ting, drying, pickling, and describing" (Sears 33). His friends and colleagues at home were being overwhelmed with crates and cartloads of specimens. He was constantly taking notes, observing both his specimens and their surroundings. His notes grew to be more detailed, as his "powers of examining and describing...increased at a great pace" (Darwin 121). Before his stint on the Beagle, Darwin's religious views were very conservative. In this, he and FitzRoy were in accord; they both took a literal view of the Bible. Indeed, one of the captain's reasons for taking on Darwin was because [the] voyage...would provide a grand opportunity to substantiate the Bible, especially the book of Genesis. As a naturalist, Darwin might easily find many evidences of the Flood and the first appearance of all created things upon the earth. He could perform a valuable service by interpreting his Scientific discoveries in the light of the Bible.(Moorehead 37) At first, Darwin's faith in the existence of an immortal soul and its Maker was unshakeable. The awe that he felt in the wilds moved him; he bore witness to the sublimity of the primeval forests...[that were] temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature; - no one [could] stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. (Dorsey 73) However, the more Darwin studied nature, the more unlikely Biblical miracles became; while on the Galpagos islands, he noted a "subtlety of life processes" (Dibner 62) upon the islands of igneous rock that Darwin compared to "a sea petrified in its most boisterous moments" (Barlow Diary 335). There, the theory of natural selection became more apparent to him, and he found himself unable to reconcile a literal interpretation of the Holy Word with his findings. In the end, he "gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation" (Dorsey 260). Darwin, as a great scientist and thinker, wa...
