Dr. Jitse Van der Meer, Professor of Biology, Redeemer University College.
He was baptized in the Anglican church but his mother took him to a Unitarian chapel in Shewsbury. Unitarians don't believe in the divinity of Christ, they only believe in the existence of God. Darwin absorbed that idea when he was young and when you read his stuff, also his private notebooks and his correspondence which I think are more important sources for this kind of information than his public...But in his private notebooks you do find clear indications that he believed in a God who was at a distance from what happens in the worst, a sort of Deistic God. A God who is not involved in the nitty-gritty of creating every single plant and animal precisely as it exists now in exactly the location where it exists but a God who does that by means of natural law. The interesting thing is that is still a different idea of design involved because God designs by means of natural law, not by means of direct involvement. He did believe in the existence of God but a very heterodox kind of God, I think you could not call that a Christian notion of God because Christian notions of God always involve Jesus Christ.
Full report on-air or online on November 17th!
