Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February, 1809 – 19 April, 1882)
was an English naturalist who established that all species of life have
descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the
scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from
a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory
with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin
of Species. The scientific community and much of the general public
came to accept evolution as fact in his lifetime, but it was not until the
emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to
the 1950s that a broad consensus developed that natural selection
was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwinʼs
scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences,
explaining the diversity of life.
The Church of Englandʼs response was mixed. Darwinʼs old
Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow dismissed the ideas, but
liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of
Godʼs design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as “Just as
noble a conception of Deity”. In 1860, the publication of Essays and
Reviews by seven liberal Anglican theologians diverted clerical
attention from Darwin, with its ideas including higher criticism
attacked by church authorities as heresy. In it, Baden Powell argued
that miracles broke Godʼs laws, so belief in them atheistic and
praised “Mr. Darwinʼs masterly volume [supporting] the grand
principle of the self-evolving powers of nature”. Asa Gray discussed
theology with Darwin, who imported and distributed Grayʼs pamphlet
on theistic evolution, Natural Selection is not Inconsistent with Natural
Theology. The most famous confrontation was at the public 1860
Oxford evolution debate during a meeting of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, where the Biship of Oxford Samuel
Wilberforce, though not opposed to transmutation of species, argued
against Darwinʼs explanation and human descent from apes. Joseph
Hooker argued strongly for Darwin, and Thomas Huxleyʼs legendary
retort, that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a
man who misused his gifts, came to symbolize a triumph of science
over religion.