On the second to the last page of "Origin of the Species," Charles Darwin writes,
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Did you have a point apart from Darwin being a theist? The modern theory of biological evolution contains no god, needs no god, and cannot benefit in terms of explanatory or predictive power by the ad hoc insertion of one into the theory.
Furthermore, this is a familiar phenomenon in the history of science, namely, that when the scientist reached the boundary of his knowledge, he invokes a god. Ptolemy had been studying the movements of the visible heavenly bodies and attempting to describe their movements, but hit a snag with the apparent retrograde motion of planets like Mars with orbits exterior to earth's, which appear to stop their forward motion, reverse direction for a while, then stop again and resume their original motion and direction, an illusion caused by a faster earth passing a slower Mars from with Mars' orbit.
At this point, Ptolemy writes,
- "I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia" - Ptolemy
Centuries later, Newton was also working on celestial mechanics, which culminated with a theory of gravitation articulated in his Principia. Newton reached the limits of his knowledge and invoked a god to account for the stability of the solar system as he conceived it, because he couldn't do it mathematically. He thought that the effect of planets like Saturn and Jupiter ought to tug on planets like Earth and Mars with each orbit, and either eventually throw them into the sun, or out of the solar system altogether. From Newton's Principia
- “The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”
Newton doesn't invoke a god prior to that in his classic work. He doesn't mention gods when discussing his formula F=ma, nor when discussing his universal law of gravitation. God is nowhere to be found until Newton runs out of ideas.
Incidentally, Newton was wrong about planets being flung without a god to prevent to keep them in their orbits. He lacked the mathematics for a 3+ body gravitational system, which was provided about 130 later by Laplace, who developed a new branch of calculus called perturbation theory, and who famously (and perhaps apocryphally) quipped to Napoleon, who asked Laplace why he never mentioned the creator in his work, "I had no need of that hypothesis"
Now we see this phenomenon again with Darwin, when he runs out of ideas to account for the existence of life. This is the god-of-the-gaps, whose job becomes smaller with each new discovery of science. The gap in knowledge that Ptolemy's god resided in was narrowed when those gods were relieved of the duty of reversing the direction of the planets, then again when Laplace removed Newton's god of the responsibility to holding the solar system intact.
This is a one-way trend in history, always the god or gods replaced by the natural, and never the other way around, and it is reasonable to expect it to continue indefinitely until all observable phenomena are or potentially can be accounted for naturalistically. We no longer call on gods to tow the sun through the sky, nor to fashion and hurl lightning bolts. The first wave of modern scientists showed us how the world works automatically - how charge flows through a wire and gases equilibrate without any active intervention, and with this vision of a clockwork universe, the builder-ruler god was demoted to the role of builder alone. With this, the god was excused from the universe, and deism became tenable.
Add the achievements since - the theory of evolution and modern cosmology, and the builder god is no longer needed, either. We see that the universe and the life in it can build themselves from seeds, and now atheism is tenable. We still need to account for those seeds, the singularity and the first living population of cells - the so-called origins problems. But we have naturalistic hypotheses for each, and expect them to be fruitful. If a spontaneous pathway from simple chemicals to first life can be elucidated, it might not be the actual one taken billions of years ago, but it will demonstrate that Darwin was premature to invoke a god to account for his gap in knowledge.
The references to Ptolemy, Newton, and Laplace come from a November 2005 essay from Neil DeGrasse Tyson entitled, "The Perimeter of Ignorance"
I've never felt that Darwin believed anything that was hostile to Creationism. The Creator breathed the life into a biological organism that is self replicating and self evolving. The only sin is that ignorant and arrogant men try to make it all a random accident.
What you call random, the advent of life arising from non-life, is probably inevitable wherever conditions are right for it to arise - not an unlikely fluke. As I said earlier, there is a reason no gods appear in any scientific theory, and it's not an anti-religious sentiment. There simply is no need for gods in those theories, and in fact, no place for them.
Contrary to what some people believe, creation is not off the table.
Creation will never be off the table unless it's disproven, which is probably impossible, even if it never occurred.
