Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 March 1888 — A Religious Darwinian. [ARTICLE]

A Religious Darwinian.

Professor Asa Gray was one of Darwin’s most esteemed friends and powerful advocates in this country. At the same time he never could find in natural selection a satisfactory cause for the law and order he beheld so clearly in the world. It was to him an insufficient explanation, and back of it he recognized the existence of a first cause. His religious and scientific beliefs are best summarized in his own words: “I am scientifically, and in my own fashion, a Darwinian, philosophically a convinced theist, and an accepter of the ‘creed commonly known as the Nicene’ as the exponent of the Christian faith.” His reasons for this position were fully given in a short coarse of lectures before the Theological School of Yale in 1880.