Evolution (24)
It appears that the ideological necessity of finding a strictly materialist theory eventually came to trump those honest and open-minded objections voiced by the majority of reviewers of the Origin in the decade after its publication. Intellectual integrity was sacrificed on the altar of ideological commitment.
Taking Leave of Darwin, 118
Neil Thomas
Taking Leave of Darwin, 118
428
If the world's finest minds can unravel only with difficulty the deeper workings of nature, how could it be supposed that those workings are merely a mindless accident, a product of blind chance?
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
When Darwin published his works, it was thought that the key to the process was found at last, but in course of time it was found that the key did not fit the lock. Darwin truly said that his theory depended entirely on the possibility of transmitting acquired characteristics, and it soon became one of the corner-stones of Weismann's biological theory that acquired characteristics are not inherited.Systematic Theology, 185
I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.
As philosopher Richard Spilsbury once noted, "The basic objection to neo-Darwinism is not that it is speculative, but that it confers miraculous powers on inappropriate agents. In essence, it is an attempt to supernaturalize nature, to endow unthinking processes with more-than-human powers.Taking Leave of Darwin, 140
So why do biologists indulge in unsubstantiated fantasies in order to deny what is so patently obvious, that the 200,000 amino acid chains, and hence life, did not appear by chance? The answers lies in a theory developed over a century ago which sought to explain the development of life as an inevitable product of the purely local natural processes.
I find it the grandest historical irony that the most fervent defenders of Darwinism claim to be advancing the ideals of the European Enlightenment. My view is that they are in reality dishonoring the foundational principles of that admirable project by perpetuating a hypothesis without empirical foundation or even the slightest approximation to verisimilitude.Taking Leave of Darwin, 140
I believe that the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents to the fact that is it thought to liberate us from religion.Mind and Cosmos, 12
Darwin was never able to give a straight answer to those persons who objected to his explanation of why giraffes had long necks. If this were such a selective advantage, why did other animals not evolve long necks? In fact, why were not all species evolving in all different directions, ostriches acquiring the useful faculty of flying, other terrestrial animals of swimming, and so on?Taking Leave, 84-85
as Gertrude Himmelfarb (who did more than any other critic to unmask Darwin's rhetorical evasions) noted, Darwin's technique here and elsewhere was "to assume that by acknowledging the difficulty, he had somehow exorcized it,"Taking Leave of Darwin, 76
Darwin himself acknowledged and indeed drew attention to the lack of fossil evidence--he even, as he put it, "had difficulty imagining by what gradations many structures had been perfected," adding, "Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?... as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the Earth?"Taking Leave of Darwin, 76
Empirically, the idea of a transformation from one species to another appears problematical in view of the practical experience of animal husbandry, where even selective breeding has proved unsuccessful in bringing about fundamentally new species.Taking Leave of Darwin, 73
Scientists often adopt hushed and almost embarrassed tones in referring to consciousness, since it represents a major challenge to the materialist schema into which all facets of human life "should" be able to be fitted. They are loath to acknowledge that the problem rests with the Procrustean, one-size-fits-all schema they support.Taking Leave of Darwin, 72
It is not even possible to imagine a theoretical pathway leading to how consciousness could have come about by natural selection -- which is one reason why leading scientists in the field, such as Susan Blackmore, have found it threatening to the Darwinian paradigm.Taking Leave of Darwin, 72
Mivart also pointed out that "certain fossil transitional forms are absent which might have been expected to be present." This latter point represented a major stumbling block then, as it does now, to the acceptance of Darwin's theory, and it was based on good evidence which Darwin had access to. In the year before the publication of Darwin's Origin, Edward Hitchcock, in his volume The Religion of Geology, had found that the fossil record did not show a gradual development of life forms via intermediaries but rather a discontinuous start-and-stop process involving just those kinds of "saltations" that Darwin ruled out of account. Hitchcock's conclusion that these discontinuities in the fossil record were an indication of repeated divine interventions was of course precisely the doctrine which Darwin was determined to oppose, even, it appears, at the cost of ignoring important evidence if it undermined his own position.Taking Leave of Darwin, 64-65
Coming now to the mainstream reviewers, historian Janet Browne notes that the leading philosophers John Herschel, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill also thought the work massively conjectural, with few findings that could be claimed as proofs. (Darwin was particularly stung when it got back to him that Herschel had dubbed natural selection "the law of higgledy-piggledy.") The novelist George Eliot was lukewarm, pointing out that the volume was "sadly lacking in illustrative facts."Taking Leave of Darwin, 63
Hoyle likened the statistical possibility of life appearing spontaneously on earth to a blindfolded person randomly solving a Rubik's cube: "If our blindfolded subject were to make one random move every second it would take him on average three hundred times the age of the earth, 1,350 billion years to solve the cube." The spontaneous origin of life on Earth, according to Hoyle, faced odds at least that long, if not longer.
Nothing illustrates more clearly just how intractable a problem the origin of life has become than the fact that world authorities can seriously toy with the idea of panspermia. The failure to give a plausible evolutionary explanation for the origin of life casts a number of shadows over the whole field of evolutionary speculation.
As noted by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, a non-theist, "I find the confidence among the scientific establishment that the whole scenario will yield to a purely chemical explanation hard to understand, except as a manifestation of an axiomatic commitment to reductive materialism."
it is noteworthy that a good deal of the opposition came not from wounded religious sensibilities but from common-sense objections arising from people's instinctive trust in everyday forms of logic. Ellegard reports that Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, with its pictures of creatures constantly strained by overpopulation and sifted by an undending existential struggle, was commonly rejected on the basis that, more often than not, the habitat in which animals have been placed gives them a sufficiency of resources.Taking Leave of Darwin, 35
So far is it from being of no concern to theology, therefore, that it would be truer to say that the whole doctrinal structure of the Bible account of redemption is founded on its assumption that the race of man is one organic whole, and may be dealt with as such. It is because all are one in Adam that in the matter of sin there is no difference, but all have fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:22 f.), and as well that in the new man there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all and in all (Col. 3:11). The unity of the old man in Adam is the postulate of the unity of the new man in Christ.Warfield, Benjamin B. The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield: Studies in Theology. Vol. 9
The assertion of the unity of the human race is imbedded in the very structure of the Biblical narrative. The Biblical account of the origin of man (Gen. 1:26–28) is an account of his origination in a single pair, who constituted humanity in its germ, and from whose fruitfulness and multiplication all the earth has been replenished. Therefore the first man was called Adam, Man, and the first woman, Eve, "because she was the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20); and all men are currently spoken of as the "sons of Adam" or "Man" (Deut. 32:8; Ps. 11:4; 1 Sam. 26:19; 1 Kings 8:39; Ps. 145:12; etc.). The absolute restriction of the human race within the descendants of this single pair is emphasized by the history of the Flood in which all flesh is destroyed, and the race given a new beginning in its second father, Noah, by whose descendants again "the whole earth was overspread" (Gen. 9:19), as is illustrated in detail by the table of nations recorded in Genesis 10
natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive. A variation does not need to bestow any actual competitive advantage in order to avoid elimination; it is sufficient that it does not burden its owner with any competitive disadvantage.There is a God (78)
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