….and yet there are people who are still trying to deny the overwhelming evidence of Evolution. One still wonders why, but one can start to put together a picture of the reasons. First and foremost is religion.
Religion, specifically the fringe ones have a strong opposition to Evolution because it is a scientific and naturalistic view of the world. Unlike Religion which makes human beings the center of the universe, Evolution and Science put that humans are a part of nature and are one of many living creatures on this planet. There is no reason for this, but Science discounts or tries to filter out anything that they cannot test and evolution has been tested over and over and over again. It is funny how Religion tends to look upon science with a sense of hatred, because Science seems to take away from Religion, but in fact it is the other way around that should be more accurate.
Religion shouldn’t have stepped into explaining the natural world because it cannot. It interjected itself into explaining the natural world with superstition and mumbo jumbo without a shred of evidence. Then Science came and did the right thing which was use materialistic evidence and theories to explain observations in the natural world, proving itself correct by using the Scientific Method. Religion which seems to demand that people suspend critical thinking. It seems to demand that you cannot use critical thinking but accept them as truth without any evidence. This is what is destructive about religion.
Just like Gay Marriage, equality rights for women and minorities, slavery and child abuse, it is religion that stands in the way of public progress.
But 150 years since the publication of a scientific book and people still oppose it for religious reasons, I see this as a dark foreshadowing of what may be to come.
Science speaks nothing of religion or spirituality because you cannot test them. Science is agnostic on purpose and despite the scientists themselves be they religious or atheistic, they make no comment on God or any type of supernatural element when speaking in the context of religion at all.
Charles Darwin went out and started looking at the natural world, and discovered a vast diversity of life, specifically in the Galapagos Islands. There, he wondered how such an abundance of different species could have been so fine tuned for their natural environments, specifically an example are his Finches. It seemed strange that on various islands different Finches had different types of beaks and different ways of feeding, but it seemed odd to him that why would they only be so fine tuned, it seemed that if there was a creator of these finches or a divine force it had tuned them so well for each type of environment. Darwin spent his entire life categorizing and finding evidence. He spent years corresponding with various naturalists and scientists all over the world and he knew that his evidence pointed to a very controversial idea because he knew that if nature itself was able to produce such vast diversity of life, then was there really a need for a creator?
Early on in his time, Geologists had already come to a firm conclusion that the Earth itself must have been hundreds of millions of years older than the biblical account. In addition the basic observations of astronomy had also dis-proven the terracentric view, that the Earth was the center of the universe. Was it that plausible, that nature simply had better answers than the bible? Remember back then in Darwin’s time it was not the modern secular world that we live in today. It was ruled by an upper class that had invested interest in maintaining certain levels of theocratic dogma over the masses. It was the Church that opposed the use of the printing press centuries earlier to spread the biblical word because it allowed people to form ideas and opinions.
Darwin knew his idea was dangerous but as a man of science he could not deny the evidence that stood before him. Only today we have even more evidence to support his claims in the form of genetic information and dating methods. Darwin’s idea was so well put together that today we are still finding new evidence that supports his ideas. The astounding evidence set forth by genetic evidence wasn’t even known in Darwin’s day and everything that Genetics has revealed supports Darwin. The sheer similarities in the human and ape chromosomal pairings shows a clear relation between humans and the higher apes. It also showed that the concept of “superior” or “inferior” life really is entirely based on nothing more than opinion, for if an amoeba has 670,000,000,000 (Six Hundred and Seventy Billion) genes, and humans only have 2,900,000,000 (two billion, nine-hundred million) genes, does that mean that the Amoeba Dubia is more advanced than us?
Today, people try to use every fallacy imaginable to slander Darwin, and his work in an attempt to discredit the Origin of Species. Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are only the latest. They attempted to link Darwin to Social Darwinism and Adolf Hitler, Slavery, Genocide, and Racism. Of course scientists and historians thoroughly discount these distortions based on the fact that there is little if any evidence to support these claims. They make the counter argument that the bible has supported more of these atrocities than the Origin of Species ever did.
Darwin didn’t have a death bed conversion and those that believe it are only those who want it to be true. The story of a death bed conversion came from someone who never knew Darwin and furthermore his loved ones, friends and family unanimously discount any event of a death bed conversion for Darwin. He firmly believed his research and he was not one to back track on an entire life’s work.
150 years later, his theory is standing the test of time and over and over again it is confirmed by continued evidence. Those who seek to undermine Darwin’s work realize they cannot discount his evidence or any modern evidence, but instead try to use any fallacy imaginable to attack Darwin himself. Hoping that if people don’t like Darwin, his evidence must be equally evil.
