ABSTRACT
The years 1836 to 1839 marked a definite change in Charles Darwin’s beliefs. He had come to see “that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus. Up to the time of the voyage of the Beagle Darwin’s views were orthodox: he was even “heartily laughed at by the officers for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.” Darwin read the Gospels carefully and critically; as a result, he “gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.” During that period Darwin also reflected much on the miracles set forth in the New Testament. On different occasions Darwin expressed his feeling that there seemed to be so much misery in the world that he could not persuade himself that a beneficent and omnipotent God had designedly created it. Darwin’s answer to the “immortality” argument was equally scientific.
