From today’s New York Times Book Review comes two interesting morsels about Charles Darwin that ought to slightly soften Christian antagonism to him as the destroyer of faith.
One new book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution,” argues that his abolitionist sentiment drove him toward a “belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent'” of all human beings. If we all come from the same place, we cannot claim one human to being superior and capable of enslaving another.
Another review (of Banquet at Delmonicos) highlighted the existence of the “Deistic Darwinians.” These would include Charles Kingsley, who responded to Origin of Species by writing: “We know of old that God was so wise that he could make all things ; but behold, he is so much wiser than even that, that he can make all things make themselves.”
Responding to another friend, Asa Gray, who had made a similar defense, Darwin himself wrote:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one ; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.”

I’ve written before that Thomas Jefferson believed in intelligent design. The conflict, it seems, is not between science and God, it’s between Biblical Revelation and Religion.