Origin
‘Of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in The Struggle For Life’by Charles Darwin, 1859.
A brief overview and commentary.
Although belief in life developing from non life and humans developing from animals over millions of years goes back to ancient pagan beliefs and philosophies (see Andrew Sibley’s new book ‘Cracking the Darwin Code’ for evidence), and natural selection was described in 1835 by the creationist Edward Blyth writing in the magazine of Natural History (Darwin borrowed heavily from Blyth without giving due credit), this is the book that started the ball rolling. It’s heavy going due to the plodding style and tortuous arguments (such a contrast from the racy and interesting ‘Voyage of the Beagle’, but then that book dealt mainly with facts rather than speculation, whereas Origin is the other way round). Nevertheless it should be read by anyone serious about the evolution/creation debate.
Much of the book is taken up with statements of the fairly obvious, decent but irrelevant science observations such as observations of re-afforestation of a heath with and without grazing animals, and worthy but banal experiments Darwin carried out like floating a dead pigeon on a pond for a few weeks then seeing how many seeds in its crop germinated. This proved that a dead bird might float over the sea and bear seeds across water to islands or further shores. Very good, one tends to think, sound experimental science which helps us understand how plants might spread from one body of land to another. But how do these banal observations support belief in the origin of all species from a commmon ancestor? Not at all.
Darwin refused to define a species, blurring the line between species and variety. I am sure he did this to make it easier to sell his hypothesis by denying the fixity of species. I don’t know what is wrong with the definition of a species I was taught at school, a male and female being able to produce fertile young together. Claiming that ‘well marked varieties’ were actually new species was key to Darwin’s strategy.
True but irrelevant
In my copy of ‘Origin of Species’ the note TBI (true but irrelevant) has been scribbled frequently in the margin. There are lots of decent little science facts in here, but none of them support Darwin’s speculations. Darwin wrote about the way that plant and animal breeders had been able to ‘improve’ various types of animals. Better hunting dogs, sheep with better wool, pigeons that tumbled in flight, and others could be purposefully bred by selecting for the desired characteristic. None of this was either new or controversial.
But every time Darwin spelled out a science fact that his 1857 audience, none of whom had ever seen a wildlife documentary, wouldn’t have thought of, he was winning their confidence as he prepared to spring his big story. This was that the tendency to variation we see in species like dogs, cattle or pigeons (when selectively bred by intelligent humans who have a goal in mind) can be assumed to have been greatly exceeded by nature over millions of years, so as to have produced all living things from a common primitive ancestor. This huge leap of imagination saw him assert that all organs, plants and animals arose by millions of gradual random changes from a common single celled ancestor. It is important to stress that Darwin had never seen anything like this happen, he was speculating about the unobservable distant past.
It should be noted that Darwin said nothing about where the ancestor might have come from. He also admitted total ignorance of the means by which features pass from one generation to the next (he hadn’t read Mendel). But he believed it happened. And as we know from his autobiography and other sources (although he was very quiet about it at the time), he had come to detest the Christian religion. Together with his revolutionary, agnostic, atheist and deist co-workers, he wanted to get rid of the Judaeo-Christian belief system.
His reasoning on this point of common descent was obviously unsupported by the available evidence in 1857, even more so today. Let me explain, its not very difficult to see why Darwin was wrong if you can let yourself. However, its hard to alow yourself to question a belief you have been brought up in and on which your whole way of seeing the world depends. Look at Muslims, they are obviously wrong but can’t see it due to the way they have been brought up and peer pressure. People who accept evolution are in a similar situation-even if the evidence proves them wrong, the cost of rethinking is very high.
Natural versus human selection
Selective plant and animal breeding is done with minds, purpose, collaboration, memory and control. Darwin obviously knew this. He also knew that if the breeder’s controlling, designing, hand was withdrawn and random breeding allowed, the strain of dog, carrot, pigeon or whatever would revert to the more natural form in a very few generations. Again, I am not supposing that Darwin was aware of this, he told us so in his writing. He knew full well that careful selective breeding was needed to get, for example, a good gun dog, but that if good gun dogs were alloweed to breed randomly, their offspring would revert to the average.
Immeasurably more or measurably less?
So why then did he so boldly assert that ‘Natural selection could achieve immeasurably more than man’ when the evidence he actually quotes is that man, through DESIGN, could achieve so much change in dogs or pigeons, for example, in a short time, changes which were reversed in an even shorter time when nature was left to herself? His conclusions did not follow his evidence, but went directly against it.
Natural selection in nature primarily conserves species in their original form. It is the designing hand of man, working with the animals and plants that we find in the natural world, that is seen to split the species into many varieties. These varieties revert to the mean once the selective breeder’s hand is removed. They remain the same species. This measurable fact is totally at odds with Darwin’s assertion that natural selection ‘could do immeasurably more’ than human selection. In fact, it can do measurably less. Measurement in this context appeared to be a weak point for Darwin the dreamer.
The impassable genomic envelope
He also ignored what I call the ‘genomic envelope’, the apparently impassable limits to variation which are fixed in the DNA of creatures. Dogs, of which Darwin wrote at some length, have been domesticated for the whole of recorded human history, and as far as we know selectively bred during that time. But nobody has ever bred anything from a dog that wasn’t a dog. The evidence of our eyes is that dogs are dogs and always have been, as with King James Spaniels which are bred to have a ‘cute’ face but sufffer terrible brain and heart disease due to genetic weakness. They could neither have arisen or survived by natural seection.
The more highly bred a dog is, the less fit it seems to be. And as already mentioned, if random breeding is allowed, the pedigree will be lost and the dog go back towards to the wild original. I wrote about this in more depth is this article on the Creation Science Movement web site. All of this was well known to Darwin but he insisted in asserting that dogs had evolved like all other life forms from a common ancestor. This was rotten bad science, ignoring the facts before his eyes and fitting the conclusion to the evidence for philosophical reasons. That his ‘;theory’ was eagerly accepted is indicative that some key opinion leaders of his time (as today) wanted to believe anything that would allow them to forget God.
Difficulties with the theory?
Darwin includes a chapter on difficulties with the theory, but if you read you can see he didn’t believe there were any difficulties. He has persuaded himself he is right and that the difficulties (even the ones he acknowledges are ‘apparently’ overwhelming) can just be‘supposed’ away. He uses words like ‘suppose..imagine…believe’quite often. He wriggles around some of the ‘difficulties’ but doesn’t satisfactorily answer any of them. His self referential and circular reasoning as he tries to wish away the impossibility of the vertebrate eye arising by various gradual changes over millions of generations is a masterpiece of evasion which should be read by all aspiring politicians, socialist economists and criminal defence lawyers.
‘I see no ships’
In the end he boldly asserts that he doesn’t see any real problem with difficulties such the eye in all its complexity coming into being by millions of gradual changes from the default position of no sight. He said that his theory wold ‘fail utterly’ if it could be shown that any complex organ ‘could not’ have arisen by ‘numerous, successive, gradual adaptations’ but added ‘I can find out no such case’.
This is sophistry of the highest degree.
For a start, Darwin gave NOT ONE example of ‘a complex organ’ or any organ for that matter, that was observed to have formed in such a way. Further, he does not say what such proof would look like. The supposed test of falsification is in fact no such thing, as Darwin and his followers could always (and do always) simply say, whenever confronted with something as complex and purposeful as DNA check and repair, ‘it could have happened!’When ‘It could have happened’ is the standard of proof required, we are into the realm of fairy tales and philosophical dogma. This is not how real science is done.
Biochemisry Professor Michael Behe has skewered Darwinian sophistry about ‘Imagine a 1% eye, then a 2% eye-all the way up to a full eye. See how easy it is?’ in his book ‘Darwin’s Black Box’. To indicate how potent Behe’s criticism is, just see how much hate there is posted against him on line. Behe demonstrated at the molecular level of systems such as blood clotting, antibody production and vision that the gradualist model simply could not work-at all. In the case of vision, even the smallest amount of light sensitivity requires a large number of highly sophisticated molecular mechanisms all working perfectly together. Google rhodopsin or chemistry of vision. The idea that there could ever be a ‘simple light sensitive spot’ without brilliant design and breathtaking assembly skills is exposed as the fairy tale it always was. Rather than respond rationally to this, Behe is vilified and denied a right of reply in peer review journals.
“I can hardly doubt…I know nothing!
In a priceless quote, Darwin wrote that
‘I can hardly doubt that the vertebrate lung descended by numerous successive gradual changes from the swim bladder of an extinct form of which we know nothing.’
That is as good a summing up of Charles Darwin’s ‘logic’ as I can think of. He knows nothing, but can hardly doubt. And they accuse Christians of blind faith!
Darwin must have known even in 1857 when so little was known about biochemistry and the cell that he was speculating way beyond what the evidence could support. Natural selection, his primary if not only creative agent, explains small variations within species or even perhaps families of plants and animals. It is conceded that in some circumstances natural selection may occasionally give rise to a new species, depending on how you define a species. But to achieve large changes through many successive sequential small changes, say from reptile to bird, the putative evolving organisms would have to pass through many, many stages which were neither one thing nor the other, so had no selective advantage, so they would be selected against.
This serious problem was clear even then, and clear in terms of Darwin’s own theory. It was not seriously addressed by Darwin. So although Darwin is less to blame than today’s scientists who are aware of the block to Darwin’s hypothetical gradualism provided by the irreducibly complex nature of cell biology. We also know about the DNA check and repair mechanism which is only explicable in terms of intelligent design and is also an effective road block against evolution as it tends to stop mutations, good or bad, conserving the genome, not progressing it. But even without this knowledge in 1857, Darwin had no excuse for refusing to address the issue of useless intermediate structures or his other logical fallacies and overinterpretation of very limited evidence.
Why would natural selection preserve useless intermediate structures?
Perhaps the most obvious argument against Darwin’s idea of one kind of animal changing into another kind by numerous gradual changes, after the rather prosaic fact that it has never been observed, is the problem of useless intermediate structures which natural selection would have eliminated. If you read Darwin carefully you will see that he was aware of this problem but refused to confront it. He stated that any variation that did not give a survival advantage would be ‘ruthlessly exterminated’ but did not pick up on the implications of this on the issue of intermediate structures which were neither one thing nor another. The best that his followers can come up with today are trite sayings like ‘Feathers might have developed for insulation and then become adapted for flight later’. Try applying that kind of‘Just So Story’ to, for example, Krebs cycle, protein synthesis, blood clotting, immunity, DNA check and repair, or chlorophyll! The intemediate stages do not exist, and they would very obviously have been non survivable. Again, this is not creationist propaganda but directly observable biology.
Without pre-existing life, natural selection has nothing to build with.
Darwin’s avoidance of the problematic area of origin of life from non life, massive an omission though it is, can be more readily excused than his avoiding the issue of useless intermediate structures. Huge numbers of these would have been necessary for his hypothesis of‘gradual, successive, slight modifications’ as the agent of evolution to be true. Such structures, if they existed (for which we have no evidence) would have been neither one thing nor another. Since the book is supposed to be about natural selection, this is an extremely grave omission which should have sunk the theory at its launch.
Why does he offer no explanation or example of how partly formed structures could offer selective advantage? To take the much proclaimed supposition that birds evolved by innumerable gradual changes from reptiles, a structure that is neither scale nor feather, neither reptile claw nor bird wing, neither reptile heart/lung nor bird heart/lung etc etc is useless so could not confer any selective benefit. Natural selection would therefore act against the wasteful, inefficient not feather not scale, not fin not leg, not gill not lung, not arm not wing, etc. Darwin clearly knew this but avoided the issue.
Natural selection can create nothing, and Darwin knew it
It must be constantly repeated, natural selection e.g. as seen in peppered moths or Galapagos finches is a demonstrable science fact which creationists accept. It eliminates less fit structures and organisms and may help with adaptation to environmental changes, but IT CREATES NOTHING NEW. Natural selection acting on variation over time is a useful concept, and explains minor adaptation to environmental changes to new species (as with dogs, carp, grasses, rattlesnakes, oak trees, finches etc). The peppered moth story (setting aside the issues of bias verging on fraud in Kettlewell’s original experiments and write up) is a decent example, but nothing new was produced, just a change in the proportion of moth colour variants. Reversible changes in the gene frequency is not the same as the production of new genetic material.
Natural selection is OK as far as it goes; the cardinal error of ‘Origin of Species’ is Darwin’s insistence that natural selection could be assumed to have done much more in the unrecorded past that it could be seen to do during recorded history. His great leap of faith asserted that given enough time, enough generations, one kind of animal would turn into a completely different kind. But we do not see this in living or fossil animals, and there is no evidence to demonstrate that it has ever happened, or that it could happen. I repeat, Darwin never saw one kind of animal turn into another, and to this day neither has anyone else. It is faith, not science.
‘Why are the rocks not packed with intermediate forms?’
Darwin said that the only real proof of his theory (since he was forced to acknowledge we cannot see it happening today) would be large numbers of intermediate forms in the fossil record documenting links betwee one kind of animal and its evolved ancestor. He lamented and made excuses for the absence of these intermediate fossils and predicted that they would turn up. After 150 years of massive world-wide effort, mostly done by people who wanted to prove Darwin right, the intermediate fossils predicted by and necessary for his theory are still absent, despite propaganda and hype.
The more fossils are found, the more they model the sudden appearance followed by stasis and extinctions which the Biblical model predicts. Intermediate fossils would be the only possible direct evidence of very gradual evolution over millions of years, but apart from a tiny number of over-interpreted possible, the intermediate fossils remain absent.
As Darwin wrote ‘Why then are the rocks not packed with intermediate forms?’ How about ‘Because they never existed’? When does absence of evidence become evidence of absence? The point is that is Darwinian gradualism were true, and if fossil creating events (i.e. massive mud slides) happened reasonably regularly over a billion years or so, then they would have captured many of the intermediate forms for us. If, that is, they had existed.
Mendel-a Christian creationist who founded the science of genetics
While Darwin was hurriedly writing his book to get it into print before Wallace beat him to it (Wallace had independently reached similar conclusions), Friar Gregor Mendel’s work on plant breeding appeared. This, unlike ‘Origin of Species’, was firmly based on experimental and repeatable science and proved to be an enduring foundation of the science of genetics. Mendel demonstrated the extent to which species tend to breed true and although variations did appear, left to breed without interference there was a strong tendency to return to the norm for that species. This suggested that natural selection was essentially a conservative process, not a means for producing new kinds of plant of animal. Mendel’s work is not mentioned by Darwin in Origin of Species, whether he had read it or not at the time is unclear. Probably he had not but who knows? Mendelian genetics are far from supportive of Darwin’s belief that species gradually changed into other species.
Why did ‘Origin of Species’ succeed?
The book was not the immediate success that is claimed by today’s Darwin hagiographers. The many contemporary scientists who opposed it have been airbrushed out of history. The success of the philosophical speculations in this book can best be explained by the rising tide of materialism, revolution and atheism in Europe at the time. It seems most likely that many people WANTED (and still want) an explanation of the natural world that excludes a Supreme Deity to whom they are answerable, so they could get rid of the restricting idea of God and follow their autonomous desires to do as they pleased.
Malcolm Bowden has written this up with some very meticulous scholarship and detective work in his book ‘Rise of the Evolution Fraud’. Those who wanted a watered down Christianity included many compromising, jobsworth churchmen, some of whom were much more quickly won over to the new belief system than scientists, many of whom, including Darwin’s old Cambridge tutor Sedgwick, dismissed Darwin’s speculations as nonsense. Bowden’s studies demonstrate that Darwin and his mentor Lyell, and ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ T E Huxley knew perfectly well that they were working in a subtle ad indirect manner against biblical Christianity, trying to undermine its historical basis.
Hail Darwin!
Today, Darwinianism has a special totemic status, protected from criticism, constantly bolstered by propaganda not least from the BBC. Anyone who questions it can expect to be ignored, shouted down, misrepresented and vilified. Nevertheless, Darwin never proved his case, ignored and glossed over many key difficulties, and is falsified by true science based on actual observations.
Origin of Species is a funny name for a book whose writer said ‘I have nothing to say about origins’ and who refused to even define what a species was. It certainly does not establish any scientific case form common descent from a self-creating original life form. This book should be read more than it is, so that people can see how bad it really is.
“The Voyage of the Beagle” by Charles Darwin.
This fascinating book is more of a travelogue and anthropological commentary than a biology treatise, well worth a read for anyone interested in the life and times of Charles Darwin. Darwin writes about his adventures on board the Beagle as Captain Fitz Roy’s companion. He wasn’t the ship’s naturalist as is commonly supposed, the ship’s doctor was. Darwin’s only qualification was in theology, but he certainly got stuck in to the nature with enthusiasm.
Clearly Darwin had a wonderful time, writing in chapter 1 he says “Delight is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who for the first time has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration……To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again.” It is difficult for us today to imagine how marvellous an adventure it was to go round the world on a sailing ship, used as we are to excellently filmed colour wildlife documentaries on TV.
He wrote of his stay near Rio, ‘In England, any person fond of natural history enjoys in his walks a great advantage, by always having something to attract his attention; but in these fertile climates, teeming with life, the attractions are so numerous that he is scarcely able to walk at all.’ His notes are suffused with his sense of wonder at nature coming through, and carefully observed writing about giant butterflies, vampire bats, skunks, condors and their lice, pumas and jaguars (and their victims’ remains) monkeys, fireflies, gigantic ant’s nests, puffer fish, sharks, booby birds, sundry invertebrates and plants. He also recorded extensive notes on the humans he travelled and lived with.
Many birds are described in detail, it is clear that Darwin’s knowledge of them was encyclopaedic. Here we see Darwin thinking about bird populations on islands, a theme he was to return to as part of his later speculations about change occurring over time in isolated populations. He wrote of the local populations as he travelled through South America, gauchos, villagers, soldiers and slaves. He describes local customs and hospitality, hunting with the gauchos and a humorous incident in which he accidentally caught himself and his horse with the throwing balls (bolas).
Many interesting anecdotes are recounted and the difficulties are mentioned, including a degree of lawlessness and the worrying knives and daggers which many men seemed to carry with them and were not infrequently used in fights. Clearly the journey was accompanied by some degree of personal discomfort and risk. There are many descriptions of hardship and discomfort, danger from potentially hostile Indians and hunting Jaguars and Pumas as well as mosquitoes and hunger and thirst. His descriptions of the Gauchos hunting and beef butchery and cookery are fascinating
He records examples of the cruel treatment of slaves which he observed in Brazil, clearly Darwin (in as far as we can tell from what he wrote in his journal when nobody had heard of him, so most likely he was writing very honestly) was clearly moved with anger by the ill treatment of his fellow humans and was a concerned and compassionate man who protested against mistreatment of others just because they were considered ‘barbarians’. He protested against the cruel killing of Indians and the prevailing attitude that justified this as ‘they breed so!’, expressing outrage that ‘in this age, such atrocities could be committed in a “Christian civilised country.”’
‘Men inbued with the principles of justice and honour’
He described while travelling through Argentina finding hanging from a tree the skeleton of an Indian with the dried skin over bones. He was clearly sickened by the approval his travelling companions expressed at this ghastly sight. There are many references to wars and bloody revolutions going on in South America during his time there, and it seems likely that this would have impressed him very deeply along with the flora and fauna he observed.
He made the remarkable observation, regarding Paraguay, and lamenting its wars, revolutions and economic failure ‘That country will have to learn, like every other South American state, that a republic cannot succeed until it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.’ Very true words indeed, but how do we develop and sustain such a body of men if we teach them from childhood that they are an accidental descendant of hydrogen atoms in a godless universe, answerable only to their base desires, and heading for meaningless extinction like other animals? whither justice and honour iof we are descended from sponges, worms, jellyfish and sharks?
Ideas have consequences.
How old is that fossils? Its still got some fat in it!!!
Darwin obtained the head of a Mylodon, a giant extinct quadruped, and noted that the bones were so fresh that they contained by analysis 7 percent animal matter and when placed in a spirit lamb burned with a small flame. This certainly suggests that the fossils of these gigantic extinct creatures may not have been millions of years old. It is interesting to compare this with the recent discovery of organic material including red blood cells in a T. Rex thigh bone in the USA-Google on Mary Schweitzer T Rex fossil fo details.
He brought his able and enquiring mind to bear on questions such as the amount of food it took to support a large animal and made the interesting observation that, should whales have been extinct and nobody had ever seen one, and the fossilised skeleton of a Greenland whale be found, nobody would have believed that its diet consisted of small invertebrates living in icy cold arctic seas? This is an interesting observation which can be rightly applied to other fossils about which unsupported assumptions are made, remembering also the coelacanth.
Species or varieties?
Writing about a poisonous snake, Trigonocephalus crepitans, Darwin remarks that is appeared to be intermediate between a rattlesnake and ‘the viper’ (rattlesnakes are of course vipers so presumably he must have meant some other particular viper which is not here named). He went on to say
‘I observed a fact, which appears to me very curious and instructive, as showing how every character, even though it may be in some degree independent of structure, has a tendency to vary by slow degrees. The extremity of the tail of this snake is terminated by a point, which is very slightly enlarged; and as the animal glides along, it constantly vibrates the last inch; and this part striking against the dry grass and brushwood produces a rattling noise, which can be distinctly heard at the distance of six feet….The Trigonocephalus has therefore in some respects the structure of a viper, with the habits of a rattlesnake; the noise however being produced by a simpler device.’
Here we see perhaps the beginnings of Darwin’s idea that there was no true fixity of species and that it was possible as it were to ‘morph’ from one animal to another by numerous slow changes over aeons. He wrote later in Origin of Species that he thought the Creationist belief that every single type of animal had been created exactly as it was and had never changed at all was inconsistent with his observations of small differences like this between ‘related’ vipers, and he proposed an alternative explanation, which was that variation had occurred with descent from common ancestors.
He was simply assuming far too much here. It is one thing to propose a couple of dozen rattlesnake sub-species descending with variation/adaptation from a common rattlesnake ancestor, probably through genetic decline from an original full rattle. It is quite another thing to suppose that all snakes, lizards, turtles etc, let alone birds, fish, mammals and all the rest were descended from a single ancestor. This became the biggest con trick in all evolutionary ‘evidence’, Darwin’s idea that minor variations within a species meant that we could safely assume that there were no meaningful barriers between different kinds of creature and that all animals could have come by unbroken descent from a single common ancestor. Which according to evolutionist mythology made itself from dirty water and sparks.
Visiting the Galapagos islands, we see the clearest evidence of the nascent theory of natural selection (variation within a kind) in his observations of finches with different shaped beaks, flightless cormorants and tortoises with different shaped shells due to inbreeding. He wrote of the differently beaked finches, ‘Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.‘ I return to my abbreviation TBI (true, but irrelevant). Yes, isolation had split the species into varieties, but they were still the same species.
In the penultimate paragraph of ‘Beagle’ Darwin notes, ‘..as the traveller stays but a short time in each pace, his description must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observations. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost,a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses.‘ (my bold)
Ahem, yes Charles. Thank you for, on this occasion, being so honest. Some of us had noticed this ‘constant tendency to fill up the gaps of knowledge’ in your writing, a tendency adopted by your followers. The invention of inaccurate and superficial hypotheses, particularly if one is honest about them, is forgivable in a travel book, especially such a good one as ‘Beagle’. It is less forgiveable when we are talking about the origin, and therefore destiny, of the human race.
Darwin, a humanitarian who saw the value of cultural Christianity but then did much to undermine it.
Further observations are made of Australia, which he didn’t like much. The book closes with a chapter including the interesting statements ‘The march of improvement, consequent on the introduction of Christianity throughout the South Sea, probably stands by itself in the records of history.‘ Thinking back to his comments deploring the cruel treatment of Indians in South America, one can only speculate what Darwin might have thought if he could had seen what results the widespread adoption of philosophical ideas derived from his story of origins would have on men’s beliefs and consequent behaviour.
Darwin was a decent man as men go, and like many other ‘decent’ men and some progressive philosophers who were perhaps less decent contemplating the alleged death of God, assumed that decency was inherent in the human condition and that we could do very well without God. This belief is at the heart of Dawkins’ creed, which is being taken up more and more in my country of Britain.
When a society that has been built on Christian foundations rejects Christianity as the basis of its morals, it will inevitably acquire a new set of morals and a new culture that is, whatever else it may be, not Christian. Currently Britain and the West in general is trying this experiment hoping for a rationalist paradise or some other godles Utopia. Our descendants, if any, will discover what the experiment leads to, but they most likely will not be able to reverse whatever happens. Anarchy, EU tyranny and Sharia law are only three possible outcomes.
The philosophical payload of Darwinism
The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition which are so often thrown in Christian’s faces (I have writen about them elsewhere on this site) fade into insignificance compared with the horrors of the 20th century that were perpetrated by secular states. Both Communism and Nazism were godless philosophies that owed something to Darwinian thinking. Darwin started out as a fascinated amateur naturalist, did some very decent basic science, but in the end, under what influences we can only speculate, created a monster whose teeth and tentacles strayed far beyond the realm of biology. Evolution has been described by Daniel Dennet as a ‘universal acid’ that corrodes everything it touches.
It is fashionable today when the philosophical efect of Darwin on 20th century secular philosophies such as Marxism, robber baron capitalism and Nazism to sweep the problem away and blame any bad outcomes on ‘bad people’, or even less credibly to assert that Hitler and Stalin got their political and moral ideas from Christianity. I can see why anyone persuaded by Darwin’s sly but empty rhetoric could fall for such stuff. Anyone interested in exploring the issue could do worse than start with Richard Weikart’s study ‘From Darwin to Hitler’.
I appreciate how shocking it is to even contemplate for a moment that you have been lied to all your life about Evolution. I have been there. The facts remain.