31% don’t believe Darwin any more
Except Jeremy Vine. He reported on his television show yesterday how many people simply do not believe his Theory of Evolution any more. That’s Darwin’s Theory, not Jeremy’s. Apparently, says the Daily Mirror, 31% of the UK population do not believe all we see ‘just evolved’ Another 7% think Charles Darwin wrote ‘The Da Vince Code’.
And in 2009 the Daily Telegraph reported a clear majority of Brits, 51% to 40%, ‘agreed with the statement that “evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages”.’
Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on 12th February 1809 and died on 19th April 1882. This year on‘Darwin Day’ he would have been 209. He published ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ in 1859. Even that is 159 years ago.
Sciences like Genetics, Molecular Biology and Information Theory were unknown in Darwin’s day. We don’t do chronological snobbery here. We don’t think we are the cleverest people ever to have walked God’s earth. Nevertheless, Darwin’s tome really does look its age these days.
Musical dropped
Meanwhile, a few days before, the BBC reported on a school which has ‘axed a musical on evolution over its suggestive lyrics and portrayal of Christian views.’
Darwin Rocks, about the scientist Charles Darwin, was due to be performed by about 90 pupils at Hartford Manor Primary School, Cheshire, next month. The school said there had been six ‘expressions of concern’ by parents.
The musical’s publishers Musicline said it was written by a Christian, adding “we can’t ever recall having courted controversy before”.
According to its website, the production is a ‘light-hearted look’ at the work of Darwin.
Head teacher Simon Kidwell told the BBC that the school, in Hartford near Northwich, received the complaints over lyrics that refer to ‘bump and grind’ – a sexually suggestive dance move.
‘There were concerns about caricature,’ he said, adding the complainants, who include a science teacher from another school, felt its representation of Christian views on science ‘wasn’t accurate’.
Who is anti-science?
It has become fashionable to characterise the Christian or Biblical view that God created all there is as anti-science.
But in truth, as we find out more about the natural world, it’s not that simple. Those who hold the evolutionist view really do see it as a matter of faith. And more and more problems are arising.
We reported a couple of years ago on the bio-energeticists who discovered that bacteria would never find the power to evolve into cells with a nucleus.
Evolutionists hold that bacteria were the first forms of life to evolve. But cells with a nucleus, ‘eukaryotic’ cells, are the building blocks of life. The poor bio-energeticists had to resort to contending some external force must have intervened. But that is ‘Deus ex machina’ by another name.
Nature is inter-connected
Creationists have long shown that certain animals, or even processes, have ‘irreducible complexity’. In other words, they simply could not evolve. Why have a stomach without a mouth and a means of evacuating waste? How did the bombardier beetle possibly evolve its extraordinary defence system? What happened to all the eggs while swallows were evolving the construction of their mud nests?
For this author, the complexity of nature and all the interconnecting strands and food chains say it all had to be in place at the same time. Flowers and their pollinators are just one obvious example. So to this engineer, a six-day creation makes sense.
Too many jobs in the biological sciences depend on the evolutionary faith-view for it to be dumped over-night. ‘Darwin Day’ might endure for a while longer. But a day is coming when those scientists will be found asking: ‘Lord, how did you Do that?’
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Amen . No matter how deep the probe is _ that tries to come to terms with human thinking . there will always be another question that cannot be answered.
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Another great piece.God Bless
Excellent – Darwin’s theory was overturned many years ago – by scientists – and was only kept alive by those interested in its potential for attacking Christianity. But as G. K. Chesterton observed, if it were not for God, there would be no atheists.
Hi Stephen,
If you have a moment then pop over to http://www.setterfield.org for a really Christian viewpoint from a Scientific aspect. Barry is an astronomer and well respected by his peers.
The Universe is plasma (eg. electric), the sun is not a nuclear bomb and creation can have taken place in 6 days, and the true chronology in the Scripture (in the Alexandrian LXX) correlates with the speed of light rapidly decreasing from the point that “God stretched out the heavens” repeated 12 times in Scripture.
So if someone says of a particular thing, like a rock, is so many billion years old, we can agree because these are atomic year (originally spinning much faster) but in earth rotation years they are so many thousands of years etc.
Amazing stuff from an amazing Creator!!
Every blessing
Tim
All true. Evolution, at it’s heart, is a dogma (I don’t use the word theory, meaning a well attested explanation) devised to try and get rid of a need for God (See Romans 1). It presupposes naturalism, and is so alien to Scripture.
Scince, as currently practised, can be split into two categories, viz. 1) Operational science, where experiments are done, and based on the results of those experiments, a hypothesis is either confirmed or not. The same operational experiment done in the UK would be expected to have the same outcome if it were done in Australia, and would be expected to have the same outcome as if it were done on a different date, and 2) Historical science, where the scientist looks at the present and tries to figure out the past. The problem with this is that there is no hard evidence that those things actually did take place. The evidence is, at best, equivocal. No experiment in the present can confirm the past. The best one can do is to try to find an eye-witness, and guess what, we have one – one that is omniscient (knows everything and can do anything), omnipresent (is everywhere), and omnipotent (exists throughout time), who is absolutely trustworthy – and He has given us His Word, which describes how He did it.
I did not have to be a scientist to work out that evolution was impossible – I think I was about 7 years old when I tried to imagine a mother taking care of a baby when she had not done it before – did not make sense – even if she had recently ‘evolved’ crazy, foolish ideas. Thinking themselves to be wise they became fools.
A kindly written article on an issue that seems to create more heat than light. Christians, both scientists and ordinary folk, have seen the flaws in Darwinian theory for years. Even atheists/agnostics like Michael Behe, a professor of bio-chemistry in the USA and writer of “Darwin’s Black Box”, have shown that evolution from bacteria to Man is a non starter. Irreducible complexity exists in many examples of biology. Darwin’s theory needs to be thrown into the dustbin of history along with belief in a flat earth and Aristotelian theory that the sun and the entire cosmos revolved around the Earth.
I wonder what stupidity in our forebears and ourselves that allowed us to take Darwin’s theory seriously! Politicians, ideological crack-pots and damnably manipulative exploiting filth in our leaders use this as a convenient means of obtaining power over the people with catastrophic results. How stupid are we to have allowed this, and yet, with all the stupidity of our garbage brained left wing politicians, the myth continues to be perpetuated. What a damnably stupid population we have become!
I think Darwin’s contribution was incredibly valuable though. The interpretation has somewhat been mangled through the Daily Mail and the awful BBC. He did take a scientific approach, and science has saved us from many horrors. Our population was in previous times almost wiped out by plagues. Darwin’s careful collecting of the data and careful study was all part of this 19th century enthusiasm and respect for science, which of course we rarely see today.
Now the thing is, because Darwin is connected to the British he is celebrated. In some ways it’s a bit like the Soviet Union and Lenin, where you put up statues and stick them on the bank notes and all of that. The trouble with this approach is, unlike a political figure, science moves on. You can’t idolise the work of Darwin and give it the stamp which says complete correctness/approved etc. His work was the start of something, and it took a long time. By the 50s DNA was discovered. You see without the first man there would not be a second, third and forth. So Darwin has my respect because he started the ball rolling in trying to understand how life developed. I don’t see this as at all bad because it is like when we knew of classical mechanics and not quantum mechanics, we could still use classical mechanics to solve most problems, even though technically it is wrong. It’s like that was the best tools they had at the time.
So the way it is now is Darwin’s theory is looking incredibly crude. Crudeness has market value for Mail and BBC readers and viewers though. Simple stuff is popular, and it increases ratings. I’d like show you something unpopular though. I think it is the next big step. DNA showed us the physical mechanism. This is about information and computation in the natural world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eC14GonZnU&
I can’t agree with that Andrew. Darwin was not a scientist, he was actually trained in Theology. He knew what the Bible taught and created a theory which contradicted the Creation account in Scripture. In Darwin’s theory, all life came from one initial single celled organism, (which broke every law of science to come into existence) but God says He created each creature according to its Kind. Science would actually support the existence of these Kinds, which cannot interbreed, but Darwin’s theory is responsible for many confused people turning away from God because they have been taught that that Bible is untrue. Also: Darwin’s theory led to the belief that the human embryo goes through the evolutionary stages in the womb, and is therefore largely responsible for the present mass murder of babies in the womb, on the basis that they are not yet ‘human’. Yet every cell in the zygote has the full complement of DNA of that individual after birth. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Gaulton, continuing evolutionary thought, also came up with the practice of Eugenics, whereby those not deemed fit were to be eliminated from society. Hitler operated on the basis of that theory, as he tried to create his ‘master race’.
People purposefully get led astray by the media. Please don’t blame Darwin. A theologian is committed to telling the truth. He went in search of the truth as best he knew how, and in the typical scientific investigative manner of that time, which I have a great deal of respect for because we were ahead of the world scientifically. God was smiling on us, because we did take it all seriously, and were not like say India and its snake charmer.
There are many theologians who are down in history for making important discoveries. Bayes is another, and then there is Newton as well, who was a monotheist. He believed in God, but not Jesus.
I do know Darwin’s theory is only semi-right. Natural selection was the big one. We know it is true, but there is more, and Darwin just started the ball rolling. The video I posted above demonstrates answers to some of the problems which have been raised regarding natural selection, e.g. why do snails have odd patterns on their shells. What possible use is this? It’s helping us to answer more of the problems raised. The media treats it like a punch-up, suggesting if there be one unanswered question then the theory is wrong. I’m a pragmatist. You have such a thing as work in progress. You keep trying to refine your work so it fits better if you are a scientist. Half-baked discoveries are very important. Nothing would be baked without them.
Anyway, like you say in the second post, the science can coexist with our religion. I think in Newton’s case it helped immensely. Many religions are pagan, but Newton was the first to establish a universal system of nature. It was not different gods interacting with one another, but one system, and this was the one thing in history that brought us down from the trees. We had never made that step before in the entire time we have here inhabited the earth. No longer did you have to sacrifice 300 cows to win a war with your neighbours. You had the means to calculate what things were going to do.
The way I see all of this is that science shines the light on God’s creation, and the more you learn, the more amazing it comes across. People say random, but that’s one of those simple answers which answers everything, like snake oil cures all ills!
‘Brought us down from the trees’? You may speak for yourself, brother, but neither my wife nor I have had ancestors who lived in trees. I shall concede I did live in a two-storey house on more than one occasion. I was able to access the upper floor by means of a staircase, which was quite cleverly designed to accommodate my human legs and feet.
Here is the first rule of archeology: ‘Remember these were people like us.’
Darwin, Shmarwin
I think it is amusing that people think this is a science V God argument, because it was The Creator God who founded the very laws of science that are necessary to sustain life. Laws like biogenesis (life cannot arise from non-life), laws of genetics (by which evolution is impossible), the laws of thermodynamics (order cannot be created out of disorder), even laws of mathematical probability ( it is mathematically impossible for evolution to have taken place). I am doing this off the top of my head, so am missing much. But these show that the laws of science are consistent with the Biblical account of Creation, not the theory of Evolution, which is basically unscientific. Scientists know that, but as one has famously said:’ we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door’. After all, the Creator is also the Lawgiver and Judge, to whom we must all give account. The lunacy we see around us today is the result of a people who have rejected God as Creator ( of male and female) Lawgiver ( the moral laws that are being flagrantly rejected) and Judge – who will one day pour out His wrath on an ungodly world.
2 good posts imo, Moira W, thank you, you know what you are talking about!