Posted on 01/13/2002 8:47:59 AM PST by aculeus
He was the originator of the most dangerous idea in history. He disenfranchised God as our creator and revealed the animal origins of humanity. Many believe his influence was pernicious and evil.
But now a campaign has been launched to establish an international day of celebration on 12 February: birthday of Charles Darwin, author of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
'Along with Shakespeare and Newton, Darwin is our greatest gift to the world,' said Richard Dawkins, honorary president of the Darwin Day Organisation. 'He was our greatest thinker. Any campaign to recognise his greatness should have a significant British contribution.'
The Darwin campaign was launched by US activists two years ago to resist the anti-evolution campaigning of fundamental Christians. Now the aim is to create global celebrations by 2009, the bicentennial of his birthday.
'We have little chance of getting a national holiday for Darwin in the US - there is far too much anti-science and pseudoscience,' said project organiser Amanda Chesworth.'We are more likely to get one established in Europe, particularly in Britain, his birthplace.'
Celebrations will include seminars and lectures, and the showing of films and plays on Darwin's life, though other ideas include an atheist giving Radio 4's Thought for the Day, and a lesson on evolution being preached at Westminster Abbey. 'I'd do it like a shot,' said Dawkins.
Darwin was originally religious. He saw nature's diversity as proof of God's existence. Only a divine creator could be responsible for such marvels, it was then thought. But, after travelling the world in the Beagle, and after years of thought and experiment at his Down House home in Kent, he concluded that natural selection offered a better explanation.
Life forms better suited to their environments live longer and so have more offspring, thus triggering an evolution of species moving into new ecological niches. As philosopher Daniel Dennett said, it was 'the single best idea anyone has ever had... ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else.'
It is also remarkably simple. 'You can explain natural selection to a teenager,' said UK biologist John Maynard Smith. 'You have difficulty with Newton and little chance with Einstein. Yet Darwin's idea is the most profound. It still haunts us.'
Nor is opposition to Darwin confined to religious figures. Sociologists, psychologists and others involved in social policy hate natural selection, said Maynard Smith. 'They deny human behaviour is influenced by genes and evolution. They want to believe we are isolated from the animal kingdom. It is damaging, intellectual laziness. That is why we need a Darwin Day.
This point was backed by biologist Steve Jones. 'If you look at Africa, US fundamentalism, and the Muslim world, you realise evolution supporters are outnumbered by creationists. Yet these are people who have deliberately chosen to be ignorant. They are flat-Earthers without the sophistication. We need a Darwin Day to counter that ignorance.'
Born the same year as well, 1809.
Whoa!!
1. Because the Second Law applies only to closed systems and the Earth is an open system. Ilya Prigogine explains all that, look him up.
2. Evolutionists do pay attention to intelligent design, they just think it's a crock. Victor Stenger has written a lot on this subject, look him up.
3. The mathematics is refuted in http://philosophy.wisc.edu/eells/papers/direv.pdf.
4. This phenomenon is familiar to evolutionists as the choice between "r" and "K" reproductive strategies. Again, look it up.
Paul Davies makes the same point in his book, God and the New Physics.
Many others, including both Darwin and Dawkins, have wondered, not why people read their books of religion, but why they so wilfully and obstinately shut their eyes to the Book of Nature. Most commentators have reached the same conclusion: these people simply do not want to be "struck with awe" at the elegance, wonder, vastness, and deep order of Nature. They want the Creation to be as small, mean, and shabby as possible, because they want it to have been made by their small, mean and shabby god.
Let me guess. You've had an oh-so-rough life. Your dog died; your girl left you...............you sold your first car and really wish you had kept it instead.
Give me a break, o ye who usurps an historical name due to lack of imagination.
I don't know what comic book you've been reading, but the Bible isn't the Word of some "small, mean, and shabby god [sic]". Try reading it sometime, especially the New Testament, before you embarrass yourself on such a public forum in such a way again.
I don't know about that. I've been preached at all my life by "men of God" who say that if you strum your dong or if you have a good time with your girlfriend, it's hellfire forever. I see no grandeur there.
LOL!!!
People either spend their lives denying the existence of a god, or their lives worshipping one---nobody spends their life debating the existence of Santa Claus in their mind as the source of absolute morals or the creation of the universe.
I'm not sure how you inferred from my reply that I consider you a creationist, though I in fact do.
The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies- between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae- between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,* will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. * Anthropological Review, April, 1867, p. 236
Darwin ch 6
Thomas A. Edison
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming ALL other living beings, we are still savages."
http://www.all-creatures.org/quotes/edison_thomas.html
Lord Kelvin's statement of the same - No process is possible in which the sole resukt is the absorption of heat from a reservoir and its complete conversion into work - has no relevance to the issue.
And both these statements are from the 1850s. If you are going that far back to find scientific errors or irrelevancies, you're really scraping the bottom of the scummy creationist barrel.
Prigogine's later views on the Second Law can be found in his Nobel laureate lecture, Time, structure, and fluctuations, republished in Science, vol 201 p 777.
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