I never said that it was an established fact. He was the one that said the story was a complete lie. It wasn't, in fact, the women existed and most likely visited Darwin. Both sides have no conclusive evidence either way.
The one fact you and he avoided was that Darwin considered himself a "Theist" even after turning away from the literal interpretation of the Bible. That he believe that God created life and was one of the first IDers.
Other than his daughter?
II. Charles Darwin’s Daughter, Henrietta, Refutes The Story.-- The Lady Hope Story
A. After the story had been revived in 1922, Henrietta stated in the _Christian_ for February 23, 1922, page 12, in an article titled: "Charles Darwin’s Death-Bed: Story of Conversion Denied," by Mrs. R.B. Litchfield."I was present at his deathbed, Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. ..... The whole story has no foundation whatever."B. More details on the spread of this story and its rebuttal may be found in the book "The Survival of Charles Darwin: a Biography of a Man and an Idea" by Ronald W. Clark, published by Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1985.
Don't you find it interesting that a similar claim (deathbed rejection of his life's work and calling for Christ) was made of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, after he died in 1802?
The one fact you and he avoided was that Darwin considered himself a "Theist" even after turning away from the literal interpretation of the Bible. That he believe that God created life and was one of the first IDers.
Indeed.
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."-- Charles Darwin, selected.
"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act."
"I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion."
"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."
"A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws."
"I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture."
"I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance."