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I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
Botanist
Carcinologist
Entomologist
Ethologist
Explorer
Geologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Travel Writer
The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
Within
Express
Wasps
Living
Intention
Beneficent
Cannot
God
Caterpillars
Body
Species
Agnosticism
Would
Evolution
Omnipotent
Thinking
Atheism
Persuade
Garden
Feeding
Created
Bodies
Parasitic

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To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
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The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.
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It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved that the subject was in the air, or that men's minds were prepared for it. I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.
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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
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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.
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In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.
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Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
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If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.
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The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children.
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I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.
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I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.
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A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.
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Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise and this into astonishment and this into stupefied amazement.
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I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.
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...conscience looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind of dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret, and if severe remorse.
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Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
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He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.
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We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
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I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.
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It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.
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