Charles Darwin 

                (credit: George Richmond [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

In the mid-1800s, Charles Darwin hit the faithful and their institutions and beliefs with Science’s second blow to the body of traditional belief, probably the biggest of all the jolts. He gave an excellent scientific explanation for life itself. He showed that over the course of millions (perhaps billions) of years, life evolved from a few simple cells to complex organisms made of trillions of cells.

Darwin had the theory, and he had the evidence to support it. The models of genetic variation and natural selection can explain all life forms on Earth in all their many subtle variations. Fossils in the rocks all over the world show the stages through which life has developed and spread. Chemical and physical tests of fossils give consistent, predictable results that clearly support Darwin’s theory. Life, in all its complex forms on this earth, developed very gradually, from a few simple cells, through myriads of forms, over billions of years.

Where was the Bible then? The first book of the Bible, Genesis, portrays all the history of the pre-human universe as happening in six days. The Darwinian Theory of Evolution says this picture is silly. Furthermore, the theory implies that natural physical processes – ones that can be observed, measured, predicted, and even manipulated – can account for all the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the Bible is not needed in their discussion of what the universe is or what human beings are. The Bible, for Science, is pretty much irrelevant.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was a shock of such magnitude that Christian authorities and most of the faithful who listen to them are still reeling from it and still lashing out at it. Scientists who believe the theory gives a true picture of reality find these attacks annoying. The evidence is there – mounds of it. What evidence is there for the alternative explanation? One old book, written by a bunch of priests, prophets, and disciples with vested interests and sinecure jobs to protect, making claims about events they did not witness, events that can’t be replicated, examined, or tested. It just isn’t Science.

In fact, how can the “faithful” – who every day derive most of the comforts of their way of life from the ideas, discoveries, and inventions of scientists – be such ingrates? It’s a sure bet that however much they may want to criticize the broad range of studies and activities called “Science”, they don’t want to starve, and they don’t want their electricity turned off. They certainly don’t want to be eating tainted food, shivering in a hovel by a wood fire, watching their children die of mysterious “miasmas”.

In spite of all of these accusations, however, a main intention of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is more complex than what my last couple of paragraphs portray. For now, this small section on the Theory of Evolution can be summarized by saying that Darwin’s theory, for most thinking people, floored the Bible for the count. He had found a theory that explained the greatest of the mysteries of our human experience – life – and he had assembled the evidence to back up that theory.

The Bible had been reduced, apparently, to a collection of myths and poems, with bits of the history of one ancient tribe (the Hebrews) woven in. Yahweh was like Zeus or Wotan: a myth kept going by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.