One of the more ludicrous ecclesiastical efforts of 2008 came in September when the Church of England bishops apologized to Charles Darwin (1809-82). What Darwin made of this is unknown as he had been dead for 126 years! This was no doubt a preparation for 2009, being celebrated in many circles as the tooth anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his best-known work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In the U.S.A. there are strong moves to declare 12 February to be Darwin Day.

Darwin himself was not a success in his early career, and his father criticized him: ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’ However, the young lad recovered enough to become passionate about beetle collecting. Later, from 1831-6, he was on the H.M.S. Beagle, circumnavigating the globe and being seasick. Possessing an eye for detail, he noticed that the finches differed from island to island in the Galapagos Islands. He wrote an account of these observations, and his Journal was a success. He went on to write a four-volume study on barnacles. His last work, appropri­ately enough, was a volume on earthworms.

Let me now put forward LLuther-like, as it were – four theses.

1. Darwin Was No Objective Scientist⤒🔗

In the popular mind, science and religion are often opposed to one another – science is rational and intellectual, based on facts, whereas faith is a leap into the dark, based on intuition or experience. Darwin did not look at life from some epistemologically-neutral standpoint. In a pas­sage deleted from his published autobiography, Darwin explained why he could not believe in Christianity, and why he did not wish to believe in it – it was what he called the ‘damnable doctrine’ of everlasting pun­ishment. In his notebooks, Darwin wrote: ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.’ According to Darwin’s own testimony, ‘Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.’ Darwin was not neutral; he looked out at the world as one who rejected the Christian revelation.

2. Evolution Is More Speculation than Science←⤒🔗

Darwin claimed that ‘Community in embryonic structure reveals com­munity of descent’ – but that is an assertion, not an argument. The fact that all animal embryos look somewhat alike is hardly a proof that they have descended from a common ancestor. It may only be an indication that they have a common Creator. Similarly, Darwin was unable to point to any single instance of a definite, graded, evolutionary sequence of organisms in the paleontological record. In fact, he confessed, ‘Nature may almost be said to have guarded against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms.’ That was true in 1859 and it is true today. An article in the National Geographic in November 2004 admits, ‘The fossil record is like a film of evolution from which 999 of every 1,000 frames have been lost on the cutting-room floor.’

The complexity of creation was something that Darwin could hardly bear thinking about. For example, he admitted that the evolution of the eye appeared to be so complex that it was ‘absurd in the highest degree’. ‘The man of science,’ declared T. H. Huxley, ‘has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.’ The truth is that if any­thing in the scientific world lacks verification, it is evolution.

3. The Effects of Darwinism Have Been Baneful←⤒🔗

Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection possessed an ominous alternative title: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Herbert Spencer’s slogan was that life was about the ‘survival of the fittest’. Ernst Haeckel popularized Darwinism in Germany, as T. H. Huxley did in England. Haeckel dismissed God as a ‘gaseous vertebrate’ and regarded immortality as irrational. He contrast­ed what he called ‘the discredited, dominant doctrines of Christianity and the illuminating, rational revelation of modern science.’ Yet Haeckel put forward theories as absurd as the embryonic recapitulation theory (meaning that the human embryo has the status of a fish or a monkey) and the claim that the Gospels were forgeries dating from the Council of Nicaea.

Darwinism led to eugenics; the survival of the fittest increasingly meant the elimination of the unfit. Haeckel’s works were probably the most popular non-fiction books in Germany before World War I. He advocated infanticide for infants with disabilities, claiming that, ‘A small dose of morphine or cyanide would not only free this pitiable creature itself, but also its relatives from the burden of a long, worthless and painful existence.’ In 1939 Nazi Germany ushered in the first euthanasia programme in the history of modern Europe. Those considered unfit to live were registered and then disposed of.

4. The Church’s Response Was Far Too Accommodating←⤒🔗

The Christian response to the evolutionary hypothesis was not as hostile as has been assumed by many scholars. Charles Kingsley was perhaps the first English clergyman to embrace Darwin’s views publicly, while across the border, Henry Drummond, the professor of natural science at the Free Church College in Glasgow, became an enthusiastic advo­cate. Many evangelical scientists were not averse to evolution, notably Asa Gray, George Frederick Wright, and James Dwight Dana. Even the great B. B. Warfield declared that he was a ‘Darwinian of the purest water’, adding, ‘I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible or any part of the account of creation, either as given in Gen. 1 and 2 or elsewhere alluded to, that need be opposed to evolution.’ Robert Rainy, Augustus Hopkins Strong, and even P. T. Forsyth saw no real threat from the theory. In 1893 James Orr considered that evolution was ‘extremely probable’.

It is not immediately obvious why the English bishops felt the need to apologize to Darwin. At his death in 1882, he was buried in Westminster Abbey with Christian rites. The choir sang an anthem especially com­posed for the occasion. Its opening line was, ‘Happy is the man who finds wisdom and getteth understanding.’ By 1898 the Baptist divine John Clif­ford was including Darwin in his book, Typical Christian Leaders.

Considering that evolution is such a lethal combination of bad theol­ogy and bad science, there is little reason to commemorate the birth of Darwin or the publication of his theory.