1859 Darwinism
‘Darwin’s greatest contribution to science is that he completed the Copernican Revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a system of matter in motion governed by natural laws. With Darwin’s discovery of natural selection, the origin and adaptations of organisms were brought into the realm of science. The adaptive features of organisms could now be explained, like the phenomena of the inanimate world, as the result of natural processes, without recourse to an Intelligent Designer. The Copernican and the Darwinian Revolutions may be seen as the two stages of the one Scientific Revolution. They jointly ushered in the beginning of science in the modern sense of the word: explanation through natural laws.’---F J. Alyala’s website.
Born in 1809, Charles Darwin, the second youngest of six children, grew-up in a large Georgian house in England. For 26 years of his life, he lived with his father, a non-religious doctor. Charles Darwin was baptised as an Anglican. He then went to medical school in Edinborough, Scotland where his brother Erasmus Darwin was also learning to be a doctor. Soon Charles lost interest in medicine and joined the Plinian Society whose students were materialists who were attempting to dismiss the Christian view of origins. He wrote in his autobiography ‘I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.’ Two men greatly influenced Darwin, Thomas Maltus (1766-1834) and Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Maltus believed the world could not sustain its growing population, so he was a pioneer of modern birth-control and abortion. Darwin, in his book, the Descent of Man (1871), refers to Malthus and his population control philosophy. Next, in 1877, there was founded the Maltusian League, the first of such birth-control societies. This in turn began the eugenic philosophy, where many indigenous peoples of new lands like Australia and Newzealand needed to be culled as less human. Darwin’s other friend, Lyell of the long-ages theory, said the Genesis flood never happened. Lyell’s aim, and achievement, was to get churchmen on board his long-age geology. In a letter Lyell wrote: ‘If you don’t triumph over them, but compliment the liberality and candor of the present age, the bishops and enlightened saints will join us.’
Charles Darwin’s legacy was carried on by his good friends Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Earnest Haeckel (1834-1919) who hated the Catholic faith. At a time when the science of biology had only started, Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog,’ wrote: ‘One of [evolution’s] greatest merits, in my eyes, is the fact that it occupies a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism to that vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral and social life of mankind, the Catholic Church.’ Haeckel agreed with Huxley, even saying that: ‘Freedom and prosperity are opposed to their Catholicism. Either the Church wins, and then farewell to all free-science and free-thinking, or else the rational state proves victorious, then, in the 20th century, human culture, freedom and prosperity will continue their progressive development.’ In his 1905 book The Wonders of Life, Haeckel also wrote: ‘Those lower races are psychologically nearer to the mammals than to civilised Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.’
‘The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin had been born into a Christian home but lost his faith as a teenager and embraced evolutionary materialism. On his desk sat a sculpture of a chimpanzee sitting on a pile of books, including Darwin’s Origin of Species, contemplating a human skull. Lenin coolly sat in the presence of that sculpture, overseeing the murders of millions of innocent people, all in the name of evolutionary progress. Lenin’s successor as communist dictator of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, also lost his faith in God as a seminarian after reading about Darwin’s evolution and Lyell’s uniformitarianism. He oversaw the murder of more than twenty million people, all in the name of evolutionary progress. When communism then spread to China, Mao Tse Tung’s forces held compulsory seminars in every town they captured, not in the teachings of Marx, Lenin, or Mao, but in evolutionism, because, in the words of Passionist missionary bishop Cuthbert O’Gara, evolutionary theory could be used to destroy people’s faith in God, in the [eternal] soul, and in the after-life, and communism could then take root in the minds of the people. The evolutionary hypothesis provided a rationale for communist movements all over the world. It also provided a pseudoscientific rationale for the eugenics movement in the United States, Germany and elsewhere. Evolutionary theory was used to justify genocide in the German colony of Namibia in the early twentieth century and to justify the ideology of the nαzι party which took power in Germany in 1933. [To these add the part evolution had in the slaughter of many thousands of indigenous natives worldwide.]’---Kolbe Center, 18/7/2017.
Koestler wrote, ‘Darwin only completed the revolution begun by Copernicus.’ Well not quite, for the Big Bang was still to come. The Copernican revolution and the Galilean reformation were again confirmed by S. J. Gould (1941-2002), Professor of Geology at Harvard University, and author of many books with his theory of evolution by giant leaps (Punctuated Equilibrium). Gould wrote:
‘I am an unrepentant Galilean. I work in a tradition extending from the Master [Galileo] himself to Thomas Huxley [Darwin’s bulldog] in the last century. The eponymous hero of my literary bloodline is Galileo himself. . . But a man does not attain the status of Galileo because he was persecuted, he must also be right.’
Topic: Know more: A brief history of Darwin's evolution (Read 1010 times)