Good Ol' Charlie Darwin
An "On Faith" column in The Washington Post lists "A dozen reasons to celebrate Darwin." While I think Darwin should be celebrated, the reasons they give are a bit odd.
For example, they note Darwin was a loving, caring father, a hard worker, and not an atheist. I suppose if religious people are frightened of Darwin, this could be helpful, but these aren't the real reason to celebrate the man.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:23 AM
5 Comments:
This could be in response to a anti-evolution billboard campaign that has a picture of Charles with the headline "Atheist."
Last night my high-school son was reading Thomas Paine for history class and shared that Paine's religious views were that science was the only true religion because it was the only tangible evidence of the divine while everything else was made up by people.
It would be nice to have him in today's debates.
Without Darwin we wouldn't have the Darwin Awards.
Cranky after little sleep, I would add that neither God nor evolution is working toward the perfectability of man, at least based on the folks I've talked to today
Paine had enough trouble with his views on religion in his day.
One-word labels don't suffice for someone whose religious views changed over his lifetime. But everyone wants to make them.
Darwin, later in life, tended to be an agnostic with atheistic leanings. (There should be a simple word for that view, which many people I know hold: They consider the idea of a God to be unlikely and/or implausible, yet also believe that to definitively deny the existence of God would be unjustified.) He specifically rejected the Christian revelation, and some of his comments are closer to the "Deist" position, while others are closer to the "Agnostic" position, and a few are close to the "Atheist" position. Not surprisingly, he showed no desire to weave all these together into a single consistent viewpoint.
Although it's not possible to ever say why any person believes so-and-so, from Darwin's own comments it seems that the death of his daughter was at least as important as his biological researches.
This Wikipedia article on his views is quite good.
None of this is related to why he is "great". And in my opinion, Darwin's religious musings were not particularly deep or original, and none of them should be relevant to whether a Christian or other Theist should believe in evolution, or whether an evolutionist should believe in God.
When he first went on the Beagle, the sailors made fun of him for being so religious. He was aware of how shocking his theory would be to people, which is one of the reasons he sat on it for 20 years.
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