Acceptance Of Atheism In The 1800's

Atheism, before the Romantics movement, was not something one would openly or publically admit. However, much of that changed in the 1800’s. Many romantic writers such as Shelly, Keats, and Byron, openly declared their atheism and wrote many texts that were controversial at the time, and still are today. One individual did not openly embrace atheism, but offered an alternative theory as to how the world as we know it came to be; his name was Charles Darwin. Darwin was born in 1809 and was trained as a minister in the Church of England, but was also the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, one of England’s greatest horticulturists. In 1832 he embarked on an exploration of South America. After several more explorations and observations, Darwin finally

Though many have gone well beyond Darwin’s original theories, his are still accepted today. However, Darwin was not the only expert in his field. Another highly controversial writer in the same field, is Richard Dawkins. In an interview with Johnathan Gatehouse, Dawkins was not given a very friendly introduction. “British author Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion sold over one million copies and touched off an international debate about the existence of a higher power. Critics denounced him as a "secularist bigot” (Gatehouse). Richard Dawkins has been described as “ultra-Darwinist”, due to the fact that there are many similarities in his theories to Charles Darwin’s theories, however, there is many ways he goes beyond Darwin’s

Darwin, once trained as a minister, never outright criticized the church in his works, but instead offered another alternative. Dawkins, however, goes out of his way to use his theory to prove the impossibility of any religion. He especially goes after the Jewish and Christian theologies in his book, All Africa and her Progenies. “Of all origin myths, the Jewish story of the Garden of Eden is so pervasive in our culture that it has bequeathed its name to and important scientific theory about our ancestry, the theory of African Eve” (Dawkins). He very much writes to disprove this theology more than to prove his own work. This is a very unusual thing. In most cases, scientist struggle with this topic when publishing as Michael J. Reiss described in his article, “The Relationship between Evolutionary Biology and Religion”. On the topic he said, “For many scientists, whether or not they have any religious beliefs themselves, the relationships between science and religion, that is the “science/religion issue,” may appear outside the scope of a serious science journal” (Reiss). However, Dawkins does not shy away from such a topic, he chose a theory and stuck by