Posted on 05/06/2024 8:22:32 PM PDT by kawhill
Of Homo sapiens, Darwin made only a passing mention on the third-to-last page of the tome, noting coyly that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." That's it. That is all he wrote about the dawning of the single most consequential species on the planet.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
I’ll wait for them to start an Apollo Program - or at least come up with an antidote to Raid.
I think ‘in his likeness’ refers to our God-given ability TO desire, imagine, and create.
I don’t think there’s anything in the Universe that is REAL, except for Mind.
Thanks for that reply. Now I can go to bed, smiling.
The entertaining bit is the anti-evolutionists are still wanting Darwin exhumed so he can be crucified when another observational scientist, Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, studying a completely different branch of the animal kingdom in another part of the world just a few years after Darwin’s field research, and who had never been privy to the bulk of Darwin’s work, came to the EXACT SAME CONCLUSIONS.
Darwin had a famously sour stomach and as he aged he grew highly averse to stress. He intended not to have On the Origin of Species published in his lifetime because he didn’t want to be at the eye of the sh1tstorm he knew it would cause among the fixed and rigid fundamentalists. But when Lord Wallace consulted with him about publishing his own work on the same subject, Darwin knew he’d have to publish right away, else Wallace would “scoop” him.
If that had happened, today Darwin would be little more than a footnote in Lord Wallace’s magnum opus and it would be Wallace the fixed and rigid fundamentalists would be clamoring to have resurrected so they could kill him.
It was Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, who coined the expression, “survival of the fittest.” One of the reasons Darwin took the position on the voyage of the Beagle was that he believed in the immutability of species, and he hoped his research would prove Grandpa wrong.
Everyone focuses on Darwin’s work with finches in the Galapagos, but the voyage of the Beagle lasted nearly five years, and they were only in the Galapagos for three weeks. The majority of what he saw that served as inspiration for On the Origin of species he observed elsewhere. In fact, he’d begin doubting the “immutable creations of God” dogma long before they’d ever reached the southern tip of South America.
In Brazil he found parasitic wasps that laid their eggs on other arthropods and those eggs eventually hatched and devoured their host. This was such a cruel and grotesque process for the host that Darwin could not make himself believe that a kind and loving god would have created them (or their tormentor, the parasitic wasp) specifically so they could suffer this fate. So if it was not God’s handiwork, there must have been some other ‘natural’ mechanism at work. The parasitic wasp was “priming the pump,” to coin a phrase, for the revelations of the Galapagos finches, tortoises, and cactuses.
The thing I find most astonishing about Darwin’s insights into how the process must have worked is that when he wrote OTOOS, not a single hominid fossil had ever been identified. One or maybe two had been found in his old age and before he died, but I doubt he felt vindicated because it would be years before the theory that these fossils were of human ancestors be accepted in the scientific community. Forget about gene theory, forget about DNA, forget about alelles and background radiation, he wrote OTOOS before it was even discovered that the remains of any of our ancestors had survived to the modern era, much less whether they showed any proto-human physical traits.
And all this vitriol over Darwin seems a bit farcical because the evolutionary science hasn’t been about Darwin for well more than a century. And we’d still have the exact same science, even if Darwin had never been born, because other scientists, most notably Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, have independently come to the same conclusions.
I also read in that book that the Creator gave the human species dominion over everything here. And also gave him free will. Does a lion or horned toad have that? Free will?
A staggering complexity that doesn’t exist.
If you say the alterations were actually planned (giving only the appearance of a chance process as a facade), that puts you in the creationist camp, however unorthodox. And if you say God was unaware of all the changes happening then you are demoting Him to a non-omniscient capacity, unable to see or control all that is happening. Thus theistic evolutionists invariably must abandon either evolution, or theism, in carefully examining what they believe.
Christianity has fought, still fights, and will continue to fight science [sic] to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.’ (G. Richard Bozarth)
Almost all religions are vitally wedded to evolutionary beliefs, so they have a religious need to prop up the evolutionary story no matter what. Their religion (all variants of atheism, agnosticism, new age, Buddhism, Taoism, animism, Hinduism, pantheism and panentheism and on and on) cannot tolerate the idea of a creator, so they must fight science to the desperate end against the idea of a Lawgiver over the Laws of nature.
Well, sure, because there were people out there trying to get rid of God. Think about it: if God exists, then we are beholden to Him, and if we are beholden to Him, maybe we should obey His commandments, which a lot of people don’t really want to do.
Not to mention the allure being gods ourselves...
The reality is that materialist evolution is impossible, as Darwin noted, because of the complexity. We are relying on random mutations, which are usually bad, and we are relying on multiple complementary, but random and good, mutations to occur in the same being. And we are relying on this having happened an untold number of times in order to bring about everything we see around us.
This is why I agree with the scientist, whose name unfortunately I did not catch and have never been able to find, who said that he realized it took more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in God.
The amount of faith needed to believe in the religion of Evolution staggers the imagination.
It takes much more faith to believe in the Evolution than it takes to believe in a Benevolent Creator creating this World we live in.
“ But I don’t think they are quite as ‘staggeringly complex’ as human beings are.”
The question is are they “staggeringly” complex.
I read about in that book about an all loving, caring, and forgiving Being, who gave us life. I wonder about human beings during their evolution, who wonder about that sometimes.
… The tidy tropes of our prehistory have collapsed under the weight of evidence: there is no single missing link that bridges apes and humankind, no drumbeat march of progress toward a predestined goal. Our story is complicated, messy and random. Yet it still can be accommodated under Darwin’s theory of evolution and in fact further validates that framework. This is not to say scientists have it all figured out. Many questions remain. …IOW, your headline is a lie.
You contradicted yourself. Why would a God that (by definition) possesses power to create bother with an evolutionary process that his creation is hoping would disprove His existence?
Solipsist?
I didn’t know I had a headline. They make me fill out all kinds of stuff to start a thread on this site. I fight like hell against their AI, I probably wrote some of the code one time.
If I was addressing you, I would have included your handle in my post.
“A miracle happens”
Some evolutionists have realized this problem. They give it a fancy scientific name: “punctuated equilibrium”. They also call it the “hopeful monster” theory. Every so often a highly mutated creature is born that then changes the evolutionary course.
Never mind that whenever a highly mutated creature is born today it usually soon dies.
i’d like to hear what you think is an ‘evolutionary process,’ that God was/has used to create new species from existing ones. that is the technical definition of ‘evolution.’ certainly if you are a believer, you know that Adam (and Eve from him) was created ‘whole cloth’ from the earth. no evolution there.
anyway, leaving that request aside, your statement above strikes me as one similar to a character in a novel i once read.
“’But how can you control matter?’ he burst out. ‘You don’t even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death —’
O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation — anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’”
-Orwell, 1984
of course, the idea of that the universe ‘is not real’ or that ‘Reality is in the skull.’ is complete rubbish, imo.
i think CS Lewis has it about right when he says the imagination is the organ of meaning and reason is the organ of truth. both help allow those inclined to understand the reality of God’s temporal Creation.
“ This was such a cruel and grotesque process for the host that Darwin could not make himself believe that a kind and loving god would have created them”
Quite the scientific reasoning.
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