Charles Darwin Quotes About Religion

Quotes about: Religion

• There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed 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

  Beautiful, Simple, Cycling

  On the Origin of Species ch. 14 (1859)

• The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for 
the existence of God.

  Charles Darwin

  Self, Religion, Atheism

  Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin (1958). “Autobiography and Selected Letters”, p.61, Courier Corporation

• The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity.

  Charles Darwin

  Powerful, Believe, Men

  Charles Darwin (2015). “The Descent of Man: Human Sexuality”, p.542, 谷月社

• That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

  Charles Darwin

  Pain, Powerful, Views

• Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, Humble, Men

• I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

  Charles Darwin

  Family, Brother, Atheist

  Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley (1983). “Autobiographies”, Oxford University Press, USA

• The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

  Charles Darwin

  Inspirational, Atheist, Insightful

  Charles Darwin (2010). “The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29: “Erasmus Darwin” by Ernest Krause, with a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin; “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin” Edited by Nora Barlow; and Consolidated Index”, p.124, NYU Press

• I see no good reason why the views given this volume [The Origin of Species] should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, 'as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.'

  Charles Darwin

  Religious, Science, Men

• It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science.

  Charles Darwin

  Atheist, Men, Illumination

  "Science and religion need a truce" by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, www.theguardian.com. August 24, 2009.

• I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

  Charles Darwin

  Book, Tyrants, Rainbow

• The more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become, - that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, - that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, - that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses; - by such reflections as these... I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.

  Charles Darwin

  Eye, Men, Reflection

  Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley (1983). “Autobiographies”, Oxford University Press, USA

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