Your belief seems incompatible with Darwin's attribution of life to God.
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Charles Darwin, last sentence of
On the Origin of Species
Perhaps you should spend a little more time learning about the subject.
You were misled by that, too. Darwin, when he formulated his theory, was an orthodox Anglican. As you just learned, Darwin wrote that God created the first living things. I realize that was a shock, and contrary to the stories you were told, but it's a fact. Try to find a way to live with it.
Fact is, Darwin suspected that he was to blame for his daughter's death. His research suggested that marriage of cousins, although acceptable in the Church and in society, was not a good idea and might lead to health problems. In fact, Annie died from tuberculosis, but science had not yet developed the germ theory of disease, so he didn't know.
His concerns were also motivated by fear of the consequences of marriage between relatives: Emma Wedgewood, his wife, was also his first cousin.1 The possible adverse effects of consanguineous marriage, which was not uncommon in England at that time, were a matter of debate. Annie’s death, and self-fertilization experiments in plants, made him suspect that ‘marriage between near relations is likewise injurious’.
Commentary: a Darwin family concern. - PubMed - NCBI
Commentary: The background and outcomes of the first-cousin marriage controversy in Great Britain. - PubMed - NCBI
Darwin, years after his daughter's death, admitted that he was "leaning toward agnosticism." But as you acknowledged, that was long after he wrote his book, in which he acknowledged that God created the first living things.
They lied to you about that as well. As you see, in 1872, Darwin acknowledged that God created life long after Annie's death. It was a shameful slander on the part of whoever passed you that story.
Didnt you know that?
No, I hope you didn't. I think you are sincere, but misguided by false teachers.
Don't get angry. Get smart. Take some time to learn about this, and you'll be a lot harder to dismiss. Here's some advice from an honest fellow YE creationist:
Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.
I say these things not because I'm crazy or because I've "converted" to evolution. I say these things because they are true. I'm motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution. (Technically, they could also be deluded or lying, but that seems rather uncharitable to say. Oops.)
Creationist students, listen to me very carefully: There is evidence for evolution, and evolution is an extremely successful scientific theory. That doesn't make it ultimately true, and it doesn't mean that there could not possibly be viable alternatives. It is my own faith choice to reject evolution, because I believe the Bible reveals true information about the history of the earth that is fundamentally incompatible with evolution. I am motivated to understand God's creation from what I believe to be a biblical, creationist perspective. Evolution itself is not flawed or without evidence. Please don't be duped into thinking that somehow evolution itself is a failure. Please don't idolize your own ability to reason. Faith is enough. If God said it, that should settle it. Maybe that's not enough for your scoffing professor or your non-Christian friends, but it should be enough for you.
YE creationist Dr. Todd Wood
The truth about evolution
As you continue to see, you're in way over your head here, with little understanding and a lot of creationist fairy tales you've been given by people you should not have trusted.
You guys love Coyne.. Haha Haha. Funny huh?
Evolution and atheism: Best friends forever: Jerry Coyne
By Jerry Coyne
Here's my thesis for the evening: The fact of evolution is not only inherently atheistic, it is inherently anti-theistic. It goes against the notion that there is a god.
Accepting evolution and science tends to promote the acceptance of atheism. Now, it doesn't always, of course. There are many religious people who accept evolution. I would say they're guilty of cognitive dissonance, or at least of some kind of watery deism.
The path from going to an evolutionary biologist to an atheist is pretty straightforward. You write a book on evolution with the indubitable facts showing that it has to be true, as true as the existence of gravity or neutrons, and then you realize that half of America is not going to buy it no matter what you say. Their minds cannot be changed; their eyes are blinkered.
And so you start studying what it is about religion that makes people resistant to evolution. You discover that religion is in some ways like science, but it's a pseudoscience. It makes scientific claims, or at least empirical claims, about the real world, but then adjudicates those claims in a completely different way from science.
So you start realizing that religion is perverting what you're trying to do with science by making statements about the world, but then supporting them with various cockamamie methods. And so you become an atheist and you might then become an anti-theist because you see that religion is promoting ways of thinking about the world that are not sound.
Natural pathway
This is a natural pathway; it's the same pathway Richard Dawkins went along — except that he [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]ed off religious people more than I did.
Look at the subtitle of Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker: A World Without Design. A design-less world is one thing that religious people cannot bring themselves to accept. I'm not going to go over the evidence for evolution. You should either know it by now or, if you don't, buy my book. Let me just say it comes from many various areas of biology: embryology, the fossil record, morphology, genetics, biogeography. All these different areas come together to show that evolution, in fact, is true. As true as anything is in science.
Case closed, right? Well, no. Not in America, at least. The Gallup Poll has been surveying American attitudes toward evolution for 32 years and the results have held pretty steady. When it asks Americans, "How did humans get here?," 40 percent say, "We've always been here like we are now and so have all the other species and the Earth is about 10,000 years old." For over 30 years this has held steady.
Then we have the theistic evolutionists. Those are the people who accept evolution, but think that God was the motor that did it. And those respondents have pretty much hovered around 30 percent. There's a sort of heartening downswing in that in the latest years, which is mirrored by a heartening upswing in the number of naturalistic evolutionists, now up to 20 percent. Those who claim, yeah, we got here by naturalistic processes. This happens to be the truth, by the way.
It's not like people don't have access to the evidence and information of evolution. It's that people are blinkered to that truth by religion, and that's something that I think almost all of us know in our hearts.
Evolution deniers
Most people who say they accept evolution are nevertheless supernaturalists to some degree. Why? Because of religion. You scratch a creationist, you'll find a religionist. Intelligent design advocates have been described as creationists in a cheap tuxedo. They say intelligent design, but what they really mean is Jesus.
A poll taken by Gallup asked evolution deniers why they deny it. The first three reasons are all religious and don't have anything to do with evidence. "I believe in Jesus Christ," "I believe in the Almighty God," and "Due to my religion or faith." It's only when you get to the fourth most common answer — you can give only one answer in this poll — they say, "Well, there's not enough evidence for it."
The poll shows 83 percent of the people who reject evolution say the rejection has to do with their faith. It has nothing to do at all with evidence. There is a strong negative relationship, a highly statistically negative relationship, between religion and belief in evolution.
The countries that have the most belief in God have the lowest acceptance of Darwinism. Countries that have the least acceptance of God, the least belief in God, are those that accept evolution more. Countries in, say, sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East, are not only highly religious, but they're also deeply opposed to evolution.
What's the reason for this relationship? This is mainly a correlation, not a causation, but I think there is some causality here. First of all, you can say, well, the higher your belief in God, the less likely you are to accept evolution. There's something about being religious that makes you less likely to accept Darwin, and I think that is indeed the case.
But the other alternative explanation is that the more you grow to accept evolution, the less you are likely to be religious. That's also plausible, but I think it's almost incontrovertibly true that the first explanation is the more correct one, simply because you know how it works in this country: People get their Jesus before they get their Darwin. By the time they get to biology class, they're already immune. They're immunized to evolutionary biology.
Religion hampers U.S.
Where's the United States in terms of religion and evolution? It's really bad. We're second from bottom. The only industrialized country that has less acceptance of evolution than we do is Turkey. So the reason why the U.S. is so resistant to evolution — as opposed to say France, Denmark and Sweden — is because we're one of the most religious "First World" countries.
We can do the same kind of correlation with states as we did with countries. At the top we have Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts. At the bottom: evolution denialists Arkansas, Tennessee and Utah. Sensing any pattern there?
I don't have the data on the religiosity of every state in the U.S., but what I did find were the 10 most religious states and the 10 least religious states. Those states that are the most religious are the ones that are the most evolution-denying states and vice versa, and there's no overlap between them. The more religious you are, the less likely are to accept evolution.
There's another factor that explains why different countries vary in their degrees of religiosity and why different states in the U.S. vary in their degrees of religiosity. And that has to do with well-being.
You see the same kind of relationship we saw for evolution and religion, but in this case those countries with the highest belief in God tend to be the countries that are the least well-off. Those countries that have the lowest belief in God tend to be the countries that have the most well-being. I don't think this is an accident.
Where is the U.S. here? You can say the reason why we reject evolution is because we're so religious. But why are we so religious? Because we're not really that well-off. We have high degrees of income inequality. We have no government health care (or not, at least, until recently), high incarceration rates and high child mortality compared to other countries.
So what's going on here? Well, again, you have a correlation and not causation. You can say two things. First, you can say that those countries that absolutely believe in God more tend to create societies that are bad. That is, it's the religiosity that somehow makes the societies dysfunctional. That's possible, but it just doesn't jibe with any notion of religion that I have.
