9. Was Darwin an Atheist?
Atheism in Five Minutes - Teemu Taira
Bernard Lightman [+ ]
York University, Canada
Bernard Lightman is Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities Department at York University, and Past President of the History of Science Society. Lightman’s research focuses on the cultural history of Victorian science. Among his most recent publications
are the edited collections The Metaphysical Society (co-edited with Catherine Marshall and Richard England), Rethinking History, Science and Religion, and Science Periodicals in Nineteenth Century Britain (co-edited with Gowan Dawson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan Topham). He is currently working on a book on science, religion, and Victorian periodicals, and is one of the general editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall. He is also editor of the
book series “Science and Nineteenth Century Culture,” which, like the Tyndall Correspondence, is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Description
Contemporary atheists like to claim Darwin as one of their own. However the story of the evolution of Darwin’s religious views confirms that he was never an atheist, even when he raised the most difficult questions about how humans can know that a God exists.