David Baum

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Darwin's legacy independent of beliefs

With all the discussion of Charles Darwin's bicentennial over the last year, we kept hearing about the conflict between evolution and religion. It sometimes seems that the entire question of whether religion is reasonable turns on whether evolution happened, and the entire question of whether to accept that evolution happened depends on whether one wants to reject the existence of God. In these polarized discussions, it is worth asking why, if he believed evolution happened, wasn't Darwin an atheist?