The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

by Francis S. Collins

Recognizing the potentially explosive nature of the argument, he hinted that this same process might apply to humankind, and developed this more fully in a subsequent book, The Descent of Man.

In fact, the notable conservative Protestant theologian Benjamin Warfield of Princeton accepted evolution as “a theory of the method of the divine providence,”5 while arguing that evolution itself must have had a supernatural author.

Furthermore, far from his being ostracized by the religious community, Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey.

“I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone…. A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he ‘has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws.’ ”6

Darwin even concludes The Origin of Species with the following sentence: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”7