The Darwin Myth by Wiker Benjamin

Author:Wiker, Benjamin [Wiker, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2012-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Darwin Meets His Maker

When Darwin published the Descent of Man he was not much beyond sixty years old, but he felt and looked much older. His continual wrangling with his stomach, head, and skin had drained years from his life. He was a frail old man. In one sense, he had nothing left to do but die. He had said everything he needed to say, laid out the whole evolutionary framework from beginning to end. But in another sense, he knew he had work to do, work that he could not possibly live to finish. As he himself admitted, the argument was hypothetical. He had given a persuasive argument. The vast framework was there, but the details needed to be filled in, and the details were as endless as the intricacies of nature itself. Even worse, the legitimate objections kept arising like the heads of the hydra. With every objection he answered, another two would take its place.

A particular thorn in his side was a former pupil of Thomas Huxley himself, the English anatomist and biologist St. George Jackson Mivart. He had begun, under Huxley’s tutelage, as an ardent evolutionist. He remained an ardent evolutionist, and indeed put forth a form of theistic evolution not too different from Darwin’s co-discoverer, Alfred Wallace. Wallace looked at the evidence of humanity’s moral and intellectual capacities, and reformed Darwin’s theory to accommodate a divine hand in bringing about the great leap to human evolution. Wallace, however, was not an orthodox Christian believer. Guided by scientific and agnostic premises, he ended up in a vain search among spiritualists. It was a path that many other Englishman who surrendered their Christian faith were to follow. Spiritualism, like phrenology, was a repository for people who thought themselves more scientific and rational than your average superstitious Christian, and so thought they were called upon to improve upon revelation. Wallace remained Darwin’s friend, even though Darwin groaned at Wallace’s attempts to redefine his theory.

St. George Mivart, on the other hand, was a convert to Catholicism who saw the same evidence of a great moral and intellectual leap from ape to man. He tried to reconcile evolution with Christian orthodoxy, and did so by hammering away at the weak points in Darwin’s theory. The weakest of all, in Mivart’s opinion, was that it was undergirded by naturalistic philosophical presuppositions that were unexamined. Darwin had rejected outright the idea of a divine hand guiding evolution, and then set about explaining religion away as one more unintended effect of natural selection. To do so, he had to treat theology in a most superficial and unsophisticated way. Darwin’s theory did not prove that there was no Creator God; it began from the assumption that God did not exist, and so his theory was constructed and expressed in such a way as to dismiss the possibility without seriously engaging it. Moreover, in order to ensure that a divine foot could not enter the door, Darwin had skirted over the profound moral and

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