German Biblical critic David Strauss:

Vainly did we philosophers and critical theologians over and over again decree the extermination of miracles; our ineffectual sentence died away, because we could neither dispense with miraculous agency nor point to any natural force able to supply it, where it had seemed most indispensable. Darwin has demonstrated this force, this process of nature; he has opened the door by which a happier coming race will cast out miracles, never to return. Everyone who knows what miracles imply will praise him, in consequence, as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race.

The biologist Karl Pearson also recalled "the joy we young men then felt when we saw that wretched date BC 4004 replaced by a long vista of millions of years of development."

Not just that "neutral" date 4004, but the Biblical account of God's judgment in the days of Noah, was a threat to the anti-Biblical free-thought of the 18-19th century. Darwin's prophecy was "peace, peace" when there is no peace:

As all forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length.

No doubt his belief produced great relief.

Sir Julian Huxley articulates the secular equivalent of "whew!":

The past of life has been steadily increased by science until it now (1958) exceeds the staggering figure of two and one-half billion years. And in place of an imminent Last Judgment, Life on this planet can now envisage at least an equal span of evolutionary time in the future.

The Judgment of God. That is the issue. George Barnard Shaw:

If you can realize how insufferably the world was oppressed by the notion that everything that happened was an arbitrary personal act of an arbitrary personal God of dangerous, jealous and cruel personal character, you will understand how the world jumped at Darwin."

This is a *moral* issue, not a scientific one. Many great scientists were comfortable with the Biblical explanation of the origin of life. No "facts" forced anyone to abandon the Biblical cosmology for a secular one. The Theory of Evolution is simply a rationalization for a moral pre-commitment.