"About That Monkey On My Back...........and Other Selective Memories"

DARWINISM vs. CREATIONISM
A Checkered History, A Doubtful Future

[jch] [[ddff-ltd] | Global Broadband Strategies] | POSTED: 12.05.04 @11:18

DARWINISM vs. CREATIONISM A Checkered History, A Doubtful Future by Lloyd Pye Starting with the Sumerians, the first great culture 6,000 years ago, through the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, everyone accepted that some form of heavenly beings hadcreated all of life and, as a crowning achievement, topped it off with humans. Now, consider that for a moment. Today the CEO of a medium-sized corporation can verbally issue an instruction to be carried out company-wide and have no hope it will reach the lower echelons intact. So the fact that most historical cultures, from first to most recent (our own), believed essentially the same creation story is astonishing in its consistency. Naturally, such long-term consistency made it extremely difficult to challenge when the accumulation of scientific evidence could no longer be ignored. Charles Darwin is usually credited with issuing the first call for a rational examination of divine creation as the belief system regarding the origins of life and humanity. However, in his 1859 classic, The Origin Of Species, he skirted both issues in an attempt to placate his era’s dominant power structure — organized religion. Though he used the word “origin” in the title, he was careful to discuss only how species developed from each other, not how life originated. And he simply avoided discussing humanity’s origins. Ultimately, pressure from both supporters and critics forced him to tackle that thorny issue in 1871’s The Descent Of Man; but Charles Darwin was never comfortable at the cutting edge of the social debate he helped engineer. The true roots of the challenge to divine creation extend 65 years prior to Darwin, back to 1795, when two men — a naturalist and a geologist—published stunning works. The naturalist was Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, a brilliant intellectual in his own right. In The Laws Of Organic Life he suggested that population numbers drove competition for resources, that such competition was a possible agent of physical change, that humans were closely related to monkeys and apes, and that sexual selection could have an effect on species modification. In short, he dealt with nearly all of the important topics his grandson would later expand upon, except natural selection. The geologist was a Scotsman, James Hutton, whose Theory Of The Earth suggested for the first time that Earth might be much older than 6,000 years, then the universally accepted time frame established a century earlier by Anglican Bishop James Ussher. (Many if not most of today’s mainstream Christians are convinced that the creation date of 6,000 years ago is Holy Writ, even though mortal Bishop Ussher arrived at it by the mundane method of calculating the who begat whoms listed in the Bible.) Hutton studied the layering of soils in geological strata and concluded that rain washed soil off the continents and into the seas; at the bottom of the seas heat from inside the planet turned soil into rock; over great stretches of time the new rocks were elevated to continent level and slowly pushed up to form mountains; then in turn those mountains were weathered away to form new layers of soil. This unending cycle meant two things: Earth was not a static body changed only superficially at the surface by volcanoes and earthquakes; and each layering cycle required vast amounts of time to complete. The significance of Hutton’s insight, to which he gave the jawbreaker name of uniformitarianism, cannot be overstated. However, he couldn’t challenge Ussher’s 6,000 year dogma because he provided no alternative to it. He was certain that 6,000 years was much too short a time span for any weathering cycle to be completed, but in the late 18th century there was no way to accurately measure geological eras. That would have to wait another thirty-five years until Sir Charles Lyell, a far more methodical British analyst and researcher, could firmly establish uniformitarianism as the basis of modern geology. Lyell took Hutton’s work and ran with it, creating a three-volume series called Principles Of Geology (1830-1833) that convincingly provided the time lines and time frames Hutton lacked. Bishop Ussher’s 6,000 year dogma still held complete sway with ecclesiastics everywhere, but the world’s burgeoning ranks of scientists could see that Hutton and now Lyell were correct; the earth had to be millions of years old rather than 6,000. But how to convince the still largely uneducated masses of Ussher’s fallacy? Like Hutton before him, Lyell and his supporters could not break through the dense wall of ignorance being perpetuated by religious dogma. However, they had knocked several gaping cracks in it, so when Charles Darwin came along in another thirty years (1859), the wall was ready to begin crumbling with an echo that reverberates to this day................ Without saying it outright, Darwin’s bottom line was that life’s myriad forms managed their own existence from start to finish without divine help. This did not take God entirely out of the equation, but it did remove His influence on a day-to-day basis. The irony is that Charles Darwin did his work reluctantly, ......... Nonetheless, the schism he created between evolution (a term he never used; his choice was natural selection) .............. continued

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The author's discussion of the Sumerians is very interesting. Personally I have no problem with the possiblity that my savior Jesus is a benevolent extraterrestrial alien being of surpassing and transcendant power. He is greater than I, and my puny mind has no ability to speculate upon his unknowable essense - it is only for me to accept him and be saved; and to live by the teachings he has given me, the greatest of which is love.

beautful. :)

He is pushing an agenda.............while selectively, and unsuccessfully debunking creation story. Creation is not a science as he has correctly pointed out. It is an article of faith based on evidence which he neglected to point out.

What he does in the latter part of his peice is simple scandalous, while he's agreeing essentially we are created he derides the Creator. He blasphemes God by his nit-wit assertions. Yet denys any implicite evidence for man's anti-life [sin] choice as the root casue of degenerative process that has stripped man of his anti-deluvian capabilities. In short he selectively chooses what is scientifically convenient for is wacky suppositional musing.

Only his treatment of Darwinism is to be lauded for he provides an excelllent encapsulation of evolutionary theoretical history, that most of it's' supporters understand little about. From uniformatarianism to transmutation of species he shows the utterly unscientific basis of evolution thought that stems for Darwin's original theorys

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It was a long article and while I didn't skim, I didn't ponder and take copious notes. Might you refresh my memory as to what in particular the author was selective about remembering?

Ed could you agree that this aothor is emplying a selective memory?

The author's discussion of the Sumerians is very interesting. Personally I have no problem with the possiblity that my savior Jesus is a benevolent extraterrestrial alien being of surpassing and transcendant power. He is greater than I, and my puny mind has no ability to speculate upon his unknowable essense - it is only for me to accept him and be saved; and to live by the teachings he has given me, the greatest of which is love.

Clarification: I couldn't agree less with the author of "DARWINISM vs. CREATIONISM" .............but he shows that matters of faith and evidencee can not be reudced to intellectualism that would use the context of truth to undermine faith in what God says: Hence my title "About that Monkey on My Back..........................and Other Selective Memories"

Actually Abram the firstt chapeter of Romans shows that everyone innately knows and udnerstand that God created the earth.

"Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,"

Romans 1:19-22

Which is exactly why I posted this article....................I couldn't agree with him less..........but it does provide a number of talking points.

This is the second article I've read from this writer. What a bunch of unadulterated jibberish! Out of that morass that was supposed to be intelligent reading I submit just a couple of quotes for commentary, on the kind of lunacy being passed off as intellectuality nowadays.

"Let us make the assertion, then, that both Darwinists and Creationists are wrong to such a degree that their respective theories are ripe for overthrow."

Darwin's theory was proven wrong ages ago and more recently by works such as Fatal Flaws by Hank Hanegraaff.

"It is simply a matter of time and circumstance before one or another piece of evidence appears that is so clear in its particulars and so overwhelming in its validity, both sides will have no choice but to lay down their bullhorns and laptops and slink off into history’s dustbin, where so many other similarly bankrupt theories have gone before them."

"Both sides," meaning Darwin and Creationists, i.e., Christianity, will "have no choice but to lay down their bullhorns and...slink off into history's dustbin..."
Far from it! Christ said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." Two thousand years later, dozens of dictators, countless persecutions, martyrs, and invasions later, Christianity marches on.

"Similarly bankrupt theories..." What is bankrupt is the mind reprobate of the knowledge of God, fogged and faked by secular ideas as to the origin of the world, such as the notion that the creation itself is divine, as in Wican and pantheistic dreams.

The Christian hope included a "new heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." As History marches on what will end up on the dustbin of history will be "the nations that forget God," which "shall be turned into hell."
911 should've woken our nation up. It only roused us long enough to put the snooze button back on. Secularism puts Jesus in the category with Santa Claus, the Toothfairy and Mother Goose and where Liberals like to think WMD are in Iraq, only in the mind of George Bush.