text: What were Darwin's religious views?\n\nCharles Darwin was baptized on November 17, 1809 at St. Chad's church in Shrewsbury, and his mother, Suzsanna, took him to services at the Unitarian church in High Street. She died when Darwin was just eight years old, but he continued to attend church on a regular basis with his sisters. There is very little known about Darwin's religious beliefs during his childhood. He was sent to Rev. Case's day school at St. Chad's for one year, and afterwards was sent to Dr. Butler's Shrewsbury School where he studied until age sixteen. It is, therefore, safe to assume that Darwin received a proper religious schooling during his childhood.\n\nWhen Darwin was a young man he found it very difficult to let go of his religious beliefs. Indeed, during the Beagle Voyage he was very orthodox, and would often quote passages out of the bible to the ill-mannered sailors on board. By the time he returned to England in 1836 he had come to view the events depicted in the Old Testament as allegory in nature. What events during the Beagle Voyage caused Darwin to become less religious? During the Voyage he had ample opportunity to see the cruelties of slavery and wondered how god could allow such inhumanity to exist. He also could not accept that a kind god would allow humans to live in such a wretched state as the natives of Tierra del Fuego. Why would god allow such suffering in the world was an internal conflict Darwin could not resolve.\n\nDuring the next twenty years of his life, Darwin was engaged in research on the origin of species. He came to see that species were not fixed over time, but rather they adapted to their changing environment from one generation to the next. This flied in the face of the Church which held fast to the notion that all species were created by god as perfectly suited for the environment he placed them in. There was no need for change in the perfect world that god created. Over these twenty years Darwin became less and less religious as he slowly uncovered the laws of natural selection. \n\nBack in his Cambridge days he believed in William Paley's "Argument from Design" as evidence for god's place in nature. By the time Darwin wrote "Origin of Species" he held the view that: "The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me as conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws" (Barlow, Page - 87)\n\nNow, 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. It was only after a very long and slow process spanning his entire life that Darwin came to be an agnostic. \n\nHow did Charles Darwin resolve the supposed conflict between science and religion? Well, for Darwin there never was much of a conflict. He saw religion as a strictly personal matter and regarded science as completely separate from religion. In general, he thought that the question of god's existence was outsi