BreakPoint/Chuck Colson Ping!
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Coffee is the first runner up as final proof of the fact that God exists, and He loves us.
Interesting! Of course, in Darwin's time, not much had yet been done re: information theory, molecular biology, etc., etc. His theory often seems to suffer for lack of such bodies of knowledge. Thank you Mr. S. for this post!
Nearly a century and a half ago, Charles Darwin conceded, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”This is one of the all-time most popular creationoid lies. A classic of creationoid dishonesty. It's explained in context Here, scroll down to quote #2.8.
What gets people upset is the method God used to implement His design.
He wrote botanist Asa Gray, “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.”Interesting. A short, sweet sentence. It presumably ends with the word "shudder." But is that really the whole story? We've learned, through a vast amount of experience, that creationoid quotes should never be trusted. So we tracked it down.
Here's the letter. The website has a big bunch of text, so search on the word "shudder" and you'll find the letter, written in February of 1860, which was right after the first edition of Origin of Species was published. Darwin says:
"The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder."Now that's odd. I wonder why the second part of the sentence was left out? Could it be [gasp!] creationoid dishonesty?
In the sixth edition of the Book, pages 143-144, found HERE, Darwin says:
Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.He goes on at length, explaining how an eye could indeed be evolved. The article, however, gives the impression (by an out-of-context and truncated quote) that Darwin believed the opposite.
Such is the current state of "creation science" and creationoid integrity.