He also made this comment that should draw our interest:
"After a brief comment on boyhood morality, he(Darwin) goes on to register a protest against a contradiction in contemporary thought: it is accepted that the whole Newtonian universe of the astronomers, vast and awesome as it may be, operates according to natural law;
N Notebook, p. 36. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library.
* Letter, Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, August 21, 1861. ML 1, 194.
[page] 369 The Notebooks on Man, Mind and Materialism
but the much more limited universe of living things is deemed so wonderful as to require the idea of a special intelligence, “the artificer,” who designs and creates each living thing. Darwin adds a reflection on human psychology: if we admired the universe as much as we did “the wonderful structure of a beetle,” we would apply the argument from Design to the former as much as to the latter, and not accept the operation of either according to natural law.”
Ellipses added
"..but the much more limited universe of living things is deemed so wonderful as to require the idea of a special intelligence, “the artificer,” who designs and creates each living thing."
This is what I mean about Darwin being simple-minded. There are a couple of classic fallacies in these statements that Darwin should have recognized.
It is a simple thing to recognize that life merely required the same creative start that the universe received, proceeding thereafter according to mechanisms and properties inherent at its creation.
Darwin apparently did not realize that the fact that each new generation of life did not require a creative act on God's part does not mean that God didn't create life any more than the fact that the change of seasons doesn't require a creative act on God's part means that the universe wasn't created.
Were he a true scientist, Darwin should then have looked for the mechanisms and properties of life that generated the things observed. This would have been science. Instead, Darwin promoted the philosophical conclusion that God did not create life.
This is the fallacy of necessity where an unwarranted conclusion is reached based on the necessity of one of the premises. The fact that life proceeds by generation without creative requirement does not necessarily mean that life was not created. Darwin continued his error by invoking the fallacy of affirming the consequent by interpreting all observations strictly in terms of his initial belief.
Pity the poor fools who can't see the massive fallacies Darwin committed and blindly accept Darwin's simple-minded fallacious assessment.