AFTER ALL, WHO WAS DARWIN?
On the 12th day of February 1809, Charles Darwin was born in the modest city of Shrewsbury, England. His name is known world-wide now and the second centenary of his birth was celebrated this year. Postage stamps were issued, articles were written, and conferences were held all over. His influence on a great segment of Christianity leads me to write some short comments on it.
In the city of Shrewsbury his name is all over: it was given to a street, to a public terrace, to a shopping centre, to public gardens. When entering the library of the city, a statue of Darwin as an old man is prominent, with a plate announcing that it was in this same building that Darwin was educated. In the modern school of the city, a statue of a much younger Darwin is displayed, with sculptures of some animals that he found in Chile’s Galápagos Islands, to be seen by the pupils as they come to school every day.
There it is taught, as in schools around the world, that the Darwinian evolution is an indisputable fact. The Bible, which was part of the national school curriculum until the last century, is not considered to be reliable any more, and Christianity is placed at the same level as Islamism, Buddhism and other religions in the Religious Education classes.
To take advantage of existing publicity and to further increase tourism filling the coffers of the city council and the local traders, besides celebrating the 200 years since the birth of Darwin, the city is also celebrating 150 years since the publication of his famous book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Election, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, and it already has developed a strategical plan for promotion during the next 30 years.
Ironically, the body of Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, pertaining to the Anglican state established church, thus honouring a man who invented and spread the theories of evolution, contrary to the foundations of Christianity.
After writing his book “On the Origin of Species”, where he published his theory of evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature, so life can be explained by “natural” processes, without a creative God, years later Darwin published another called “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” in which he applied his evolutionist ideas to the origin of man and claimed that humanity descended from ancestral animals similar to monkeys. This theory attacks the authority of the Word of God in the book of Genesis, which is basic for all Christian doctrine, even the entire Bible.
In accordance with Charles Darwin, the central mechanism of evolution is the survival of most able. In this concept, inferior animals have greater probability of being extinguished while their superiors have more probability to prosper. The racism that this idea produced is well documented and extensively divulged, being the foundation of Nazism, which condemned to extinction the “inferior races” including Jews, gypsies, etc., and promoted to leadership the so-called “Aryan race”, limited to the “pure” Germanics according to the conception of Hitler and his henchmen.
It has been less divulged and is therefore less known that many evolutionists, including Darwin, following the concept of survival of most apt, had arrived at the conclusion, and had taught, that women are biologically and intellectually inferior to men. Their reasoning is that amongst other things, war and hunting had trimmed the weakest men, leaving only the strongest to return home and reproduce, whereas women were not subject to these pressures of selection, having been protected by the men, thus allowing the weak ones to survive.
They concluded by means of this logic that women evolved less than men, and because of their smaller brains, were “primitive,” perpetually infantile, less spiritual and more materialistic than men, and “a real danger for the contemporary civilization.” The supposed difference that many great proponents of Darwin believed existed between the two human genders was so great that one of his supporters classified them as two different species, calling the male “Homo frontalis” and the female “Homo parietalis”. Darwin was astounded that “such different beings belonged to the same species.”
Many biographers of Darwin grant that he had a low opinion of women. One of them, Brent, declared that “it would be difficult to conceive a more self-indulgent, almost insolent, attitude on the subservience of women to men than this of Darwin”.
In contrast with this evolutionist theory, the Bible teaches that all human beings descend from Adam and Eve, Adam having been created especially by Him and Eve produced by Him from a rib taken from Adam. All their descendants result from that initial substance, which is proved by modern science, notwithstanding the physical differences between the genders, or colour of the skin, the eyes, blood group, etc., resulting from adaptation (not evolution) to the environment: all are brothers and sisters. Moreover, in Christ “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28). Men and women, Jews, heathen, enslaved, free citizens, all have personal equality before God. One is not superior to the other, though their roles can differ here in this life.
In the house where Darwin lived, now preserved for its historical value, this explanation placed above a high-relief of the text of Genesis 1 reads:
“Many Christians believed that the world and everything in it, including mankind, had been created by God in the beginning and had remained unaltered ever since … Darwin’s theory made nonsense of all of this. He said that the world was a constantly changing place and that all living creatures were changing too. Far from being created in God’s own image, Darwin suggested that human life had probably started out as something far more primitive—the story of Adam and Eve was a myth.”
In short, this was the “great work” of Darwin for which he is celebrated. In his autobiography he wrote:
“I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus, or the beliefs of any barbarian..”
It so happens that these theories of Darwin not only invaded the Anglican Church, but also the main Christian ecclesiastical institutions, that have strived to reinterpret the story of creation found at the beginning of the Bible and thus to accommodate it with the philosophy of evolution. Thus, from the opinion that evolution would have been used by God appeared the “theistic evolution” that now predominates in this area. In 2006, hundreds of churches in the U.S.A. assembled to celebrate what they called Sunday of Evolution to honour Darwin on his 197th anniversary, and on this occasion they promoted the doctrine that evolution and the Bible are compatible, rejecting the clear and literal interpretation of what it is found in the book of Genesis, and accepting as certain the atheistic ideas of evolution.
The consequences of opening to this heresy, that shakes the foundations of the Christian faith, have been disastrous. Instead of only accommodating those who had difficulty in believing in the creation of the universe by God in six days, the new generations of those who were baptized as children into these institutions began to reject more and more the authority of the Bible. The institutions also saw their efforts in evangelism become almost useless.
In England many of the buildings used by the Anglican and other protestant institutions were emptied, and it is common to see them transformed into residences, shops, theatres, clubs, mosques and even worse things. It is sad to see, for example, a Protestant chapel where before it was used to open the Bible and worship God, now being used as a Sikh temple (an Indian religious sect established at the end of the 15th century AD) in the top floor, with the throne for its sacred book, of guru Grantham Sahib, in the lower floor.
Culture and education in the countries of the United Kingdom, as well as those in the north of Europe and North America, used to be moulded to a large extent on Biblical principles, having therefore the Bible as a base. But as this solid base was gradually substituted by the Darwinian thought built on unstable foundations of human theories, starting from the speculations of Darwin and followed by evolutionist theories also adopted by the so-called “science” taught from infancy, and the Bible to be regarded as a mythical book less and less trustworthy, the resulting atheism generated a vacuum in general morality and individual responsibility, which has grown frightfully and is at this time threatening the collapse of Western civilization!
And so we see the evidence of the disastrous consequences which came from the rejection of the Biblical story: which is truly told to us by the supreme Author of the universe through His inspired scribe Moses, and not only explains the origin of everything that we see but also of sin, and reveals the justice and mercy of God, and the promise of a Saviour, which was accomplished millennia later in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the legacy of Charles Darwin.
R David Jones
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