darwin…waiting the gates of eden

The times of Charles Darwin. It can be said that in Darwin’s England of the nineteenth century the world was not only imaginatively comprehensible, it was benevolently ordered and Abraham was a sheik…

…Much of this apparent coziness was due to a relative lack of historical sense, which,paradoxically, helped men to feel at home with the past. Educated men could speak familiarly of Moses, Abraham and Solomon, and derive maxims from their words and deeds with no sense of estrangement; Dean Milman became very unpopular for calling Abraham a sheik. One reason for familiarity with the past was the relatively short time span it was thought to cover.

Most men at the beginning of the nineteenth century thought that the world had been created only some six thousand years before, although perhaps few would have cared to be as specific as a seventeenth-century vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, according to whom “man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C. at nine o’clock in the morning.” But when Rev. John William Burgon apostrophized Petra as a “rose red city half as old as time,” he meant it. ( to be continued)…

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Darwin did mention a Creator and God in the last edition of The Origin of Species. But he did not say that God created life or specifically created man. Those who oppose Darwin do not want to allow for the possibility that Darwin brought a Creator (with a capital C) into the picture. But he clearly did.

Perhaps Darwin was being more liberal in allowing others to choose to believe in God or not. Perhaps he had more respect for believers and atheists than they have for him. As a scientist, he felt that a priority should be placed on describing the changes to life we see in the natural world as proceeding along natural “law” which, in his time, was the a topic for the investigations of the naturalist. For example, Newton describes the “laws” of motion. Darwin sought to find those laws in the early forms of life.

In the final view, Darwin’s work is like a Rorschach inkblot test: people will see what they want to see, what is consistent with their beliefs. However, as readers of his work we must factually report what he actually said, not what we want to believe he said. Critics of Darwin’s work are then attacking him for not believing the same thing they believe, rather than for what he actually wrote.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/what_darwin_said_about_god.html#ixzz2EnTT57uj

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…Stanley in his ” Essays “ says: ” Those who were but children at the time can remember the horror created in remote rural districts by the rumor that a book had appeared in which Abraham was described as a ‘ sheik.’” But this initial attempt to show that the characters and events of sacred history could be treated both critically and reverentl

ovoked from the pulpits an outpouring of denunciations which even now Milman’s successors in such attempts have not
ceased to suffer. His book was declared to be “impious.” H e himself was pronounced the greatest enemy to Christianity since Julian the Apostate. The ” Family
Library ” series, of which…Read More:http://www.unz.org/Pub/Outlook-1900mar24-00684