Are you prepared for the drama…the romance…the comedy…of the original science fiction story? Ironically, it happens to be a true story. Sit right back and you’ll hear how the unbelievable hypothesis became the darling tale of a once scientific Western Civilization.
The origin of the universe is the ultimate nucleus of all debate. “Where did we come from?” – that very question, in all its cliché simplicity, is the prequel to the ultimate factors that determine an individual’s worldview. It challenges a person to decide how to regard life, death, the universe and morality. There is no detouring around it, though there are so many intellectual “scientific” thinkers that insist upon imagining fine print complexities and tut-tutting away all supposedly childish speculations because they would much rather have the public quietly accept their theoretical spoon feeding. Perhaps this sort of situation has always existed in civilization to some extent. In the past two centuries, so much has happened so quickly that probably few have given much thought to the fact that the debate of origins was given a very peculiar treatment not too long ago. Ah, it doesn’t appear too out of the ordinary anymore, because we have grown up immersed in it, regardless of which side of the debate we actually stand on. But there are plenty of extraordinary things in history that no one likes to talk about any more. Perhaps this has become one of them.
It was in the late 19th century that formerly outlandish ideas appeared acceptable. It was a time when people became thrilled with the thought of increased industry and technology – a second Renaissance of sorts. The conception of all the ideas that would make the 20th century a great glory of man had been made. The western world was on the brink of publicly shunning the Bible as nothing more than a collection of personal sentiments and in turn submitting the lifestyle of civilization to a human-invented quest for knowledge. Science was once a mostly Christian-dominated field of independent observation. In fact, many pastors were naturalists. This was because the Biblical view of the natural world was the most conducive to scientific study. While other worldviews either believed in Earth-worshiping mysticism or viewed the natural world as being inferior to the realm of thought and spirituality (and thus not worth studying), the Biblical Creationist view offered a balanced perspective of the universe that was interesting and profitable. But now science was becoming an idol.
“For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” – Romans 1:25
A few unusual geologists were beginning to form speculations about the age of the earth and the historical accuracy of the Bible. But they couldn’t promote any such thing just yet. Not even the most brilliant scientist in the world could possibly convince a predominately God-fearing society of accepting such a trend alone. The whole origin debate remained in the way, and the realm of biology – the study of life – was yet to be mastered by the skeptics. The Bible had an answer regarding origins, but science did not. There were plenty of oozy, grimy, old mythological ideas regarding the spontaneous generation of flies out of raw meat and mice out of wood boxes and eels out of smelly mud. But those were not convincing enough. Finally, in 1859 a theology-student-turned-naturalist published a book.
Charles Darwin began his renowned On The Origin Of Species with the opening statement,
“When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species–that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.”¹
Charles Darwin
It is interesting to note that his beginning paragraph immediately presumes that the reader believes the origin of species is “that mystery of mysteries”. With that taken into account, you can begin to project into your mind the primary audience that this literature would captivate. Obviously, those who believed the Bible to be the literal, inerrant Word of God and to have historic value would not be mystified by the origin of species. The Bible tells the story of a Creator designing the origin of everything in the universe. However, those that did not take the Bible seriously – or preferred to discount some of its text as irrelevant – would be anxious to find an alternative idea with a substantial appearance.
Of course, Darwin wasn’t being entirely original in his reasoning (as there is nothing new under the sun). He was under the influence of his friend Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), the lone British geologist who introduced the doctrine uniformitarianism. Lyell believed that “the present is the key to the past”, and that all of history must have slowly groped to its current position without any extraordinary circumstances. It was Lyell that considered the universal flood stories to be embellished accounts spread by survivors of global warming-related melt downs from the icebergs (Fancy that!).
There were two significant quarters of opposition towards Darwin’s ideas. The second opposition – that of “religious” leaders who were concerned about the new theory attempting to discredit the literal account of Genesis – is the more popular of the two. The controversy surrounding it is readily promoted by those who adhere to the view as summarized by evolutionary polemicist Andrew Dickson White (1832 – 1918):
“In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst of evils both to religion and to science.”
Louis Agassiz
The first opposition doesn’t receive much attention among scientists in our present century. Ironically, this was the opposition from Darwin’s fellow scientists. One of the most eminent scientists of the day was Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873), who is known as one of the “founding fathers of the modern American scientific tradition”². He was world-renowned for his studies in ichthyology and paleontology. He was by no means afraid of the presentation of scientific ideas, following that they had credibility. It was Agassiz that first scientifically presented the idea that the earth had undergone an ice age at some time in its past (which is complementary to what would result following a world wide cataclysmic flood). But he mystified the Darwinian zealots because of his life-long opposition to the evolutionary theory. Some people today even refer to him as “a historical enigma.” His writings and lectures on the matter present his firm and sharp conviction against the new trend fast rising in the scientific world:
“I trust to outlive this mania.”
“You don’t know what this new tendency of science will lead to. God will go out of the universe as fast as Darwinism comes in. If the theory were demonstrated by facts, I would be the first to sustain it; but I can’t give up God Almighty for an ingenious hypothesis when I know there are facts which contradict the hypothesis. I am, first of all, a man of science; I follow whithersoever science leads; but I get enraged when I am voted an old fogy by a man behind the age, because I decline to accept a theory which my generalized knowledge and my daily investigations forbid me even to tolerate.”
“It is my belief that naturalists are chasing a phantom, in their search after some material gradation among created beings, by which the whole animal Kingdom may have been derived by successive development from a single germ, or from a few germs…the resources of the Deity cannot be so meager, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.”
“It would be superfluous to discuss in detail the arguments by which Mr. Darwin attempts to explain the diversity among animals. Suffice it to say, that he has lost sight of the most striking of the features, and the one which pervades the whole, namely, that there runs throughout Nature unmistakable evidence of thought, corresponding to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence; and no theory that overlooks this element can be true to nature.”
One point brought up by Agassiz was that no other scientific hypothesis had really been given such acclaim and credit to a single person. Right after the controversial book was published, the terms “Darwinism” and “Darwinian” were already extremely popular. If one is a Bible-believing creationist, one can both awe at the Creator’s intelligence of design and adore Him as a personal Lord. Perhaps those that replace the Bible with On The Origin of Species, still being as entirely human as Bible believers, want some one to both awe at and adore. Since they cannot awe at and adore the Creator of the universe, they instead awe at and adore the creator of their theory.
Thomas Huxley
The acceptance of the theory of evolution in society met its climax in the debate between Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873) at Oxford in 1860 ³. The various records of this debate demonstrate what happened when this issue reached the public. It also offers a crucial glimpse into why evolution became widely accepted by people that formerly never dared to imagine such a thing. Thomas Huxley was an eloquent writer and speaker. A professed agnostic, he was the foremost supporter of the new evolutionary theory, as he stated:
“I am Darwin’s bulldog.”
Furthermore, his view of science explains the immense influence debate and the written word had on the issue – perhaps more of an influence than actual scientific analysis had itself:
“Science is…the results of exact methods of thought whatever be the subject-matter.”
English Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the third son of William Wilberforce and a notably keen debater, was reckoned to be a good match for Darwin’s bulldog. More than 700 men and women clamored to watch how the scene would unfold, a large majority of which was allied with Samuel Wilberforce’s creationist stance. Those that supported Thomas Huxley were the handful of intellectuals that were intrigued by Darwin.
“Accordingly it was to him, thus marked out as the champion of the most debatable thesis of evolution, that, two days later, the Bishop addressed his sarcasms, only to meet with a withering retort. For on the Friday there was peace; but on the Saturday came a yet fiercer battle over the `Origin’ which loomed all the larger in the public eye, because it was not merely the contradiction of one anatomist by another, but the open clash between Science and the Church. It was, moreover, not a contest of bare fact or abstract assertion, but a combat of wit between the individuals, spiced with the personal element which appeals to one of the strongest instincts of every large audience.”
- Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911)
Samuel Wilberforce
What happened according to various eyewitnesses is almost mysterious at first glance. With Biblical creationism being the view point that was still both scientifically and socially acceptable (particularly in the audience), Wilberforce apparently didn’t think that he needed to defend the Bible as much as he needed to show how absurd the evolutionary theory was:
“But we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton’s patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses; and if Mr Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms, – `Claim kindred there, and have our claim allowed’ – only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we are invited to substitute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation, or the spasmodic fluttering flight of fancy for the severe conclusions to which logical accuracy of reasoning has led the way.”His speech was given immediate acclamation, with cheering from the clergy and ladies waving their white handkerchiefs. Wilberforce supposedly concluded his dissertation jovially mocking evolution by questioning his opponent whether it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey.
Perhaps the lightheartedness was a mistake. It gave the opponent an opportunity to appear more sincere, wise and knowledgeable. In his famous response, Huxley is said to have ironically replied,
“The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.”
Huxley then shocked the audience by retorting with complete seriousness:
“I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.”
Nothing scientific, nothing dealing with fact versus fiction. But it left his listeners speechless. One woman actually fainted in astonishment. The very basis of the argument had shifted away from pure, cold hard scientific observation. On second thought, maybe the basis of the argument was never on pure, cold hard scientific observation in the first place! It was destined to be no scale of experiment and observation and faith, but an issue of foolishness and less foolishness and greater foolishness. No one was prepared to respond. Christians in confusion and fear fled from the crucial and long-suffering field that was once theirs alone: Science.
Many leaders such as Wilberforce had failed to realize what a threat to their descendants this theory actually was, and had allowed the opponent to run all over them crying “aimless rhetoric” and “religious prejudice”.
Shortly before his death, Louis Agassiz said,
“I confess that I was not prepared to see this theory received as it has been by the best intellects of our time. Its success is greater than I could have thought possible.”
- With his passing, the next century came to revere Darwin and his theory of evolution in place of God just as Agassiz had predicted. On February 12, 2009, Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday was celebrated (Abraham Lincoln happened to have the same birthday, oddly enough). What about the great men of science that acknowledged the Creator? I noticed by my own observation that Louis Agassiz’s 200th birthday was May 28, 2007 – the day the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum was opened.
WORKS CONSULTED
“John Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873)”. Lefalophodon. Ed. John Alroy. Last accessed 10 May 2009. http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~alroy/lefa/LAgassiz.html
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 6th Ed. Project Gutenberg Etext, December 1999. Gutenberg.org. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=39460&pageno=1
Lucas, J.R. “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter”. The Historical Journal 22.2 (1979): 313-330. Homepage of J.R. Lucas. 10 May 2009. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html
Pearcey, Nancy R. and Charles B. Thaxton. The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy. Wheaton: Crossway, 1994.
Waggoner, Ben. “Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)”. University of California Museum of Paleontology. 01 Jan. 1996. 10 May 2009. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/agassiz.html
Written by Amanda Read. For more articles by Amanda, check out her site: AmandaRead.com
I’d never heard of Louis Agassiz before. I also found the part about the debate between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley particularly interesting. Thank you for your sharing your research.
[...] here to continue [...]
Of course, none of this changes the fact that Charles Darwin is hardly the only evolutionary biologist to have ever lived, and that his ideas ultimately gave rise to the most powerful theory in all of modern biology, one which touches and informs every aspect of the field. To pretend that evolution is not a rock-solid concept whose core precepts have been observed and verified a million times over (with the advent of molecular biology allowing scientists to confirm virtually every hypothesis about common descent) is to proudly display one’s own stubborn, Biblically based ignorance.
I am interested in the next installment. Is there one? If so, where do I go?
I am working on the next one. I hope to have at least three installments.
~Amanda~
In response to kemibe,
Your comment is that of an excellent Huxley protege: not only do you mold science to fit your desires, but you mold Darwin to fit them as well. Charles Darwin did not present macroevolution as a “rock-solid concept whose core precepts have been observed and verified”. His observations of microevolution might be called positively powerful, but his extrapolation of macroevolution is not (notice: it was an extrapolation, not an actual observation).
But sadly, despite the work of Darwin that was honest, the dramatic Huxleyites who wanted to use Darwin for their personal religious agenda have probably set science back further then we might ever know. For instead of drawing focus to observable science, they have given scientists incentive to waste a century trying to solve the “mystery of the origin of the species” – which isn’t a mystery at all – when they could have focused even more in depth on science that is beneficial to our understanding of the natural world and medicine. Scientists have still made quite a bit of progress in some ways, but think of how much more they could have made (and could be making) if they weren’t chasing the phantom ape man all their breathing days!
You cited molecular biology to make your point. Hmm…poor choice when 99% of evidence from molecular biology shows that Evolution is anything but rock-solid.
Molecular biology is the study of molecules important to life, particularly focusing on the study of proteins. The more similar or closely related one organism is to another, the more similar their amino acid sequences ought to be. This means that the more complex an organism appears to be on the evolutionary scale, the more different their cytochrome C amino acid sequences should be from those of simple organisms. If macroevolution has any plausibility, then cytochrome C amino acid sequences of various species ought to reflect that. However, take a look at the following data that is likely kept under lock and key:
Compared to Bacterium Rhodospirillum rubrum (1),
A Horse has 64% difference
A Pigeon has 64% difference
A Tuna has 65% difference
A Silkworm moth has 65% difference
Wheat has 66% difference
Yeast has 69% difference
So, according to molecular biology, horses and pigeons have more in common with bacteria than silkworms and yeast!
Also, compared to a lamprey eel,
A Horse has 15% difference
A Pigeon has 18% difference
A Turtle has 18% difference
A Carp has 12% difference
There are no consistent trends of common descent in any of these relationships.
When the overwhelming evidence suggests that your hypothesis is wrong, it’s time to get back to the drawing board. People need to stop holding science back by indulging in fantasies (even Charles Darwin himself once wondered if he had devoted his life to a fantasy).
~Amanda~
WORKS CITED:
(1). Wile, Jay L. and Marilyn F. Durnell. Exploring Creation with Biology. Apologia Educational Ministries, Inc. 2003. Pg. 294-298.
Post Scriptum – Don’t you dare attempt a phony cheap shot and say the amino acid sequences are invalid because I happened to find the list in a textbook that has the word “Creation” in the title. I know that as an evolutionist you have tremendous faith in the human imagination, but surely you do not devalue PhDs in Nuclear Chemistry as products of spontaneous generation too…
http://blog.drwile.com/
Fascinating, Amanda. To the fellow who parroted the mainstreammedia response of evolution is a fact: It was the late Dr. Colin Patterson, author of the British Nationial Museum’s book “Evolution” who famously asked an audiance of over 500 evolutionists “Can anyone in this room tell me one thing about evolution that is true?” He got zero responses. Later, in a letter to Luther Sunderland, author of Darwin’s Enigma, he answered Sunderland’s question as to why he had not included even one transitional form in his large book on evolution. “I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which we can make a watertight argument. If there were I would have included it in my book.” They have over 7 million fossils in their collection. And it was Dr. Lee Spetner who put the nail in evolution’s coffin when his research showed that mutations always subtract information, they never add useful information. Occassionally information will be mistakenly repeated, but that is not useful. Occassionally a mutation will provide a temporary benefit but that benefit disappears in the organism’s normal, natural environment. Sickle cell anemia, for example, provides only problems for folks that get it in North America. In the jungles rife with malaria it can provide a small benefit. (Which would disappear if radical environmentalists would reintroduce DDT. All credible research showed DDT to be very safe for humans and wildlife. Only when concentrated a 100 times what pesticide spraying would ever leave behind does it cause problems. So perhaps 10 plus million died due to malaria related diseases because of one deluded, very poor researcher, Rachel Carson and her book of lies. Sort of like Darwin’s. But if you repeat a lie often enough, control the press and the universities, hey, even global warming becomes an accepted “consensus”, the facts notwithstanding. Thank the Lord for that hacker who unleashed climategate. Too bad some hackers wouldn’t unleash evolutiongate, it would be a much bigger flood revealing much larger deception. And for those who believe nonlife could possibly produce life (there is no such thing as simple life, our electron microscopes have made that abundantly clear), remember matter and energy alone never produce an increase in information. Systems and intelligence are required. So you can’t even get started, let alone build up the gene code from amoeba to man. (Mutations subtract information, remember? So how does one build up the billions of lines of informational code to program for lungs, eyes, brains etc. when one is always subtracting information? The idea is ludicrous.) No wonder Sir Francis Crick, Sir Frederick Hoyle and Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe found the possibility of even the protein needed for a living cell evolving to be less than one in ten to the forty thousandth power. They concluded it did not happen on earth and must have come from outer space. Oh, like it is somehow easier on some other planet? I do agree it came from elsewhere, ie Creator God. Lastly, the 100,000 rpm machines found even in bacteria coded for by DNA (which is 27 trillion times better than our computer chips at storing information) ought to show even the most brainwashed evolutionist intelligence is required. Oh, wait. It did! Dr. Charles Oxnard of Oxford converted to design in Dec. 2004 after 66 years in atheism. Why? He studied DNA for 2 months and concluded he had to follow the evidence where it led, to a Designer. Yeah! The Bible calls Him Jesus. Romans 1:20. rarichardsjr@hotmail.com