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Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes besides that of Hercules.
Thomas Huxley, cited in Browne (2006), pp. 94–5This century will be called Darwin's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1884), from Orthodoxy, cited in Ingersoll (2007), p. 168Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
Williams Herbert Carruth (1909), p. 2Reconciling God and Darwin
Charles Darwin was absolutely terrified of going public with his theory of evolution. The basic idea of natural selection first dawned on him in 1838, but it was twenty years before he finally announced it to the world. In other words, for two whole decades, he sat on one of the most important scientific theories of all time, only sharing his bold speculations with a handful of close friends. And throughout that time, he worried and he worried about how the public at large would respond when he finally unveiled the theory. In 1844, still fourteen years before that fateful day arrived, Darwin admitted in a letter to a friend that he was ‘almost convinced’ that species change over time, and described this admission as ‘like confessing a murder’.
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