Darwin was raised in an environment of Unitarian beliefs of his mother. His father also was publicly Unitarian, but really was a freethinker. The Unitarian concept of God differs slightly from the Judea-Christianity concept of God in that the former believe God is just God, while the latter believe God is comprised of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost (the Holy trinity). Unitarian belief holds that Jesus Christ was a prophet, and not the Messiah.
In a seeming paradox to van Gogh, who wanted to be accepted by the church but wasn't, Darwin excelled at Theology in secondary school, and was embraced by the leaders of the church. His father's frustration, also paradoxical to van Gogh's father's frustration, was that young Charles wanted to go beyond the church. After achieving the credentials necessary to stop and earn his living, he kept going on with his studies in the natural sciences.
He assisted on a couple of voyages to South America to chart land and study animals and plants. One of those trips was a five-year journey aboard 'The Beagle.' It was on this journey that Darwin's eventual natural selection model began. He found fossils of sea life in the mountainous regions. He found fossils that resembled current animals, but were different in size or some features. He noticed that similar types of animals had different characteristics or features seemingly based only on the region they live in.
Darwin, at this point, still believed in monotheism, but he must have started realizing that the 'concept of God' worked 'mysteriously differently' than what was common belief, and certainly not how the Bible says it happened. He recognized this, and worked diligently to prove neither theory was totally correct. He found and cited anomoles that conflicted with the wholly natural 'we lose that which we don't use' theory of evolution, which atheists contended proved there was no God. He cited 'beautiful and colorful fish' in the oceans that seemed to serve no wholly natural purpose for being kept 'out of sight.'
At some point, he may even have thought 'this is all created by time.'
As he aged, and his findings began morphing into mathematically sound theory, and very conscious that he had found truths in what were commonly regarded as theories of atheists, he went to great lengths to devise counter-arguments both for those who believe in God and would consider it blasphemous, and for those who were sure to claim this proved there is no God.
His own prejudice, at least by considering his childhood environment, was that there was a God, but not in the conventional Judea-Christianity concept of God. He struggled to find the truth, but the truth just kept getting older and older and older . . . kind of like if one were to search for the origins of infinity.
Darwin was very successful and very busy as a young man. He married when he was older than typical marrying age, and he married his cousin. He loved his wife dearly, but he also would tend to blame himself any time one of their children would become ill. He understood that by marrying his cousin, any condition common between he and his cousin, his children had, not twice, but squared the chance to acquire it.
When his ten year-old daughter died, he said, seemingly from nowhere, that he no longer believed in 'a beneficent God.' If you succumb to post hoc ergo propter hoc, you would conclude 'his daughter's death immediately and suddenly caused him to denounce God.' I think that's very highly unlikely. Things don't happen that way, but, rather, most often 'only appear to happen that way.'
After that, he declared that he was agnostic ([not understanding/inconclusive about] God), not atheistic (belief in no God).
Let's consider the 'series of events.'
We know that his prejudice was that there is a God, but with some environmental latitude to believe in God as a concept and not as 'The Man.' We know that he was the tenth best student in a class of 178, and Theology is what he did best in. We know that he passed up the opportunity, at that point, to earn a respectable living telling the world that The Bible is THE Word of God. We know that he was very careful in developing his natural selection theory 'so it would not be construed as evidence of no God.' We know that he found conflict in the 'totally natural theory' when he put forth effort to locate it. We know it bothered his conscience that he had given his children exponential odds at acquiring any negative family trait common between he and his wife. We know his child died, and he declared his belief in 'no beneficent God.' We know he died agnostic in his religious belief.
This 'series of events' leads me to believe that the traumatic episode of the death of his daughter was really 'the last straw the camel's back could hold' before launching his long-developing belief that God is not 'The Man,' but, rather, that he just doesn't understand the concept of God (though I find it more likely that he really held his own concept, and didn't share it because of the scientific standards he would have expected himself to meet to prove his beliefs).
If you would contend that Darwin were truly an atheist, and only said he was agnostic because of his prejudice, then how would you be able to rely on his research if he were willing to lie to be popular?
It seems far more likely that he had been 'lying for popularity' up to the point of his daughter's death, and he really only disclosed that which he had 'developed belief in' at the point of the traumatic episode.
He didn't have Einstein's theories to work with, but he had 'uncommon sense' about time. To wit: he noticed that fossils of ancient land animals in the proximity of fossils of more modern sea life, in what was now mountainous regions. Just imagine finding something, and understanding that it really means 'everything we thought we knew is way bigger and way older than we've ever imagined.'
It was a tremendous load lofted onto the shoulders of one person to assimilate and dispense for the world to learn from. Instead of getting his 'just rewards,' he is mistakenly lauded to have proven there really is no God, and being equally, but oppositely, mistakenly chastised for being the 'father of Atheism.'
Simplicity made complicated with irrelevant and incorrect factors that lead to illogical conclusions: the suffering of Darwin.
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