason for such a greedy attraction to this issue.

Love for the world and for each other is the natural state of man. Therefore, it is contained in all religions (the initial attempts of prehistoric people to understand the world around them). The evolutionary theory does not raise doubts among people related to the scientific worldview. Man did not come from a monkey, but from a common progenitor with it. This process took millions of years.
There are no other serious explanations for the origin of man!

So much time has passed since the opening of this dispute, I already forgot about it ... Speaking of a common ancestor, one source is meant ... As far as I am aware of the discoveries, there is no single chain, and everything that we were taught at school- these are just versions, all archeology is somehow based on speculation. And if we talk about scientists: they are also different and not everyone understands the issue of Faith, genetics and history ... what can I say, doctors understand only their narrow qualifications. Theologians are also such scientists, and in none of their books can one find where a person came from and for what. Do you really consider it a reasonable and serious explanation that life originated from a grain of dead dust in the entire vast galaxy on a single planet? Excuse me how? That we have not yet observed humanoids from the collider.
"Love for the world and each other is the natural state of man" - this is once again sorry for the harshness Brad with a capital letter, nonsense of pure water, Soviet brainwashing. Love is a completely unnatural state not only of man, but of all creatures on earth , starting with small children who bite, beat each other and rejoice at being at the top of their narrow society, and only thanks to education, free will and God's participation, a person can come to an understanding of what and who is Love (Love is a sacrificial arrangement of the soul. When rejecting myself and my own benefit, I am ready to give my time, integrity, life for the good of my neighbor. How can this be natural?!). Love for the world, flowers, streams, monkeys, a sofa and meatballs is rubbish and death for the soul, there’s nothing to say about it. Everything will rot and nothing will remain, that’s the whole serious explanation.

Roger W. Sanders

Darwin was a product both of his time and of his own character. Like all of us, he tried to comprehend the world in which he lived. However, true knowledge of the world begins with trust in God and His Word. Unfortunately, our nature rebels against a loving Creator.

“For this is good and pleasing to our Savior God, who wants all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”- 1 Timothy 2:3-4

“God-hater Darwin was determined to turn the whole essence of Christian culture upside down” - this is how many Christians think about Darwin. But let's dig deeper.

In fact, this is very easy to do, since from an early age until his death, Darwin kept personal records. When we try to get to the bottom of the truth, we see not a cruel and terrible person, but an intellectual who brought to the surface many of the contradictions and conflicts that prevail in British culture of the Victorian era. He was a man like everyone else, a man whom God wanted to save. Even secular biographers unconsciously declare, "God was after Darwin."

What motivated Darwin?

Charles grew up in a wealthy middle class family. His mother died when he was eight years old, which left Charles very depressed, and with his father, a successful doctor, they were not emotionally close. However, Charles soon learned how to get the "Doctor" to give him what he wanted. Later, when Charles grew up, he often used this special talent to enlist the support of his colleagues and persuade them to his opinion.

Although he was calm and well-mannered, Darwin was still an egocentric person. For example, when he once listed about twenty reasons for and against continuing to court and marry him, all the arguments concerned his convenience and safety.

“Now it seems ridiculous to me that I once intended to become a priest. Not that I formally retracted my intention and my father's desire to become a priest, this desire simply died a natural death after I left Cambridge and, as a naturalist, ended up on beagle". — The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1876)

Despite his selfishness, Charles could also be generous. For most of his life, he supported the South American mission, which preached the gospel to the local inhabitants of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. He did not care at all about their souls, he just wanted these "savages" whom he met during his journey to beagle had a better life. Although he did not attend church in the village of Dawn, he became a close friend of the parish priest, and the villagers considered him a kind and generous advocate for the parishioners.

Like many scientists, Darwin took himself quite seriously. In his early years, this manifested itself when he tried to please his superiors and educators. As an adult with many responsibilities, he paid more attention to professional, social, political and economic success. As his ideas developed after the trip to beagle, he did not know what to do: to openly declare his views or secretly harbor them until the favorable time comes, so that the discovery of these ideas does not destroy him and his family.

As a boy, Charles scoured the coasts, hills and forests for shells and beetles. It was from that time that he developed a love for compiling catalogs of found samples and recording information. While traveling to beagle for about five years (1831–36), he perfected these skills to enrich the collections of the Museum of England and to ensure that he would be immediately accepted into scientific circles upon his return. Later, these same skills turned him into a person who collects, analyzes, describes and theoretically evaluates his collected samples.

Darwin's diary, which he wrote during a journey called was an instant success. The thirty-year-old celebrity enjoyed the attention that fell upon him from London intellectual circles until he began to suffer from severe stomach pains. This caused him to retire with his family in the village of Daun, and insisted that his colleagues only meet with him face to face.

Darwin traveled the world for about five years on a ship called Beagle(1831–36). Publication of a description of his journey, (1839), brought recognition to the thirty-year-old Darwin. his famous work Origin of Species he published about twenty years later (1859).

More and more was known about heredity, and Darwin suspected that his chronic disease was hereditary because his parents were first cousins. Since he married his cousin, he blamed himself for the fact that his children began to show signs of his illness. In addition, a lot of stress could play a role. He was forced to hide his thoughts from the professional world, which would have expelled him if everything became known. In 1844, he finally revealed his theory to a colleague he could trust and confessed that for him it was like "confessing to murder."

Who influenced Darwin?

Although Darwin interacted with evolutionists and anti-religious scientists such as Robert Grant, Thomas Huxley, and his dabbler brother Erasmus, some of the people God brought him closer to show how God sought to save Darwin. His father, the Doctor, renounced the atheistic teachings of Darwin's grandfather Erasmus when Darwin's name became more associated with wealth, respectability and political correctness. Instead, he wrapped his son, Charles, in a formal Anglican education that was heavily drenched in Scripture and Christian orthodoxy.

Years later, Darwin recalled that when he went to study at Cambridge, he "fully accepted" the Apostles' Creed, or at least "had no desire to challenge the creed." Charles became especially close to Christian mentors such as the botanist Rev. John Henslow and the geologist Rev. Adam Sedwick, and friends such as the passionate evangelist Robert Fitzrow, Capt. beagle. However, the closest were the "women of the Wedgwood family" - his mother, sisters, wife and daughters. Even though they were Unitarians, they continued to talk to Darwin about eternity. By the time Charles and Emma were married, he was already questioning his personal relationship with God, the inspiration of the Bible, the soul, and eternity.

Fearing that Charles, like a branch, would be thrown into the fire, Emma tried to convince him through letters in which she implored him to take seriously the words Jesus said during the supper in John 13-17(b). In her, in Darwin's words, "beautiful letter," she wrote: “You expose yourself to great danger when you refuse God's revelation. . . and from what has been done for you and for the whole world. . . . I would be the most miserable if I knew that we would not spend eternity together.”

He kept this letter all his life, and in response to her, he sketched out only a couple of lines: “When I die, know that I have read your letter many times and wept over it.”. Through the power of Scripture, which Emma lovingly shared with him (and despite her own personal doctrinal error), God showed him the way to salvation.

product of its time

Though God caught Darwin's attention again and again through his familiarity with Scripture, he still resisted. Part of his resistance was the result of the fact that he was the product of a culture that opposed biblical authority despite the fact that it was called Christian. In particular, most of the British priests and church scientists were supporters of natural theology - the concept of God, which originated in the late 1600s. In Darwin's youth, they argued that we can only see God and His attributes through human thinking, without the help of Scripture. This erroneous approach led to three main concepts of natural theology that undermined the authority of the Bible:

Creation is immutable; otherwise the revelation of God would change and we could not know Him.

Problem: such a statement denies the fall of Adam and the Flood and the consequences of these events.

Creation was given the right to exist on its own in accordance with the immutable laws of nature, which have always operated in the same way as they do today.

Problem: such a statement denies that miracles can happen.

Whenever the Bible disagrees with science, God adjusts the words in the Bible to the primitive thinking of ancient man, and science must be accepted as the true explanation.

Problem: Science transcends Scripture.

Based on this erroneous theology, the scientific dogma of Darwin's time was that species cannot change, even though the Bible never states so. On the other hand, people could see that the earth was changing: rivers flooded, rocks eroded, volcanoes erupted, and earthquakes changed the landscape. Therefore, they came to the conclusion that the earth has changed since creation, but very slowly and with the help of these processes. Since the sedimentary rocks are very thick in many places, most scientific researchers of the early 1800s concluded that these geological changes took place over millions of years. Almost none of them believed in a literal global Flood and all that it implied, ie. fast changes.

So when Darwin stepped on deck beagle, he was half "creationist" created by the science of the time. He believed that the earth was millions of years old, that the species of organisms never changed (although it was not known when they were created), and that the Bible did not say anything significant about this. He belonged to the financially privileged class and craved recognition from the aristocratic scientific community, and was also distrustful of social radicals and revolutionaries.

One page of his diary contains an outline of Darwin's preliminary reflection on common ancestry.

Darwin was taught to think. The problem was that he started with the wrong assumptions, not understanding the Scriptures. So when the Beagle walked past fossil-filled beds, eroded valleys, unique island fauna and submerged volcanoes, he saw nature in a way no one in England had ever taught him to see. He saw species as the product of change, but not the change that came after the global Flood. He saw rock layers as the product of processes, not processes that date back to the time of the Biblical catastrophe. He saw various kinds of plants and animals, but could not see the abyss between the various "created kinds" that were originally created by God.

But perhaps the most important thing that Darwin could not understand was how a merciful and loving God could allow such phenomena as death and suffering to exist in the natural world and among people. According to natural theology, death and suffering have always been a part of nature since the beginning of creation. If so, then this God was not the God of Christianity or the Bible, but insensible and distant and only the one who created all the starting points of matter and the laws of nature. Based on all this, Darwin came to the conclusion that all the diversity of life developed gradually, and God had nothing to do with it.

And if Darwin could show that species do change and propose the laws of nature according to which new species are formed, then he could convince his colleagues that evolution is true. For the ruling class and spiritual scientists, who had already compromised and believed in the ancientness of the earth, the last barrier to the acceptance of evolution was the unbiblical concept of the unchangeable species. Darwin was such a perfect product of his time that, despite all the years of anxiety and illness, his scientific arguments, set out in the work Origin of Species convinced almost all of his colleagues.

Whenever Scripture said anything about science, most British Christians mistrusted it, believing that science had more authority than Scripture. Therefore, evolution has not caused any conflict. Scholars have generally accepted evolution as God's way of creation, which lasts for a long time, despite the fact that it involves heavy death and suffering for millions of years. In fact, evolution has become a matter of national pride. For the British elite, Victorian England testified to the heights to which evolution could bring human intelligence and power.

Did Darwin realize that his assumptions and ideas reflected a rejection of the authority of Scripture in every field it touched, including science? No doubt he did, but he didn't seem to care much; lack of scriptural authority was part of the religious upbringing and scientific training he received from his parents, teachers, and colleagues. So for him it was not the main problem.

Did he understand the philosophical implications of his ideas? Definitely - his secret diaries, which he dared not reveal even to his closest friends, show that he struggled with the fact that evolution could undermine people's faith in God. But he seems to have been more concerned with the effect that undermining other people's faith might have on him and his social standing than what it would mean for other people.

Despite the fact that Darwin tried to understand the origin of life forms from a purely scientific point of view, he was never able to solve religious questions. Does God participate in all these processes or does he exist at all? Was Jesus' sacrificial death senseless?

And while God pursued Darwin enough to know where to look for answers to questions, he never turned to the Bible to find those answers. He chose not to look there.

The most frequently asked questions about Darwin

Darwin studied to be a scientist? Yes and no. In those days, no one studied to be a scientist.

Studies included areas such as medicine, the humanities, or theology, and doing science was something of a hobby. Darwin began studying medicine in Edinburgh and completed his studies at Cambridge, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in the hope of becoming a parish priest. While studying at school, he was most given natural history, which he was personally taught by professors of medicine and theology, known as experienced geologists, zoologists and botanists.

Were Darwin's parents and grandparents evolutionists?

Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, doctor, was a political freethinker devoted to evolutionary ideas. Maternal grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was a wealthy industrialist and friend of Erasmus, but had Unitarian views and was a little concerned about this issue. His grandfather Robert Darwin strove for decency and did not publicly express his views on this issue.

What does it have to do with Beagle

Huge! On the recommendation of the Rev. John Henslow, Darwin was invited to travel on a British ship called Beagle, with the aim of exploring the coast of South America. The captain, the aristocrat Robert FitzRoy, wanted a gentleman on board his ship who would conduct research in the field of natural history and with whom he could make friends. Darwin took full advantage of this opportunity to gain recognition as an accomplished geologist and biologist.

What is said in the work Origin of Species about the origin of man?

Nothing. In fact, Darwin knew that in 1859 this issue was the most hotly debated issue. He waited until the scientific community accepted the theory of evolution, and then in 1871 he published his work Human Origins.

What do finches and Darwin have in common?

In the Galapagos Islands, Darwin collected a collection of many species of birds. He found the specimens of these birds obscure and realized that they were all varieties of finches after he returned to England and examined them. However, Darwin immediately established that the mockingbird species he discovered on the island belonged to one unstable group, which made him doubt that species could not change.

Did Darwin repent before his death?

No. This rumor was started by Lady Elizabeth Hope, who, during a missionary trip to the parts where Darwin lived, once visited him six months before his death. Her story was published in Baptist Watchman-Examiner in 1915, after she immigrated to the United States, she actively wrote sermon pamphlets for many years. She no doubt embellished her story, which was that Lady Elizabeth Hope saw Darwin read the Bible (which could very well be true, given his interest in comparing philosophies). She spoke of his admiration for Scripture, but did not say that he repented before his death or abandoned evolution.

Why is Darwin buried in Westminster Priory?

This was insisted on by his students. Darwin was to be buried in the cemetery in the village of Down. However, his cousin Francis Galton and "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Huxley successfully used their influence in scientific and political circles and wrote a petition to Parliament asking for permission to bury Darwin in London's most famous Anglican church.

Dr. Roger Sanders He received his PhD in Botany from the University of Texas. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Bryan College and Associate Director of the Center for Origins Research.

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First of all, I would like to emphasize that this often mentioned myth has absolutely nothing to do with the dispute between creationists and evolutionists. Darwin did not give up his beliefs. Nor was he an atheist. In his youth he was an orthodox, however, rather sluggish, in adulthood he switched to unorthodox theism, and in his old age he became an agnostic. Rumors about Darwin's conversion were circulated in some evangelical circles. However, neither Darwin's biographers nor other sources confirm this information. Indeed, a study of the letters written by Charles Darwin shortly before his death, during the period of his alleged conversion, clearly shows that there were no changes in his heart and thoughts. Apparently, Darwin until the last day of his life remained an evolutionist and agnostic.

Another common misconception about Darwin is that his main work was primarily an attempt to put the idea of evolution on a solid scientific foundation. If there was such a task, then it was secondary. Darwin's scientific evidence in support of evolution was not particularly impressive. Darwin, who did not receive a systematic education in the natural sciences, believed in the theory, already debunked by science, that organisms allegedly inherit acquired characteristics. And although Darwin made great contributions to many natural sciences such as zoology, botany, geology, and paleontology, his most significant and lasting achievements are not in the natural sciences, but in philosophy.

"He who does not look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as something incoherent, can no longer think that man was the fruit of a separate act of creation."

Charles Darwin

On the birthday of the greatest naturalist Charles Darwin, I publish several inaccuracies, misconceptions and unreliable information about him, which I encountered on the Internet and in some television programs.
Perhaps this publication will help shed light or remember who the great British naturalist was and who he was not.

1) Charles Darwin is the author of the statement: "Man is descended from apes." Darwin made no such statements, and you will not find such statements in his writings.
This myth about Darwin was most likely born in a clerical environment in which his activities, to put it mildly, did not arouse sympathy. Charles was only trying to substantiate the idea that modern apes and humans had a common ancestor, although Darwin was not the first to claim that apes and humans are related.

2) Darwin was the first to say that humans and apes have a common ancestor. This is not so, because the first to put forward this idea was Buffon, a French naturalist, in his work "Natural History", at the end of the 18th century. And Carl Linnaeus in the same century placed man in his taxonomy in the order of primates (where man, as a species, quite rightly remains to this day).

Later, on the basis of comparative anatomical and embryological data, Darwin substantiated the statement about the common origin of man and modern anthropoid apes from an ancient original ancestor. In the 20th century, this theory was also reliably confirmed by the data of molecular biology and numerous paleontological finds.

3) Darwin was the author of the first theory of evolution. It depends what is considered a theory ... It is believed that the author of the first more or less internally consistent theory of evolution, namely the concept of how and due to what this process occurs, was Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). However, the basic provisions of his theory (inheritance of acquired traits and the “striving for perfection” inherent in all living things) were not further confirmed, at least in the form in which Lamarck expressed them. Darwin, in his theory, abandoned the second fundamental component of his predecessor - the "tendency for perfection", and introduced a different creative force into the theory of evolution - natural selection, which remains, perhaps, the main engine of evolution in biology to this day.

4) Charles Darwin at the end of his life "renounced his theory." This story is not supported by any facts. The story of "Darwin's renunciation" and that on his deathbed he allegedly believed in God first appeared many years after the scientist's death, in 1915. This story was published in an American Baptist publication by the preacher Elizabeth Hope, who, by the way, never met Darwin. Where does she get this information from? Apparently, as a revelation from above... However, neither in Darwin's autobiography, written by him shortly before his death, nor in the memoirs of his relatives, there are any hints that the great naturalist at the end of his life had any doubts about his views.

5) Darwin was a believer. Every now and then in the statements of apparently insufficiently informed individuals, such statements emerge. However, not only about Darwin, but also about Einstein and Pavlov fall into such delusions.
Here is a curious quote on this subject from a certain priest Alexander Shumsky:

“Darwin himself regarded his theory of evolution as merely a hypothesis. He was a believer and did not stop repeating that the evolutionary chain originates from the Throne of God. He unequivocally recognized God as the Creator of the world, of all living things... He was a deeply religious person, and he himself would have been horrified by what his theory had been turned into. I don't doubt it at all."
And you should doubt it, father Alexander. If you read his autobiography, you would know that for some time Darwin believed in God and was going to become a priest, but over time this belief passed like a cold on the lip, although not so quickly. Darwin became more of an agnostic.
Here are a couple of quotes from Darwin himself that dispel the myth of his deep faith:

"There is nothing more remarkable than the spread of religious infidelity, or rationalism, during the second half of my life." (Ch. Darwin Memories of the Development of My Mind and Character. Autobiography.)

“While sailing the Beagle, I was quite orthodox; I remember how some officers (although they themselves were orthodox people) laughed heartily at me when, on some moral issue, I referred to the Bible as an indisputable authority. I think they were amused by the novelty of my argument. However, during this period [i.e. October 1836 to January 1839] I gradually came to realize that the Old Testament, with its apparently false history of the world, with its tower of Babel, rainbow as a sign of the covenant, etc., etc., and with its attribution the god of feelings of a vengeful tyrant is no more trustworthy than the sacred books of the Hindus or the beliefs of some savage. At that time, one question continually arose in my mind, from which I could not get rid of: if God wished now to send down a revelation to the Hindus, would he really allow it to be connected with belief in Vishnu, Siva, etc., in the same way that Christianity is related to belief in the Old Testament? It seemed absolutely incredible to me.” (ibid.)

6) Darwin lost his faith in God after the death of his daughter.
There is no direct documentary evidence for this claim. Neither Darwin himself nor his contemporaries wrote about it. This hypothesis was formulated by biographer James Moore. However, Darwin describes his own loss of faith in his autobiography, and gives many other reasons that have nothing to do with the death of Annie, his daughter.

7) Darwin falsified his theory and it was created under the auspices of secret Masonic societies. Adherents of this point of view often refer to the fact that the father and grandfather of Charles Darwin were Freemasons. For lovers of dubious conspiracy theories, Masonic societies are such secret organizations that almost worship the Devil himself and are, again, according to these conspiracy theorists, the main evil for humanity.
Still, the sources of information are not clear either that Darwin's relatives had some kind of secret interest in the work of the scientist, or that he himself was somehow connected with secret societies. If Darwin's theory had been falsified by him, it would have come to light fairly quickly. There would be no Wallace, who, independently of Darwin, came to the same conclusions about the role of natural selection in evolution. There would be no further confirmation of the theory of evolution. Although maybe here the Masons had a hand? :) It is not clear why, in this case, Darwin was so slow to publish his work (about 20 years). Probably waiting for an order for publication from the reptilians ... Oh, that is, from secret societies. :)

In fact, there are more myths and dubious information around Darwin. Therefore, when you discover some unconfirmed information, not only about Darwin, but also about any other great person, it is important to doubt the reliability of the information and ask yourself: what is the source behind this?