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Charles Darwin
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Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England on 12 February 1809 at The Mount, the house his father built in 1800 on the River Severn. He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor Robert Darwin and Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood). He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his father's side, and of Josiah Wedgwood on his mother's side. (Charles later forged another Darwin-Wedgwood link by marrying his Cousin Emma Wedgwood, and his sister ... married into the Wedgwoods: see Darwin — Wedgwood family). Both families were largely Unitarian, and Robert Darwin was practically a Freethinker but for appearances sake adopted the conventional Anglicanism of his clients. Charles was taken to the Unitarian chapel by his mother, and early in 1817 he joined the day school run by its preacher.
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Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England in 1809. His mother died when he was eight years old. His father, a physician, was the son of Erasmus Darwin, the well-known poet, philosopher and naturalist. At age 16, Darwin left Shrewsbury to study medicine at Edinburgh University. Repelled by the sight of surgery, he left medical school and went to Cambridge University to become a clergyman. After receiving his degree, Darwin accepted an invitation to serve as an unpaid naturalist on the HMS Beagle for a five-year scientific expedition around the world.
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Sixty years of published correspondence contains no evidence that Charles Darwin ever embraced the biblical faith of Christ. From the time that Charles began courting Emma Wedg- wood the young couple became quite close and able to be frank with each other. Charles, ignoring the counsel of his father, revealed his lack of faith in God to Emma. This was always a cause of distress to her, even though her personal faith was not truly evangelical. She always protected his reputation, even after his death. A particularly poignant evidence of lack of evangelical Christian faith in either husband or wife is found in the family correspondence in 1851 when their beloved daughter, Annie, died at the age of nine.
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Charles Darwin remains the subject of continuing energetic debate in the fields of philosophy, history of science, biology and history of ideas. This volume offers a collection of newly commissioned essays from experts in their fields, and will provide a student readership with an accessible guide through Darwin's thought.
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Now, there appears to be a common misconception regarding the religious views of Charles Darwin. First of all, Darwin was never an atheist. While it is true that in his later years he was not religious to any extent, he never entirely discounted the existence of god. In his Autobiography, Darwin says he was a theist by the time he wrote "Origin of Species" and that he believed in an intelligent first cause. However, it was his view that the nature of this "first cause" was something beyond man's vision. The death of his daughter, Annie, on 23 April 1851 was a crushing blow to his religious beliefs, and from this time forward he stopped attending church with his family.
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Through Charles Lyell, Darwin met Richard Owen and began to analyze the various fossils that he had found on his voyage. The results were astounding. The fossils contained bones of huge sloths and the extinct Glyptodon.
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Charles Darwin