 |
| Darwin as photographed in 1860 |
His name was Charles Darwin. In 1831, Darwin, then 22 years old, set sail on a five year expedition for the British Empire . He journeyed from England on the HMS Beagle, traveling around the tip of southern america, then north towards a chain of volcanic islands in the pacific chain called The Galapagos Islands.
On this desolate archipelago, six hundred miles off the western coast of Ecuador, Charles Darwin encountered an extraordinary array of birds, reptiles & mammals the likes of which he'd never seen before. For more than a month, Darwin studied plant & animal life, took extensive notes and collected specimens. Then he left, never to return. 25 years past, & he developed a theory about how the diverse forms of life on earth had originated & in 1859, Darwin published a book titled ' On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life'
Its impact on science, and ultimately all of western culture was dramatic . Darwin argued that all life was the product of purely undirected natural forces. Time, chance and a process he called 'natural selection' were responsible for the existence of mankind.
To understand how natural selection works, consider the Finch population which Darwin encountered on the Galapagos islands. 13 species of Finches inhabit the Galapagos islands and they vary in terms of their body size and shape of their beaks. Darwin returned to England with 9 species of these birds .
 |
| Finches from Galapagos Island |
According to his theory, differences in size & shape of the bird's beaks are the direct result of ' natural selection' .One example often cited involved species of seed eating Finches. Following seasons of heavy rain, small soft seeds are plentiful throughout the island. Birds with short beaks can easily gather food .
However, during periods of drought, the only seeds available are encased in hard tough shells that remain on the ground from the previous year. In these circumstances, only birds with longer, sharper beaks can crack the shells and eat the seeds. Those birds with the longer beaks survive because they can reach the food source where else other birds could not. If the drought continues, the environment causes a change in the features of the Finch population as a whole . Over time, the long beaks are passed on to succeeding generations because those beaks enable the birds to survive.Those with shorter beaks fade into extinction.
Natural Selection was a powerful idea. Physical variations that proved advantageous would be inherited by succeeding generations. Through this process, populations will be altered and over long periods of time, fundamentally different organisms would arrive without any form of intelligent guidance.
For Charles Darwin, 'natural selection' explained the appearance of design without a designer . The origin and nature of life on earth are not the result of a Creator but through 'natural selection' which took place over millions of years. There was no longer any need to invoke an intelligent cause for the complexity of life. God does not exist.
On 24 November 1859 Charles Darwin published his book 'The Origin of Species' . Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Note : As a young man, Darwin was destined for the church. He was training to be an Anglican clergyman at Cambridge [University], and then gradually throughout his life he lost his faith, partly because of personal tragedy - losing children and things like that, and partly because his science led him to see the superfluousness of a creator. He never described himself as an atheist; he ended up describing himself as an agnostic - the term which was coined by his friend T H Huxley. Source
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 |
| Richard Dawkins |
Richard Dawkins is the world's best-known champion of both atheism and its intellectual underpinning, particles-to-people evolution. His book, The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution is touted as an unanswerable challenge to those who believe in divine creation.
In the past, he says, he has assumed evolution; this time he lays out in one major book the evidence for evolution (and its corollary, vast geological ages).
Richard Dawkins and pseudoscience
Within the evolutionary science community and the creation science community, the evolutionist and agnostic Richard Dawkins has faced charges of engaging in pseudoscience and has also faced charges of committing elementary errors.[3][4]
The website True Free Thinker notes:
“ Moreover, note that with regards to “assertions without adequate evidence” evolutionary biologist and geneticist, Prof. Richard Lewontin, referenced Carl Sagan’s list of the “best contemporary science-popularizers” which includes Richard Dawkins. These authors have, as Lewontin puts it, “put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market.” Lewontin specifically mentions “Dawkins’s vulgarizations of Darwinism” (find details here and here).
Even renowned evolutionary biologists H. Allen Orr, David Sloan Wilson, and Massimo Pigliucci have called into question the power that Dawkins once had as an intellectual, since he has made elementary errors in The God Delusion.[6] Source
Richard Dawkins Cult of Personality
On August 16, 2014, Andrew Brown wrote an article for The Spectator entitled The bizarre – and costly – cult of Richard Dawkins which declared:
“
...the Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the ‘Reason Circle’, which, like Dante’s Hell, is arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak...
But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.’
The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’. I don’t think any irony is intended. At this point it is obvious to everyone except the participants that what we have here is a religion without the good bits.[1]
Now, scientist, chess master and logician Jonathan Sarfati Ph.D. FM goes head to head with Dawkins in this full-on rebuttal, The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Refuting Dawkins on Evolution.
Sarfati is no lightweight opponent; his Refuting Evolution at over 500,000 in print is the biggest-selling creationist book ever. In his crisp, highly readable trademark style, Sarfati's sheer competence relentlessly erodes each of Dawkins' claims and in the process, exposes the logical fallacies and even some of the dubious tactics employed. It's precisely those who feel smug in the belief that all the intellectual firepower is on the side of evolution who most need to read Sarfati's book if only to understand better why it is that there are thousands of scientists and intellectuals today who are convinced that biblical creation outguns evolution in a fair science showdown, stripped bare of rhetoric and ideological 'noise'.
No comments:
Post a Comment