…It was the unscientific character of early evolutionary theory that made scientists like Lyell and Huxley, and Darwin himself, skeptical. All the same, their predecessors made some telling points. There were the improvements made in some domesticated animals and plant species by artificial selection- of which Darwin was to see the full significance. There were embryonic changes: the development of tadpole into frog and larva into butterfly. There were vestigial organs- noted by Erasmus Darwin- which seemed once to have served a purpose but now served none, suggesting that the modern species might be radically different from the ancestral one to which such an organ was useful.
—Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, a quasi-creationist organization, claimed that the public interest in Darwin teetered “on the edge of hero worship” and tied evolution to atheism.
William Dembski, research professor in philosophy and director of the Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, accused Christians of being “infatuated” with Darwin and accommodating their faith to him. He found Darwin’s theory “untrue” and “laughable.”—Read More:http://ethicsdaily.com/reviewing-last-weeks-public-brawl-over-charles-darwin-cms-15260 image:http://theuraniumcafe.blogspot.ca/2011/06/freddie-franciss-trog1970-w-joan.html
And there was the fossil record, unmistakeable evidence of the extinction of species. The giant bones which lay embedded in the earth proved that the Creator could change his mind. Struggle and waste in nature were familiar to the nineteenth century long before The Origin of Species; Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” is a pre-Darwinian quotation. But what naturalists did not see was that this could be used to explain the formation as well as the extinction of species.
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…The caustic atheist Richard Dawkins said on CNN: “There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot,” referring to Comfort.
“What matters is evidence. And the evidence is clear. The evidence is in favor of evolution,” said Dawkins.
“If you don’t understand evolution, you can’t be considered scientifically literate,” responded Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, to Comfort’s claims.
Noting that her copy of Comfort’s book was missing four critical chapters from “On the Origin of Species,” Scott wrote, “Comfort’s treatment of the human fossil record is painfully superficial, out of date and erroneous.”
As scientists and creationists battled, Deborah Heiligman brought insight into Darwin the human being, not the straw man, in a column on the Washington Post’s “On Faith” page.
Author of a new book on Darwin, “Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith,” Heiligman contended that Darwin was not an atheist and that God can be found in the pages of “On the Origin of Species.”
“Darwin put God into his great book, not in the first edition, but in the second and every one thereafter. The last sentence reads, ‘
re is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,’” she wrote. Read More:http://ethicsdaily.com/reviewing-last-weeks-public-brawl-over-charles-darwin-cms-15260
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