Darwin’s Rejection of Creationism | BBC Earth Science

This is The Origin of Species, the book in which Charles Darwin outlines the theory of evolution by natural selection. But this copy is unique and totally priceless. This is the first copy of the first edition, the one that the publisher sent to Darwin himself, hot off

the press. Now, on page 484, there's a remarkable passage which gives an insight into what Darwin himself thought about the origins of life. "All the organic beings which have ever lived on this

earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed." Now, this doesn't simply say that we humans have evolved from an ape-like ancestor. No, it goes much further than that. It suggested that all living things, from insects to elephants,

from a hyacinth to a human, have evolved from one single, common ancestor and it flew in the face of the Bible's account of creation. At the time, Darwin didn't propose a scientific explanation for what created this original lifeform.

His notion that life was breathed into the primordial common ancestor left room for the Creator. Yet Darwin's Origin of Species introduced one of the most important thoughts in science. That all life on Earth sprung from one single organism.

But to know what that organism would have been, you have to turn to the other big idea around in Darwin's day. It was the theory that cells form the basis of all living things.

When it was first proposed in the 1830s, this was a shocking revelation. From man to flowers to frogs, it showed we're all made up of the same building blocks. By the time Darwin published his work on evolution, cell

theory was the new bedrock of biology. And, crucially, scientists had shown that new cells are born only when existing cells divide. All living cells are descended from other cells. So in just two decades in the 19th century, scientists

had come up with the two biggest ideas in biology. Cell theory and evolution. And if you put the two together, there can only be one conclusion. That all life on Earth began with one single cell.

Darwin himself never connected the two theories in such a direct way. But what he did do, just 11 years after publishing The Origin of Species, was make an unholy attempt to explain how life may have begun.

He expressed this thought in a private letter to his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker. And this time, there was no mention of the Creator. And this is it. It's incredible.

I've studied Darwin for many years, but this is the first time I've ever seen one of his letters, penned by his own hand. And I've got to tell you that his handwriting is appalling.

But just listen to what he says. "If we could conceive of some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity et cetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes." So Darwin had

done a complete u-turn. No sign of the Creator. He was now suggesting that life on Earth began with chemistry. No wonder he stopped going to church.