Posted on 02/11/2005 9:29:29 PM PST by restornu
When The Origin of Species was published it aroused immense interest, but initially it did not provoke antagonism on religious grounds. Although many criticized Darwin's lack of evidence, none raised religious objections. Instead, the initial response from theologians was favorable. The distinguished Harvard botanist Asa Gray hailed Darwin for having solved the most difficult problem confronting the Design argument – the many imperfections and failures revealed in the fossil record.
Acknowledging that Darwin himself "rejects the idea of design," Gray congratulated him for "bringing out the neatest illustrations of it." Gray interpreted Darwin's work as showing that God has created a few original forms and then let evolution proceed within the framework of divine laws.
When religious antagonism finally came, it was in response to aggressive claims, like Huxley's, that Newton and Darwin together had evicted God from the cosmos. For the heirs of the Enlightenment, evolution seemed finally to supply the weapon needed to destroy religion. As Richard Dawkins confided, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
Atheism was central to the agenda of the Darwinians. Darwin himself once wrote that he could not understand how anyone could even wish that Christianity were true, noting that the doctrine of damnation was itself damnable. Huxley expressed his hostility toward religion often and clearly, writing in 1859: "My screed was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsondom ... both of which are in my mind the natural & irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is to see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies."
According to Oxford historian J. R. Lucas, Huxley was "remarkably resistant to the idea that there were clergymen who accepted evolution, even when actually faced with them." Quite simply, there could be no compromises with faith.
Writing at the same time as Huxley, the leading Darwinian in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, drew this picture:
On one side spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress stand under the bright banner of science; on the other side, under the black flag of hierarchy, stand spiritual slavery and falsehood, irrationality and barbarism, superstition and retrogression.... Evolution is the heavy artillery in the struggle for truth. Whole ranks of...sophistries fall together under the chain shot of this ... artillery, and the proud and mighty structure of the Roman hierarchy, that powerful stronghold of infallible dogmatism, falls like a house of cards.
These were not the natterings of radical circles and peripheral publications. The author of the huge review of The Origin in the Times of London was none other than Thomas Huxley. He built his lectures on evolution into a popular touring stage show wherein he challenged various potential religious opponents by name. Is it surprising that religious people, scientists as well as clerics, began to respond in the face of unrelenting challenges like these issued in the name of evolution? It was not as if they merely were asked to accept that life had evolved; many theologians had long taken that for granted. What the Darwinians demanded was that religionists agree to the untrue and unscientific claim that Darwin had proved that God played no role in the process.
Among those drawn to respond was the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who is widely said to have made an ass of himself in a debate with Huxley during the 1860 meeting of the British Association at Oxford. The relevant account of this confrontation reported: "I was happy enough to be present on the memorable occasion at Oxford when Mr. Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. The bishop arose and in a light scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us that there was nothing in the idea of evolution. Then turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey? On this Mr. Huxley ... arose ... and spoke these tremendous words. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous."
This marvelous anecdote has appeared in every distinguished biography of Darwin and of Huxley, as well as in every popular history of the theory of evolution. In his celebrated Apes, Angels and Victorians, William Irvine used this tale to disparage the bishop's snobbery. In his prize-winning study, James Brix went much farther, describing Wilberforce as "naive and pompous," a man whose "faulty opinions" were those of a "fundamentalist creationist" and who provided Huxley with the opportunity to give evolution "its first major victory over dogmatism and duplicity." Every writer tells how the audience gave Huxley an ovation.
Trouble is, it never happened. The quotation above was the only such report of this story and it appeared in an article titled "A Grandmother's Tales" that was written by a non-scholar in a popular magazine 38 years after the alleged encounter. No other account of these meetings – and there were many written at the time – made any mention of remarks concerning Huxley's monkey ancestors, or claimed that he made a fool of the bishop. To the contrary, many thought the bishop had the better of it, and even many of the committed Darwinians thought it at most a draw.
Moreover, as all of the scholars present at Oxford knew, prior to the meeting, Bishop Wilberforce had penned a review of The Origin in which he fully acknowledged the principle of natural selection as the source of variations within species. He rejected Darwin's claims concerning the origin of species, however, and some of these criticisms were sufficiently compelling that Darwin immediately wrote his friend the botanist J. D. Hooker that the article "is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly." In a subsequent letter to geologist Charles Lyell, Darwin acknowledges that "the bishop makes a very telling case against me." Indeed, several of Wilberforce's comments caused Darwin to make modifications in a later revision of the book.
The tale of the foolish and narrow-minded bishop seems to have thrived as a revealing "truth" about the incompatibility of religion and science simply because many of its tellers wanted to believe that a bishop is wrong by nature. J. R. Lucas, who debunked the bishop myth, has suggested that the "most important reason why the legend grew" is, first, because academics generally "know nothing outside their own special subject" and therefore easily believe that outsiders are necessarily ignorant, and, second, because Huxley encouraged that conclusion. "The quarrel between religion and science was what Huxley wanted; and as Darwin's theory gained supporters, they took over his view of the incident."
Since then the Darwinian Crusade has tried to focus all attention on the most unqualified and most vulnerable opponents, and when no easy targets present themselves it has invented them. Huxley "made straw men of the 'creationists,'" as his biographer Desmond admitted. Even today it is a rare textbook or any popular treatment of evolution and religion that does not reduce "creationism" to the simplest caricatures.
This tradition remains so potent that whenever it is asked that evolution be presented as "only a theory," the requester is ridiculed as a buffoon. Even when the great philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that the standard version of evolution even falls short of being a scientific theory, being instead an untestable tautology, he was subjected to public condemnations and much personal abuse.
Popper's tribulations illustrate an important basis for the victory of Darwinism: A successful appeal for a united front on the part of scientists to oppose religious opposition has had the consequence of silencing dissent within the scientific community. The eminent observer Everett Olson notes that there is "a generally silent group" of biological scientists "who tend to disagree with much of the current thought" about evolution, but who remain silent for fear of censure.
I believe that one day there will be a plausible theory of the origin of species. But, if and when that occurs, there will be nothing in any such theory that makes it impossible to propose that the principles involved were not part of God's great design any more than such a theory will demonstrate the existence of God. But, while we wait, why not lift the requirement that high school texts enshrine Darwin's failed attempt as an eternal truth?
Me either. That sentence is admittedly less than honest. If you are going to quote something or somebody then do it in it's entirety. I'm down with that.
Not just evolution. You can add physics, astronomy, and cosmology as well.
For example here are a few we have had to argue against:
"Wildly elliptical orbits"
"Gravity travels at twice the speed of light"
"The universe just exploded"
"Retrograde motion proved the big bang never happened"
"Stars could not form because gas expands"
"Saturn hovered over the north pole of the Earth"
There are many more. I could fill pages full.
Definitely do so. It may be even worse than you think. Rifkin is rabidly anti-science and it's very possible that his version is also distorted.
Rodney Stark’s “Fact, Fable, and Darwin” (September) claims incorrectly that, “There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species.” Variation from one generation to the next, combined with the geographical isolation of groups, can be expected to give rise to the development of new species. Not only are there firm theoretical foundations for believing this; there is direct evidence, in the form of laboratory experiments and field observations. A quick Internet search on “observed instances of speciation” will take you to several Web sites presenting such evidence.
Stark’s statement, “The boundaries between species are distinct and firm—one species does not simply trail off into another by degrees,” is similarly incorrect. In some families of tropical butterflies, for example, over a quarter of the species are known to hybridize with each other. To give a more familiar example, lions and tigers are able to interbreed, despite the fact that they are different species. How can this be, if the boundaries between species are, as Stark claims, “distinct and firm”? The boundaries between species are “leaky” if species share a recent common ancestor (as is the case with lions and tigers) and firm if the common ancestor was less recent (as in cats and dogs).
Robert Stovold
Brighton, England
Rodney Stark’s conclusions about evolution are merely a 3,000-word confirmation of the notion he inappropriately chides his antagonist Richard Dawkins for holding—that if any scholar criticizes any detail of Darwinian theory, “that
fact is seized upon and blown up out of proportion.”
How else to explain the fact that, aside from its discussion of Bishop Wilberforce, his column is a virtual reprint of the standard, shopworn, disproven creationist attacks on evolution, from its simplistic invocations of chance, mathematical probabilities, gaps in the fossil record, and Popperian philosophy of science, down to its closing suggestion that something other than evolution be taught in public schools?
I am but a layman, yet judging from the rubbish Stark asserts about the status of evolutionary biology, I can only conclude that he is—like those whom he alleges helped the legend of the Wilberforce-Huxley debate grow—one of those academics who knows nothing outside his own special subject.
Mark Lowe
Rancho Cucamonga, California
Rodney Stark's "Fact, Fable, and Darwin" (September) ranks with the work of Bishop Berkeley , whose Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician found the Principia Mathematica filled with" much emptiness, darkness, and confusion" and Cardinal De Polignac, who warned that the theory of gravitation "bordered on atheism." Neither bothered to inform his opinions by actually learning Newtonian mechanics.
Stark's exegesis is likewise untroubled by evolution's roots in molecular biology, the punctuated evolution of artificial life, the heuristic growth of genomics or the paradox of his embroilment in a biotechnology debate arising directly from the evolutionary biology whose existence he denies. He presents instead a catalog of 19th century objections as far removed from contemporary Darwinism as a Durer woodcut of the crystalline spheres from a Hubble telescope image of galaxies in collision.
Republicans who take science seriously may recognize that materialism is too important to be left to the Marxists, and that faith-based policy is the nemesis of science and religion alike. But to judge by Stark's essay, it is beyond their power to arrest the devolution of neoconservative anti-Darwinism into the teleology of fools.
Russell Seitz
Watertown, Massachusetts
Rodney Stark replies:
My article sought to make only two points. 1) All prominent biologists agree that there is no theory of the origin of species. 2) As these writers demonstrate, those who claim that there is such a theory are zealous true believers.
here we stand on the bottem rungs of the Ladder with our limited view.....feeling dead sure of things!
We are not feeling "dead sure". This is why we continuously "do" research. Theories are modified, added to, discarded, etc. as new evidence is accumulated. Such is science. This body of knowledge has been painstakingly accumulated for thousands of years with such a passion that often, many of the researchers, explorers, and scientists lost their lives in doing so. And it is not just the prominent ones. Many a researcher toils in obscurity in a lab adding a tiny bit to this huge volume of knowledge never knowing fame or riches. My hat is off to every one of them and I am deeply humbled to know a few of them personally including a few that post here on FR.
Our essence is eternal and some day you will be in another realm with a whole new set of laws and perspective...
I cannot argue this. However, this does not fall into the realm of science.
Many here are familar with our corporal dimention and a hind of other locals!
Are you talking the multiple universe stuff?
So to argue over evolution or creation is silly....is there not more to this puzzle....which to of us those residing here....have an incomplete formula....unless remote viewing could assist!
I disagree here. It is not silly. How could we honestly strive for the understanding of how this universe works (in a scientific venue) if we did not ensure anything added to this body of knowledge followed specific guidelines and peer review. For example, if I wrote a paper extolling pink elves were living on the far side of the moon, would you want that taught in science class?
When one learns about Biogenetic is that evolution or inspiration?
Not sure what you are asking here.
hehe!
How could I ever forget that or the now famous "a circle is not an ellipse". LMAO!
On CSI try Wesley Elsberry, for instance this article:
Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski's "Complex Specified Information"
http://www.antievolution.org/people/wre/papers/eandsdembski.pdf
For IR there are a number of links on the following TalkOrigins page. The critiques by Orr and Miller, for instance, are both substantive and fair. I haven't read the Dorit review of D'sBB yet:
Irreducible Complexity and Michael Behe
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
I liked:
"Any 3 random mutations definitely kill"
"What is an angular unconformity?" (from a poster who was pontificating about geology)
"If evolution is correct then why didn't the ancients work it out? They had all the evidence too."
"Most mutations are harmful so evolution is impossible"
"The Grand Canyon proves that the world is young"
"Men lived with dinosaurs, so evolution must be false"
"Species are not tightly defined, so biology is not science"
"Astronomers haven't explained the galaxial spin dilemma, so the universe is only 6000 years old"
"There are no transitional forms"
"It takes more faith to believe ToE than to disbelieve it"
Usually these arguments are posted with mocking laughter, as if we are dolts for not having already seen them.
What interests me, is that 99% of the time, when their delusions and lack of logic are corrected there is no recognition of their error.
It's like they have a software reset switch inside their head.
Line would read: "-reset then loose all data since reset-"
Our biology library has the original article. I photocopied it and read it, and I agree with your hypothesis that by 'student' he meant professionals.
He in no sense anywhere claimed that these students were silent because of a fear of censure; in fact, he suggests theree reasons for their silence - that they feel the controversy is of little importance, that they are not interested, or that they don't feel up to the task of controverting the vast body of information and theory.
In the previous paragraph he discusses a 'vocal, but little heard minority' of dissenters whose opinions are given little credence. However, it is by no means clear he means evolutionists. TYhe whole article is couched in terms of a debate between 'synthetic theory' - gradualism - and 'saltation theory' punctuated evolution, and it appears to my reading that his dissenters belong to the latter group, or a more general group of biologists dissatisfied with gradualism.
Of course, nowhere does Olson claim that fear of censure motivates anyone. And nowhere in the original article does Stark say that Olson was a firm believer in evolution, or that the statement he quoted so unfairly was written in 1958 and delivered at the Darwin Centennial in 1959, thus being a half-century out of date.
"Any 3 random mutations definitely kill"
"What is an angular unconformity?" (from a poster who was pontificating about geology)
"If evolution is correct then why didn't the ancients work it out? They had all the evidence too."
"Most mutations are harmful so evolution is impossible"
"The Grand Canyon proves that the world is young"
"Men lived with dinosaurs, so evolution must be false"
"Species are not tightly defined, so biology is not science"
"Astronomers haven't explained the galaxial spin dilemma, so the universe is only 6000 years old"
"There are no transitional forms"
"It takes more faith to believe ToE than to disbelieve it"
OMG! - people with at least half a brain in their heads say these things? I hope there's more of these over at DU or we are doomed.
What do you consider to be the best arguments of the ID side?
Thanks for the heads up. The sentence he includes above with two patial quotes and the censure thing is intellectually dishonest. I agree with that.
You need to hang out on the CvE threads more often. LOL!
I'm here a lot lately, you must have been collecting for quite awhile. The worst I've seen is "all mutations are recessive" and that really isn't that bad.
If things are that bad, why bother?
It seems that this particular brand of insanity is heavily concentrated on the right, in the USA at least. However fear not, over at DU there is nuttiness of a different kind a-plenty.
Never forget, nearly everyone knows nothing about anything except TV soaps, automobiles, and sports stats, and nearly everyone wants to remain totally ignorant if at all possible... So democracy is the worst possible system, except for all the others that have been tried.
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