NATURAL SELECTION: DEAD AT ITS INCEPTION-PART 8

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good. (Psalm 14:1 ESV.)

Through the first seven parts of this series on natural selection we have learned that in reality Darwin’s natural selection can best be described as a bankrupt abstraction. It is dead and cannot do the things assigned to it initially by Darwin and later by other evolutionists. Darwin spent decades of his life developing his theory. What was his purpose in writing The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection?

Charles Darwin was trained as a clergyman. From my reading I think he believed in God, but some sort of an unknowable Unitarian type of God. Milt Marcy wrote this, “He [Darwin] wrote and received many letters from Asa Gray, the Harvard professor of botany, and he was willing to share things with him that he did not share with others. In 1860, after publication of Origin, he wrote: ‘My dear Gray, I thank you for two letters…Yesterday I read with care the third article [that Gray wrote]; & it seems to me, as before admirable. But I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about Design. I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as I see it, is the result of chance; & yet I cannot look at each thing as a result of Design.’ [Marcy, Milt, The Emperors Who had No Clothes, Create Space Publishing, 2013, Page 151.]

Another opinion is that “Darwin believed in a Creator as [peer naturalist Richard] Owen did. But Owen was a Coeridgean idealist; his ‘archetype’ existed only in the divine Mind. Darwin was heir to a rival Unitarian tradition that rooted itself in material events. He was thinking of real, historical parents. Homologies for him indicated blood ties, and he used them to work out how barnacles were actually related to crabs and lobsters.” [Desmond and Moore, Darwin—the life of a Tormented Evolutionist, Warner Books, 1991. Page 368.]

“Darwin’s ‘design’ was a far cry from Owen’s ‘ordained’ nature. Like Carpenter, Southwood Smith, and other Unitarians, Darwin made nature an immutable chain of material cause and effects. There was no providentialism; natural causes did not express the ‘continuous operation’ of God’s will.” [ibid, Page 479.]

So these insights indicate that Darwin just could not accept the concept of God as an Engineer of everything. I think this was because of his Unitarian belief that God would not be interested in that much detail, and Darwin’s myopic concentration on discovering an external operator for organic adaptation. We should not lose track of how little he knew about the intricacies of life. Thinking that life was made up of blobs of protoplasm could lead anyone to the wrong conclusions. But his biggest failure was not having enough faith to believe God’s Word.

After Origins was published, “The world wanted to know Darwin’s religious views. With public honors showering him, he entered his Delphic Oracle phase. The audacity of the sermon-senders, the evangelists, and the spiritual Peeping Toms was excruciating. ‘Half the fools throughout Europe write to ask me the stupidest questions,’ he groaned. He sometimes managed a terse retort—‘I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.’” [ibid, Page 634.]

However, I think the more important question today is how did the words of this miserable, muddled, and tormented naturalist actually affect the world after he was gone; especially regarding his proposed externally acting power or force he called “Natural Selection”? We have seen that many people of many stripes did not accept natural selection in the 19th century. Men that Darwin knew and that he often thought were his allies, like Charles Lyell and Thomas Huxley, were more than skeptical. Let’s look at several more recent secular quotes next to see if we can absorb the real effect of natural selection in modern times.

“Biologists now tend to believe profoundly that natural selection is the invisible hand that crafts well-wrought forms. It may be an overstatement to claim that biologists view selection as the sole source of order in biology, but not by much. If current biology has a central canon, you have now heard it.” [Kauffman, Stuart A., At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995.]

“Natural selection is a theory of ‘trial and error’ externalism—organisms propose via their storehouse of variation, and environments dispose of nearly all—not an efficient and human ‘goal-directed internalism’ (which would be fast and lovely, but nature does not know the way).” [Gould, Stephen J., “The Power of This View of Life,” Natural History, 103 (6), 1994.]

“The radicalism of natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of Western thought, particularly the notion that nature’s benevolence, order, and good design, with humans at a sensible summit of power and excellence, prove the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent creator who loves us most of all…To these beliefs Darwinian natural selection presents the most contrary position imaginable. Only one causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproduction success—nothing else, and nothing higher (no force, for example, works explicitly for the good of species and the harmony of ecosystems).” [Gould, Stephen J., “Darwinian Fundamentalism,” The New York Review of Books, 1997.]

“Everywhere we look in nature, we see animals that seem beautifully designed to fit their environment…It is no surprise that early naturalists believed that animals were the product of celestial design, created by God to do their jobs…Darwin dispelled this notion in The Origin. In a single chapter, he completely replaced centuries of certainty about divine design with the notion of mindless, materialistic process—natural selection—that could accomplish the same result. It is hard to overestimate the effect that this insight had not only on biology, but on people’s world view.” [Coyne, Jerry, Why Evolution is True, Viking, 2009, Page 115.]

“If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.” [Wilson, Edward O., On Human Nature, 1978.]

The above five quotes make it clear that today’s primary position on natural selection by evolutionists is that it has indeed replaced the Creator God. He is no longer needed, at least so far as understanding origins questions. No matter how questionable the idea of natural selection is, there seems to be no ‘thing’ better to replace it as the substitute god needed by the secular world view. It may not have been Darwin’s purpose to replace God, but he certainly wanted to provide an argument designed to reject the accuracy, inerrancy, and authority of the Bible. From that position I think it is true that nothing good has resulted from Darwin’s work. He cannot be excused either. He should have known better as we have been told in Romans chapter one.

Here next is one final quote to consider before we move in Part 9 to discuss another terrible result of Darwin’s ideas—Eugenics. After that discussion we will move on to more recent scientific research that explains organic adaptability in terms of an internal pre-programmed process. This is exciting science because it can be interpreted to totally reject natural selection and leave adaptability with the Creator Engineer, the person to whom it belongs.

“Little wonder that Bishop Samuel Wilberforce commented that Darwin was implicitly ascribing to Nature the same ontological status as theists customarily ascribed to God. Darwin’s tacit raising of external nature to crypto-divine status was, concluded Wilberforce, just as much an article of faith as any of the more conventional forms of theistic belief.” [Thomas, Neil, “Natural Selection: A Conceptually Incoherent Term.” Posted on evolutionnews.org, December 1, 2021.] 

J.D. Mitchell

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