Darwin's "Tree of Life"
Darwin's famous sketch from Transmutation Notebook B
that represents the divergence in his thinking about
extinction and adaptation over time.
Darwin had difficulty with William Paley's idea of a God who acts through Nature. Darwin couldn't believe God designed a particular animal or plant for a singular purpose. In this July 3, 1860 letter to Harvard botanist Asa Gray, Darwin explicitly points out his reasons for rejecting Paley's argument:
One word more on "designed laws" & "undesigned results." I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly.—An innocent & good man stands under tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most person do believe this; I can't & don't.—If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.—If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.
speaking of faith
