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Darwin did not lack religious influences in his youth. Baptized an Anglican and steeped in his mother's Unitarianism, young Charles was brought up to pray. He used to run the mile or so from home to school, concerning which he wrote,
"I often had to run very quickly to be on time, and from being a fleet runner was generally successful; but when in doubt I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to the prayers and not to my quick running, and marvelled how generally I was aided."
He had dropped out of medical studies after two years at Edinburgh, and his father suggested to him the calling of an Anglican clergyman. Charles wasn't sure whether he could accept everything in the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. However, he later wrote,
"I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted."
During his three years of theological studies at Christ's College, Cambridge, he was greatly impressed by Paley's Evidences of Christianity and his Natural Theology (which argues for the existence of God from design). He recalled,
William Paley“I could have written out the whole of the 'Evidences' with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley,” and, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley's 'Natural Theology.' I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”
In a letter of condolence to a bereaved friend at that time, he wrote of “so pure and holy a comfort as the Bible affords,” compared with “how useless the sympathy of all friends must appear.”
His intention to enter the ministry, he wrote, was never “formally given up, but died a natural death” when, on leaving Cambridge, he joined HMS Beagle as an unpaid naturalist. However, the religious influences in his life did not abate. His official position was that of gentleman companion to the captain, and for the next five years Darwin heard the Bible read and expounded on a regular basis.
Captain Robert FitzRoy was a deeply religious man who believed every word in the Bible and personally conducted divine service every Sunday, at which attendance by all on board was compulsory.
Darwin later recalled his own doctrinal orthodoxy when, in discussion with some of the officers, much to their amusement he quoted the Bible as “an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.” And at Buenos Aires, he and another officer requested a chaplain to administer the Lord's Supper to them before they ventured into the wilds of Tierra del Fuego.
The Progress of His Belief
A painting of Charles Darwin as a young man from Down House.Despite all of the above religious influences in his life, the decline of Darwin's faith began when he first started to doubt the truth of the first chapters of Genesis. This unwillingness to accept the Bible as meaning what it said probably started with and certainly was greatly influenced by his shipboard reading matter--the newly published first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (the second volume, published after the Beagle left England, was sent on to Darwin in Montevideo). This was a revolutionary book for that time. It subtly ridiculed belief in recent creation in favor of an old earth, and denied that Noah's Flood was world-wide; this, of course, was also a denial of divine judgment.
Based on James Hutton's dictum that all natural processes have continued as they were from the beginning (2 Peter 3:4), or 'uniformitarianism', Lyell's book presented Darwin with the time frame of vast geological ages needed to make his theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution 'work'. One of Darwin's biographers calls Charles's reading of this book his 'point of departure from orthodoxy'.
And when Lyell died in 1875, Darwin said, “I never forget that almost everything which I have done in science I owe to the study of his great works.”
Inevitably, the more Darwin convinced himself that species had originated by chance and developed by a long course of gradual modification, the less he could accept not only the Genesis account of creation, but also the rest of the Old Testament as the divinely inspired Word of God. In his Autobiography, Darwin wrote,
Charles Darwin“I had gradually come by this time, [i.e. 1836 to 1839] to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos or the beliefs of any barbarian.”
When Darwin came to write up the notes from his scientific investigations he faced a choice. He could interpret what he had seen either as evidence for the Genesis account of supernatural creation, or else as evidence for naturalism, consistent with Lyell's theory of long ages. In the event, he chose the latter -- that everything in nature has come about through accidental, unguided purposelessness rather than as the result of divinely guided, meaningful intention, and, after several years, in 1859 his Origin of Species was the result.
On the way, in 1844, he wrote to his friend, Joseph Hooker, “I am almost convinced... that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” Concerning this, Ian Taylor writes, "Many commentators have pointed out that the 'murder' he spoke of was in effect the murder of God."
Having abandoned the Old Testament, Darwin then renounced the Gospels. This loss of belief was based on several factors, including his rejection of miracles: "the more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become"; his rejection of the credibility of the Gospel writers: "the men of that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible to us"; his rejection of the Gospel chronology: "the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events"; and his rejection of the Gospel events: "they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses."
Summing up the above, he wrote, “by such reflections as these... I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.”
On another occasion he wrote, “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.” He turned 40 in 1849. Commenting on this, Darwin's biographer, James Moore, says, "... just as his clerical career had died a slow 'natural death,' so his faith had withered gradually."
One immediate effect of Darwin's rejection of the Bible was his loss of all comfort from it. The hopeless grief of his later letters to the bereaved, contrasts sharply with the earlier letter of condolence quoted above. In 1851, his dearly loved daughter Annie, aged 10, died from what the attending physician called a "Bilious Fever with typhoid character." Charles was devastated, and wrote, "Our only consolation is that she passed a short, though joyous life." Two years later, to a friend who had lost a child, Darwin's only appeal was to "time," which "softens and deadens... one's feelings and regrets"
The Role-Models of His Forebears
Charles DarwinOne major factor that contributed to Charles's apostasy is worth noting--the role model of his father, Robert, and of his grandfather, Erasmus. Both were ' freethinkers', so disbelief was an acceptable trait within the Darwin family--perceived not as 'a moral crisis or rebellion,' but perhaps even as 'a filial duty'. Indeed, in 1838, when Charles had become engaged to Emma Wedgwood, a very devout Unitarian, Robert had felt the need to advise his son to conceal his religious doubts from his wife--other households did not discuss such things.
Surrounded as he was by unbelievers, and having soaked his mind in literature that rejected the concept of divine judgment in earth's history, Charles mused,
“I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”
Darwin's Descent into Darkness
The descent into darkness did not stop there. In 1876, in his Autobiography, Darwin wrote,
“Formerly I was led... to the firm conviction of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, 'it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.' I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind.”
In 1880, in reply to a correspondent, Charles wrote, “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.”
In the last year of his life, when the Duke of Argyll suggested to him that certain purposes seen in nature "were the effect and the expression of mind," Charles looked at him very hard and said, "Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times," and he shook his head vaguely, adding, "it seems to go away." And about the same time he wrote to his old friend, Joseph Hooker, “I must look forward to Down graveyard as the sweetest place on earth.”
Did Darwin Recant Evolutionism on His Deathbed?
Charles Darwin was a self-acknowledged agnostic in his later years. He died at Down House, “after several hours of nausea, intense vomiting and retching.”Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882, at the age of 73. To some it was deplorable that he should have departed an unbeliever, and in the years that followed several stories surfaced that Darwin had undergone a death-bed conversion and renounced evolution. These stories began to be included in sermons as early as May 1882.
However, the best known is that attributed to a Lady Hope, who claimed she had visited a bedridden Charles at Down House in the autumn of 1881. She alleged that when she arrived he was reading the Book of Hebrews, that he became distressed when she mentioned the Genesis account of creation, and that he asked her to come again the next day to speak on the subject of Jesus Christ to a gathering of servants, tenants and neighbors in the garden summer house which, he said, held about 30 people. This story first appeared in print as a 521-word article in the American Baptist journal, the Watchman Examiner, and since then has been reprinted in many books, magazines and tracts.
The main problem with all these stories is that they were all denied by members of Darwin's family. Francis Darwin wrote to Thomas Huxley on February 8, 1887, that a report that Charles had renounced evolution on his deathbed was "false and without any kind of foundation," and in 1917 Francis affirmed that he had "no reason whatever to believe that he [his father] ever altered his agnostic point of view." Charles's daughter (Henrietta Litchfield) wrote on page 12 of the London evangelical weekly, The Christian, dated February 23, 1922,
"I was present at his deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier … The whole story has no foundation whatever." [The Darwin Legend]
Lady Hope was real. Here is her grave stone.Darwin's biographer, Dr James Moore, lecturer in the history of science and technology at The Open University in the UK, has spent 20 years researching the data over three continents. He produced a 218-page book examining what he calls the 'Darwin legend'. [The Darwin Legend] He says there was a Lady Hope. Born Elizabeth Reid Cotton in 1842, she married a widower, retired Admiral Sir James Hope, in 1877. She engaged in tent evangelism and in visiting the elderly and sick in Kent in the 1880s, and died of cancer in Sydney, Australia, in 1922, where her tomb may be seen to this day.[The Darwin Legend]
Moore concludes that Lady Hope probably did visit Charles between Wednesday, September 28 and Sunday, October 2, 1881, almost certainly when Francis and Henrietta were absent, but his wife, Emma, probably was present. He describes Lady Hope as "a skilled raconteur, able to summon up poignant scenes and conversations, and embroider them with sentimental spirituality." [The Darwin Legend]
He points out that her published story contained some authentic details as to time and place, but also factual inaccuracies — Charles was not bedridden six months before he died, and the summer house was far too small to accommodate 30 people. The most important aspect of the story, however, is that it does not say that Charles either renounced evolution or embraced Christianity. He merely is said to have expressed concern over the fate of his youthful speculations and to have spoken in favor of a few people's attending a religious meeting.
The alleged recantation/conversion is embellishment that others have either read into the story or made up for themselves. Moore calls such doings “holy fabrication!”
It should be noted that for most of her married life Emma was deeply pained by the irreligious nature of Charles's views, and would have been strongly motivated to have corroborated any story of a genuine conversion, if such had occurred. She never did.
It therefore appears that Darwin did not recant, and it is a pity that to this day the Lady Hope story occasionally appears in tracts published and given out by well-meaning people.
Conclusion
Charles Darwin was a tragically mistaken man who drifted from a childlike trust in One who helped him run to school on time into an abyss of hopelessness and agnosticism. While the spiritual journey of a Christian is a journey out of darkness into Christ's marvelous light, that of Charles Darwin was a slippery slide out of Gospel light (although not saving spiritual sight) into the sheer "blackness of darkness for ever."
Darwin's unbelief, like that of so many people today, had its roots in a mind which first rejected the revelation of God in the Bible and then was unwilling to accept the revelation of God which God Himself has given in nature. This religion of revelation, of the Bible, of the Lord Jesus Christ, will keep us tuned to truth, hope, and life in God, and away from evolutionism, humanism, and atheism, only as we allow it to exercise its power in our hearts. The tragedy of Charles Darwin is that he never did.
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1 - Because of free will , God created Lucifer but he choose to become Satan , he choose to rebel against God and about your friend nobody is born gay much less chooses to be gay , we are sinful , those temptaions , those feelings will never cease until we died ( physically in the body ) , but it is a choice whether we accept them or not
2 - Christians do not claim that the humans who penned the books of the Bible were always accurate in everything they said or did. We simply believe that the Bible is right when it claims that God guided these men in their task of writing Scripture, in such a way that the result is an infallible book. The apostle Peter undoubtedly said some foolish things during his lifetime, but God did not allow him to clutter up the Bible with any of those blunders.
2 Timothy 3:16 contains the classic claim that the Bible was produced by God, not just men:
All Scripture is inspired by God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
One standard explanation of the concept of "inspiration" is given by Ryrie:
God's superintendence of the human authors so that, using their own individual personalities, they composed and recorded without error His revelation to man in the words of the original autographs [Charles Ryrie, A Survey of Bible Doctrine (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972), p. 38].
We do not know exactly how God accomplished His purpose of providing a totally accurate Bible. But 2 Peter 1:21 gives some insight:
No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.
The word "moved" in this verse is also used in Acts 27:15 to describe the way a great storm blew the apostle Paul's ship off course across the Mediterranean. The people on board could spend the time as they chose (either bailing or wailing!), but the storm determined their destination of Malta. Similarly, God guided the writers of Scripture to produce exactly the message He wanted.
3 - The "problem of pain," as the well-known Christian scholar, C.S. Lewis, once called it, is atheism's most potent weapon against the Christian faith.
All true science and history, if rightly understood, support the fact of God. This evidence is so strong that, as the Bible says: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Psalm 14:1).
Most atheists, therefore, without any objective evidence on which to base their faith in "no God", must resort finally to philosophical objections. And this problem of suffering is the greatest of these.
That is, they say, how can a God of love permit such things in His world as war, sickness, pain, and death, especially when their effects often are felt most keenly by those who are apparently innocent? Either He is not a God of love and is indifferent to human suffering, or else He is not a God of power and is therefore helpless to do anything about it. In either case, the Biblical God who is supposedly one of both absolute power and perfect love becomes an impossible anachronism. Or so they claim!
This is a real difficulty, but atheism is certainly not the answer, and neither is agnosticism. While there is much evil in the world, there is even more that is good. This is proved by the mere fact that people normally try to hang on to life as long as they can. Furthermore, everyone instinctively recognizes that "good" is a higher order of truth than "bad".
We need also to recognize that our very minds were created by God. We can only use these minds to the extent that He allows, and it is, therefore, utterly presumptuous for us to use them to question Him and His motives.
"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25).
"Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, why hast Thou made me thus?" (Romans 9:20).
We ourselves do not establish the standards of what is right. Only the Creator of all reality can do that. We need to settle it, in our minds and hearts, whether we understand it or not, that whatever God does is, by definition, right.
Having settled this by faith, we are then free to seek for ways in which we can profit spiritually from the sufferings in life as well as the blessings. As we consider such matters, it is helpful to keep the following great truths continually in our minds.
There is really no such thing as the "innocent" suffering.
Since "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), there is no one who has the right to freedom from God's wrath on the basis of his own innocence.
As far as babies are concerned, and others who may be incompetent mentally to distinguish right and wrong, it is clear from both Scripture and universal experience that they are sinners by nature and thus will inevitably become sinners by choice as soon as they are able to do so.
The world is now under God's Curse (Genesis 3:17) because of man's rebellion against God's Word.
This "bondage of corruption," with the "whole world groaning and travailing together in pain" (Romans 8:21, 22), is universal, affecting all men and women and children everywhere. God did not create the world this way, and one day will set all things right again. In that day, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain" (Revelation 21:4).
Learn about how much Jesus Christ sufferedThe Lord Jesus Christ, who was the only truly "innocent" and "righteous" man in all history, nevertheless has suffered more than anyone else who ever lived.
And this He did for us! “Christ died for our sins” (I Corinthians 15:3). He suffered and died, in order that ultimately He might deliver the world from the Curse, and that, even now, He can deliver from sin and its bondage anyone who will receive Him in faith as personal Lord and Savior. This great deliverance from the penalty of inherent sin, as well as of overt sins, very possibly also assures the salvation of those who have died before reaching an age of conscious choice of wrong over right.
With our full faith in God's goodness and in Christ's redemption, we can recognize that our present sufferings can be turned to His glory and our good.
The sufferings of unsaved men are often used by the Holy Spirit to cause them to realize their needs of salvation and to turn to Christ in repentance and faith. The sufferings of Christians should always be the means of developing a stronger dependence on God and a more Christ-like character, if they are properly "exercised thereby" (Hebrews 12:11).
Thus, God is loving and merciful even when, "for the present," He allows trials and sufferings to come in our lives.
“For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).
4 - There have been hundreds of books written on the subject of the evidences of the divine inspiration of the Bible, and these evidences are many and varied. Most people today, unfortunately, have not read any of these books. In fact, few have even read the Bible itself! Thus, many people tend to go along with the popular delusion that the Bible is full of mistakes and is no longer relevant to our modern world.
Nevertheless the Bible writers claimed repeatedly that they were transmitting the very Word of God, infallible and authoritative in the highest degree. This is an amazing thing for any writer to say, and if the forty or so men who wrote the Scriptures were wrong in these claims, then they must have been lying, or insane, or both.
But, on the other hand, if the greatest and most influential book of the ages, containing the most beautiful literature and the most perfect moral code ever devised, was written by deceiving fanatics, then what hope is there for ever finding meaning and purpose in this world?
If one will seriously investigate these Biblical evidences, he will find that their claims of divine inspiration (stated over 3,000 times, in various ways) were amply justified.
Fulfilled Prophecies
The remarkable evidence of fulfilled prophecy is just one case in point. Hundreds of Bible prophecies have been fulfilled, specifically and meticulously, often long after the prophetic writer had passed away.
For example, Daniel the prophet predicted in about 538 BC (Daniel 9:24-27) that Christ would come as Israel's promised Savior and Prince 483 years after the Persian emperor would give the Jews authority to rebuild Jerusalem, which was then in ruins. This was clearly and definitely fulfilled, hundreds of years later.
There are extensive prophecies dealing with individual nations and cities and with the course of history in general, all of which have been literally fulfilled. More than 300 prophecies were fulfilled by Christ Himself at His first coming. Other prophecies deal with the spread of Christianity, as well as various false religions, and many other subjects.
There is no other book, ancient or modern, like this. The vague, and usually erroneous, prophecies of people like Jeanne Dixon, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and others like them are not in the same category at all, and neither are other religious books such as the Koran, the Confucian Analects, and similar religious writings. Only the Bible manifests this remarkable prophetic evidence, and it does so on such a tremendous scale as to render completely absurd any explanation other than divine revelation.
Unique Historical Accuracy
Learn more about Archaeology and the BibleThe historical accuracy of the Scriptures is likewise in a class by itself, far superior to the written records of Egypt, Assyria, and other early nations. Archeological confirmations of the Biblical record have been almost innumerable in the last century. Dr. Nelson Glueck, probably the greatest modern authority on Israeli archeology, has said:
"No archeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries."
Scientific Accuracy
Another striking evidence of divine inspiration is found in the fact that many of the principles of modern science were recorded as facts of nature in the Bible long before scientist confirmed them experimentally. A sampling of these would include:
Roundness of the earth (Isaiah 40:22)
Almost infinite extent of the sidereal universe (Isaiah 55:9)
Law of conservation of mass and energy (II Peter 3:7)
Hydrologic cycle (Ecclesiastes 1:7)
Vast number of stars (Jeremiah 33:22)
Law of increasing entropy (Psalm 102:25-27)
Paramount importance of blood in life processes (Leviticus 17:11)
Atmospheric circulation (Ecclesiastes 1:6)
Gravitational field (Job 26:7)
and many others.
These are not stated in the technical jargon of modern science, of course, but in terms of the basic world of man's everyday experience; nevertheless, they are completely in accord with the most modern scientific facts.
It is significant also that no real mistake has ever been demonstrated in the Bible -- in science, in history, or in any other subject. Many have been claimed, of course, but conservative Bible scholars have always been able to work out reasonable solutions to all such problems.
Unique Structure
The remarkable structure of the Bible should also be stressed. Although it is a collection of 66 books, written by 40 or more different men over a period of 2,000 years, it is clearly one Book, with perfect unity and consistency throughout.
The individual writers, at the time of writing, had no idea that their message was eventually to be incorporated into such a Book, but each nevertheless fits perfectly into place and serves its own unique purpose as a component of the whole. Anyone who diligently studies the Bible will continually find remarkable structural and mathematical patterns woven throughout its fabric, with an intricacy and symmetry incapable of explanation by chance or collusion.
The one consistent theme of the Bible, developing in grandeur from Genesis to Revelation, is God's great work in the creation and redemption of all things, through His only Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Bible's Unique Effect
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The Bible is unique also in terms of its effect on individual men and on the history of nations. It is the all-time best seller, appealing both to hearts and minds, beloved by at least some in every race or nation or tribe to which it has gone, rich or poor, scholar or simple, king or commoner, men of literally every background and walk of life. No other book has ever held such universal appeal nor produced such lasting effects.
One final evidence that the Bible is true is found in the testimony of those who have believed it. Multitudes of people, past and present, have found from personal experience that its promises are true, its counsel is sound, its commands and restrictions are wise, and its wonderful message of salvation meets every need for both time and eternity.
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