I remember hearing that Stalin credited "Origin of the Species" as the inspiration for giving up his faith while in the monestery.
I did a Google search for Stalin, Origin of the Species and found the story confirmed on several sites. Unfortunately all of them are anti-evolution, so I don't know if you would accept them as being authorititative.
The source they give for the story is "Landmarks in the Life of Stalin" by E. Yaroslavsky.
I agree that you can be a Christian and believe in evolution but there are those who use the theory as a excuse to reject the teachings in the Bible.
That may be true; I haven't researched it. I think Darwin also lost his faith, possibly as a result of his lifetime of scientific work. What does this prove? Darwin didn't go on to become a communist or a mass murderer (although there seems to have been some kind of contact between him and Marx). And no one was more involved with the principles of evolution than ol' Darwin himself. Professors of biology don't run off and become mass murderers (although, being academics, they are often leftists, an unfortunate malady they share with virtually every other academic discipline). Ayn Rand lost her faith -- if she ever had any -- but she became stridently anti-communist, and I'm not aware of any reports that she was a murderer. Socrates was condemned to death by Athens for encouraging his students to question the existence of the gods, yet ol' Socrates was no communist, and no mass murderer. Sparta was very religious, and they were as close to a communist nation as the Greeks ever produced.
The point of all this is that you cannot make a causal connection between atheism on the one hand, and either murder or communism on the other hand.
Yes, that is unfortunate. I happened to pick up a copy of Discover magazine recently, and, apparently its whole editorial staff is of that opinion... even the Big Bang theory, which seems to me about as close as one can get to the scientific version of "And God said, let there be light...", they take as "proof" of a non-theistic origin of the universe. People like that really irritate me.
Unfortunately all of them are anti-evolution, so I don't know if you would accept them as being authorititative.
You would be correct to surmise that I would be skeptical of such sources.