A private letter from Darwin detailing his doubts about God just sold at auction for $125,000 — here's what he wrote.

Pedro_P

The letter sold for $125,000 at a Sotheby's auction on Dec. 12, 2017, along with 70 other science and technology items, including a Nazi code-making 'Enigma' machine and the 1954 Nobel Prize medal for the polio vaccine.Courtesy Sotheby's
*.Years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," he responded to a reader who wanted the biologist to explain whether his theory destroys the argument for an all-creating God.
*.Darwin wrote a three-page letter, citing his own ailing health as one of the reasons he couldn't definitively answer the question.
*.The letter was auctioned off at  Sotheby'son December 12 for $125,000 to a private American collector, the auction house said.The winning bid was more than double the estimated $40,000-$60,000 the letter was expected to fetch.
When Darwin published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" in 1859, many people saw the book as an attack on religion. How could the world have been created in seven days if the evolution of living creatures on Earth took place over hundreds of thousands of years, as Darwin claimed?
A curious young reader named James Grant wanted to know more about how Darwin thought his theory might change the idea that an omnipotent God was the ultimate creator of all beings.
Grant wrote to Darwin in March 1878, asking the biologist to "in two or three words" explain whether his theory "destroys the evidence of the existence of a God looked at through nature's phenomena."
Darwin, who was 69 at the time, responded just five days later with a "private" note a bit longer than the reply Grant had requested. In his three-page letter, which was auctioned offfor $125,000 at Sotheby's in New York on Tuesday, Darwin refused to definitively pit science against religion.
Instead of providing a yes-or-no answer, Darwin lobbed the question back to his reader, calling it an "insoluble" problem without a simple, universal answer.
The strongest argument for God, Darwin said, is found in the instincts and intuitions of people, who might "feel that there must have been an intelligent beginner of the Universe."
Darwin was just four years from his death when he wrote the letter, and was clearly not so sure about his own stance on God, writing that there is inevitably a "doubt and difficulty whether such intuitions are trustworthy."
The scientist's final line to Grant urges the boy not to be afraid of the latest science, regardless of how he feels about God. Darwin wrote that that while he couldn't answer the question of religion, "no man who does his duty has anything to fear, and may hope for whatever he earnestly desires."
Here's the full text of Darwin's letter:
March 11, 1878.

Private.
Dear Sir,
I should have been very glad to have aided you in any degree if it had been in my power. But to answer your question would require an essay, and for this I have not strength, being much out of health. Nor, indeed, could I have answered it distinctly and satisfactorily with any amount of strength.
The strongest argument for the existence of God, as it seems to me, is the instinct or intuition which we all (as I suppose) feel that there must have been an intelligent beginner of the Universe;but then comes the doubt and difficulty whether such intuitions are trustworthy.
I have touched on one point of difficulty in the two last pages of my "Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication," but I am forced to leave the problem insoluble.No man who does his duty has anything to fear, and may hope for whatever he earnestly desires.
Dear Sir,
yours faithfully,
Ch. Darwin.
Source

★The book "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin is available in the section eBooks of CraxMe Forum and can be downloaded by following this link:

► On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• Shared by: @Rhett Bassard

Rhett_Bassard

Loved Darwin's sensitivity toward the young reader. I sensed his understandable humility as it would be many years before his fame. He had no idea there would be a frequently-quoted award named after him.

Pedro_P

Rhett Bassard 13-12-2017 10:23 PM
Loved Darwin's sensitivity toward the young reader. I sensed his understandable humility as it would ...

Religion has endeavored by all means to deny the existence of the evolutionary process, what Darwin in time posed as a theory, today is recognized as a fact. However, the ridicule and contempt towards him from the religions, continue. The main religion of the world continues to postulate Creationism, as the reason for the existence of every living being. But before the evidence and the weight of reason and science that hold as true and correct the evolutionary process religion made a new turn and has invented the concept of Intelligent Design, which holds, in short, that God created evolution. I have never known that science based its concepts on the basis of religious criteria, however, from time to time, religion ends up accepting scientific concepts.
As Doug McLeod said: "I keep saying that a tower of a church with a lightning rod on top, shows a lack of trust in God."

Rhett_Bassard

Pedro_P 13-12-2017 09:51 PM
Religion has endeavored by all means to deny the existence of the evolutionary process, what Darwi ...

I'm in Arkansas, USA...deep in the "Bible Belt", a hotbed for Creationism. The Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in the next State to the east, Tennessee.
On Monday night past, I was at our local Veterans' Post, one of two places in the entire county that sells booze (another consequence of the Bible Belt).
On the bar stool next to me, this guy starts his overly-righteous monologue to nobody in particular.
Good thing American football was on multiple TVs

somi

Rhett Bassard 14-12-2017 01:18 PM
I'm in Arkansas, USA...deep in the "Bible Belt", a hotbed for Creationism. The Scopes Monkey Trial ...

that's great

Rhett_Bassard

somi 14-12-2017 10:45 AM
that's great

Yes and no.
Yes: keep your friends close and the zealots closer.
No: a "dry" (no booze) county for religious reasons seems to contradict the myth of #ThatGuy turning water into wine and promotes the making of dangerous "moonshine" (arrack).

Pedro_P

Rhett Bassard 14-12-2017 04:00 PM
Yes and no.
Yes: keep your friends close and the zealots closer.
No: a "dry" (no booze) co ...

As equal to the ritual cannibalism of the eucharist: wine = blood, the host (sacramental bread) = human flesh...