Some Christians Protest Darwin's Birthday. Is Their Antagonism Misplaced?
In an interview, one of the authors of Darwin's Sacred Cause argues Darwin was motivated by his faith
Not everyone is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. Some are protesting. A Christian ministry called Answers in Genesis is holding anti-Darwin conferences on the East and West coasts this month, aimed at helping Americans "understand that Darwinian evolution is wrong and that it has undermined the Christian faith and has fueled social ills like racism and abortion." Faith-based opposition to Darwin is hardly consigned to the religious fringe. A recent Pew survey found that fewer than 10 percent of evangelical Christians believe life evolved through natural selection. Secular Americans were the only respondents who voiced majority support for the theory.
A new book, Darwin's Sacred Cause, argues that Christian antagonism toward Darwin is misplaced. Acclaimed Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore portray a Christian Darwin who was driven by his faith-based opposition to slavery to prove the common origin of the human race. A theory of common human decency, Darwin believed, would undermine a key precept of the slave trade: that blacks comprise an inferior race separate from whites. Moore talked to U.S. News this week. Excerpts:
You write that Darwin hailed from an actively abolitionist family but that he was quieter about his antis lavery views than most of them.
You could say that he was more outspoken in that he made a lot bigger noise than they did, because he published Origin of Species and we're talking about him today. But Darwin was personally reticent. He followed events in the United States very keenly, but his abolitionism—and I think it's fair to say abolitionism—took the form of undermining the ideological foundations of race segregation and slavery—or, as people have come to call it today, scientific racism—by showing the common descent of all races.
Why do you call Darwin's antislavery views a "sacred cause"?
The phrase "sacred cause" is Darwin's. He didn't mean it was a spiritual, otherworldly pursuit. It was a sacred cause because it had already been called a sacred cause among English abolitionists. The word came up so many times that we had to purge it from our book—sacred this and sacred that.
The tradition that Darwin belonged to, Unitarianism, taught that all believers die and are resurrected at the end of time to face the final judgment and to live forever in perfected creation. There was no heaven or hell in a sense, only a future state or perfection. Darwin's end was never about getting people off a sinking ship and into a spiritual realm where everything was perfect. Darwin and his family were interested in perfecting this world.
The unity of his faith and his humanitarianism was instilled in him from his youth. Darwin acquired his foundational belief in the brotherhood of all humans of all races when he was baptized, at 9 months. Even when he couldn't believe all the things he had been taught—he certainly gave up belief in Adam and Eve and, eventually, in the Bible as a moral authority—the unity of the human family was his bottom line.
How religious was the young Darwin?
When Darwin goes to Cambridge, he is expected to become an ordained clergyman in the Church of England. At Cambridge, he mixed with men whose theological views were indistinguishable from modern-day American fundamentalists: belief in the Bible, even if not as a textbook of science, and Adam and Eve. When he embarked on the Beagle voyage [his global fact-finding mission], he said he was so in captivity to the word of Scripture that he was able to quote the Bible as a moral authority. He was so priggish that his shipmates laughed at him for it.
How did a religious idea like the brotherhood of man meaningfully influence Darwin's scientific quest?
Science always begins with certain assumptions. Darwin took certain things for granted, like laws of nature, regularities established by God. Laws of creation, that's what Darwin wanted to find. Another thing Darwin took for granted was the brotherhood of man. It was the air he breathed. It would be immoral for him to believe otherwise. The really key statement that Darwin makes in his notebooks is where he says, "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals." What that brings together is a moral, theological, and scientific judgment.
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Christianity
Christianity is the belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Charles Darwin was RIGHT - no one at the time understood why
What do you have to say and how do you scientifically explain endogenous retrogene insertions without evolution?
Endogenous retroviruses are a great example of molecular sequence evidence for universal common descent. Endogenous retroviruses are molecular remnants of a past parasitic viral infection. Occasionally, copies of a retrovirus genome are found in its host's genome, and these retroviral gene copies are called endogenous retroviral sequences. Retroviruses, like HIV, make a DNA copy of their own viral genome and insert it into their host's genome. If this happens to a germ line cell (i.e. the sperm or egg cells) the retroviral DNA will be inherited by descendants of the host. Again, this process is rare and fairly random, so finding retrogenes in identical chromosomal positions of two different species indicates common ancestry.
There are at least seven different known instances of common retrogene insertions between chimps and humans, indicating common ancestry. I'll say it again, the same insertion occurs at the same DNA marker in two totally different species at a rate that is far far greater than chance.
Kent Hovind was asked this when he called into IG.com - he had no answer.
What do you have to say about the biochemical similarity of all life on earth, and how do you scientifically explain this without evolution?
The only organic polymers used in biological processes are polynucleotides, polysaccharides and polypeptides - chemists have mades hundreds, if not thousands of additional organic polymers, but only these three contribute to biological life as we know it.
In addition, all the proteins, DNA and RNA in every organism known to man use the same chirality (twist), so for example out 16 different possible isomers of RNA, all organisms use one and only one, and they all use the same one.
Also, there are something like 300 (forget the exact number) naturally occuring amino acids in nature. Only 22 acids are used in life as we know it, and all organisms use the same 22 acids to build proteins and carry out biological processes.
All of this points to a common ancestor to ALL life on earth. The fact that no known organisms differ from this fundamental scheme when countless other schemes could work equally well should smack anyone who examines it in the face. If evolution were NOT true the odds that ALL organisms would use the same biochemical schemes is utterly astronomical.
Oh, and another example, all organisms use the same 4 nucleotides to build DNA - out of something like 100 naturally occuring nucleotides.
Oh, and all life on earth derives metabolic processes from ATP, plenty of other natural compounds would have worked equally well.
The biochemical evidence for evolution is some of the strongest evidence for evolution we have.
What do you have to say about the hominid fossil record? Do you still think there are no fossilized “missing links” now?
How do creationists explain coccygeal retroposition (true human tails) and other atavisms and vestigual structures?
An atavism is the reemergence of a lost phenotypical trait from a past ancestor and not specific to the organisms parents or very recent ancestors. For example, perhaps you would care to explain well documented coccygeal projections (true tails) that are occasionally found on human newborns? Do you have a better explaination than the tails resulting from the incomplete regression of the most distal end of the normal embryonic tail found in the developing human fetus?
You can see about 100 medically recorded instances of this phenomena here:
PubMed links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ...
And just so there is no misunderstanding, these are true tails, with vertebrae extending from the human tail bone as shown in this x-ray: http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/4548/tail6yz.jp ...
What about other vestigual structures like molecular vesitges in the form of human viatamin C definciency? Why does the gene for manufacturing viatamin C exist as a psuedogene in humans and also as a broken gene in chimps, orangutans and other primates - as predicted by evolutionary theory? Why can more distant relatives like dogs make their own viatamin C? This is only one of the molecular atavisms found in humans. What is your scientific explanation for this, if not evolution by common descent?
The problem with Carl Sagan...
is that he was wrong. "The cosmos is, was, and ever will be"-(paraphrase). This statement is essentially saying that the universe is eternal. Well, there is a scientific problem with this and it is called the second law of thermodynamics. This law explains that energy is gradually going from a state of being useable to a state of being unusable. If the universe was eternal, then it would be a rather dead universe because the energy needed for life would not be usable an neither would the energy needed for our sun to burn. However, life does exist and the sun is indeed burning today. Therefore, the universe can not be eternal, and Carl Sagan was wrong.
The other possibility left then is that the universe came into existence when nothing existed before it. Well again, there is a scientific reason why this simply can not be. The law of conservation prohibits the action of such a possibility. This law states things can not simply come in and out of existence, they are merely placed else where. This is why chemists must account for each element and how many atoms for that element in both sides of a chemical equation.
So evolution without God is good for children? Well, I suppose it is good for moral relativists. After all, morality does not necessarily help survival. Also, who can say is right or wrong if we are all just products of random, purposeless reactions in a chaotic universe? Who are we to say Hitler was evil? Even if there was a "moral gene" (which has very little evidence to be considered real), who is to say that one person's moral gene is better or worse than another? What would be wrong with cannabilism? Animals do eat each other, and if humans are just animals, what's wrong with cannabilism? What's wrong with rape, murder, lying, etc? How do we know such things are wrong? What is this thing that we call right and wrong? Evolution does not disprove God. If anything, it needs God.
You base most of your arguments on ad hominem fallacies. Most of your claims are also founded on a select few people who have abused tithes. When someone offers an apology to you (like Dr. Shade), you attack them and immediately believe he/she is doing it with a hidden motive. Such assumptions are not good for debate.
Pastors do pay income taxes (I know, I have asked one). Churches and other organizations must meet a set criteria made by the IRS and is posted on the IRS's website.
If donations were proof that God doesn't exist, then donations made to atheistic groups must prove that God does exist.
I suggest looking historically into the crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. You'll be surprised as to what you will find.
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