tele, your link is a bit short.
darwin started off giong to church, being xtian, but the older, and wizer, he got, he started to veer away the church.
i see the teleogy people like to pin darwin as a ID because he said :To suppose that the eye […] could have been formed by
natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. (The Origin of Species(1859)
darwin freely admits that some things still boggled his mind, and that it’s beyond him to understand it all:
the respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.– I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I [should] wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can (letter to Asa Gray, 1860)
he continues to doubt ID as ge grew older
I may say that 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; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty (In a letter to a correspondent at the University of Utrecht in 1873)
September 1881, darwin had a guest in the form of Freethinker Doctor Ludwig Büchner
in discussions after dinner Darwin asked his guests:
"Why do you call yourselves Atheists?"
they responded that they "did not commit the folly of god-denial, [and] avoided with equal care the folly of god-assertion"
Darwin gave a thoughtful response, concluding that "I am with you in thought, but I should prefer the word Agnostic to the word Atheist."
Aveling replied that, "after all, 'Agnostic' was but 'Atheist' writ respectable, and 'Atheist' was only 'Agnostic' writ aggressive."
Darwin smiled and responded "Why should you be so aggressive? Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of mankind? It is all very well for educated, cultured, thoughtful people; but are the masses yet ripe for it?"
i find darwin quite happy to equate agnosticism and atheism. atheism being the militant wing of agnosticism. his choice being, to be the guy to pushes the flower into the barrel of the gun. and not pushing anybody into anything they are not ready for. i can totally respect and follow that.
he published his autobiography, and initially his wife and son left out his more religious views, trying not to tarnish his reputation after he had died.
In 1958 Darwin’s granddaughter Nora Barlow published a revised version which contained the omissions
"The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection had 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." (p.87)
"At the present day (ca. 1872) the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons. But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos, Mahomadans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favor of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddhists of no God...This argument would be a valid one if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God: but we know that this is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists." (p.91)
"Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps as inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake." (p.93)
so
wheras darwin might have started off believing in god, and that god had designed nature as it is, he had been faced with evidence as his years of research passed, and as an old, wizened man, he knew the truth, and he was not shy about saying so.
darwin died not being a teleologist. he died an agnostic, not believing in the church, an afterlife or heaven. and i tend to attach a label to someone’s last word. the fact that he made a point of making it clear that he didnt give credit to ID, in his autobiography of all things, tells me that he very much wanted his kids, grandkids, and the future to know that religion is bogus, as is ID, and the church.
maybe then stop making him out be something he isnt.
