Re: Is it soup yet?

Randy Landrum (randyl@efn.org)
Tue, 5 Mar 1996 11:23:58 -0800 (PST)

On Tue, 5 Mar 1996, Stephen Jones wrote:
>
> "The concept of creation in itself does not imply opposition to
> evolution, if evolution means only a gradual process by which one kind
> of living creature changes into something different. A Creator might
> well have employed such a gradual process as a means of creation.
> "Evolution" contradicts "creation" only when it explicitly or tacitly
> defined as fully naturalistic evolution-meaning evolution that is not
> directed by any purposeful intelligence." (Johnson P.E., "Darwin on
> Trial", InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, Ill., Second Edition,
> 1993, p3-4).
>
> Johnson considers Darwin to be a weak deist at best, although Gould
> emphasises those parts of Darwin's writings that show him to be a
> thoroughgoing philosophical materialist, ie. an atheist.
>
> Both creationists and evolutionists doubt that Darwin really believed
> in a "Creator" in the Christian sense:
>
>
> After all, the full quote says:
>
> Thus, FROM THE WAR OF NATURE, FROM FAMINE AND DEATH, the most exalted
> object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of
> the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view
> of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by
> the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet
> has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so
> simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
> have been, and are being evolved." (Darwin C., "The Origin of
> Species", 6th. edition, 1872, Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons
> Ltd: London, 1967, pp462-463).

Darwin said before his book was published...

'You will be greatly disappointed (by the forthcoming book); it will be
grievously too hypothetical. It will very likely be of no other service
than collocating some facts; though I myself think I see my way
approximately on the origin of the species. But, alss, how frequent, how
almost universal it is in an author to persuade himself of the truth of
his own dogmas.'

Charles Darwin, 1858, in a letter to a colleague regarding the concluding
chapters of his Origin of Species. As quoted in 'John Lofton's Journal',
The Washington times, 8 February 1984.