Funny that hardly anyone in his own time, and familiar with him or his work, thought this. Consider, for instance, the creationist Adam Sedgwick, one of the greatest geologists of the 19th century, and a real creation scientist:
For one summer of his work in Wales which was to lead to this controversy [the great Devonian controversy], Sedgwick made a fateful choice of field assistant: a young Cambridge graduate named Charles Darwin. Darwin had passed his examinations for the Bachelor of Arts degree in January 1831, and began attending Sedgwick's geology lectures, which he found fascinating. That summer, the two men explored the rocks of north Wales; Darwin got a "crash course" in field geology from Sedgwick, an experience that would stand him in good stead over the next five years, on the round-the-world voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. During this voyage, Darwin sent rocks and fossils from South America back to Sedgwick, as well as descriptions of the geology of South America. These impressed Sedgwick, who wrote in a letter to Darwin's family:He is doing admirably in S. America & has already sent home a Collection above all praise. -- It was the best thing in the world for him that he went out on the Voyage of Discovery. . .In November 1835, before Darwin had returned to England, Sedgwick read some of Darwin's work on South American geology to the Geological Society of London. This greatly improved Darwin's reputation as a scientist; he was inducted into the Society shortly after his return. The two stayed friends until Sedgwick's death, but Sedgwick was upset and disappointed by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. After reading The Origin of Species, Sedgwick candidly wrote to Darwin on November 24, 1859:If I did not think you a good tempered & truth loving man I should not tell you that. . . I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly; parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous-- You have deserted-- after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth-- the true method of induction. . .
Sedqwick cleary was unhappy with Darwin's evolutionary theory, but I find no hint he considered Darwin a dummy. No hint that anybody did, for the matter of that.
That's understandable. The little things about Chuck's BS getting 100 million people killed and turning Europe into a pig pen from end to end came a bit later.
Funny that to defend him you should pick a quote that says:
"parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous-- You have deserted-- after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth-- the true method of induction. . . "
The big problem with Darwin is not his intelligence, but his honesty and his totally unscientific methodology. He did not do experiments. He was still a collector of curiosities. Of course he was also very much a selector of those curiosities which fit his theory while ignoring those that did not. In short he was a charlatan. A very good charlatan, but a charlatan nevertheless.