On the morning of November 24, 1859, Darwin's On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin's godless tract. sparking a fresh battle in the long-running battle between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the discovery of Gregor Mendel's work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin's triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle — an understanding of just how inheritance works.
Unfortunately, everything in the previous paragraph is nonsense, apart from the Origin's publication date. . . . The Victorian "crisis of faith" preceded Darwin by many years. — Jim Endersby, "Creative Designs?" Times Literary Supplement, 16 March 2007, p. 3.
Darwin, Evolution, and the Argument from Design
- Darwin's views of religion: his agnosticism and his reasons for rejecting Christianity
- William Paley and Natural Theology
- Darwin and the Removal of Design
- Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the Intellectual Ferment of the Mid- and Late Victorian Periods
- Patrick Fairbairn and Evangelical belief that evolution is a central principle of the Bible and scared history
- "Darwin's world is full of wonder and awe (Levine)
- Wallace & Darwin on the Evolutionary Origins of Morality
Darwin and Victorian Religious Belief and Unbelief
- Ethical Arguments against Religion in Victorian Britain
- Agnosticism
- Atheism
- Comteian Positivism
- Deism
- Philosophy sitemap
- Bishop Colenso disproves the Literal Truth of Bible
Darwin, Religion, and Victorian Literature
- Tennyson and Evolution (2): Was he a proto-Darwinian or a proto-Gouldian?
- Darwin's Imagery: The Tree and the Tree of Life
Last modified 2 August 2019