Today we didn’t go to church, as it is a hundred and sixty kilometre round trip to church, and as my husband has to travel the same distance to go to the orthopaedic specialist on Tuesday, he didn’t feel that he could cope with two journeys a couple of days apart.
What to do – I love going to church and hearing the Word of God preached well, instilling it into my heart and helping me to grow into the sort of woman that God wants me to be, and to be fit to be for the Master’s use. We decided that we would watch the DVD, DARWIN, The Voyage that Shook the World, from CREATION.com. We bought this DVD a while ago, and haven’t really found the right time to watch it, so today was it, and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching the movie, as well as the extras!
This movie would have to be the most unbiased DVD that I have ever had the privilege of watching. It talks about Darwin as a young boy, and how he had a very enquiring mind, and he always wanted to know things – why this, why that, but that he also liked to fabricate tall tales from a very early age.
His father was a wealthy society doctor from Shrewsbury, and his mother was from the famous Wedgewood Pottery family. Charles Darwin was surrounded by a massive religious influence, but he was impacted most of all by the beliefs of his grandfather, who was a free thinking rationalist and humanist, who believed that there were going to be “chariots in the air”, that we now know as aeroplanes. Erasmus Darwin wrote the book, Zoonomia, which first theorised evolution, so the theory of evolution is not a new idea, but was simply popularised by Darwin. He also added passages from Zoonomia to his own book.
He loved enjoying himself and spent hours with his friends hunting and collecting specimens, and enjoyed discussing the wonders of nature. Darwin went to Cambridge with the understanding that he would train to become a preacher, and that he would become a country vicar with a comfortable life. However Charles started questioning some of the teachings of the established church.
In 1831, he received an invitation to join the Beagle for a five-year voyage of discovery around the world, and this was to change his way of thinking forever. It was on this voyage that the captain gave him the book, The Principles of Geology, that was written by Charles Lyell, a geologist and lawyer, and which was to have a profound impact upon Charles Darwin’s thinking, and to influence his thinking about the origins of the species. Lyell couldn’t accept the Genesis account of Creation.
Darwin studied such questions as:
- Where did the world come from?
- How was it made?
Darwin’s ideas were of uniformitarianism, influenced by Lyell’s books. Scientists have their own preconceived ideas, and this can influence the outcome. During Darwin’s day, he believed that he was seeing the results of slow, uniform change – uniformitarianism. He believed that at the mouth of the Rio Santa Cruz was an ancient sea channel, and that the ocean raising and lowering over great eons of time caused the change in landforms that he was seeing, and that the ocean had changed the coast. He attempted to travel up the river to prove his cause, but a lack of food and the fast flowing water meant that they had to turn back. Had he continued, he would have found the Perito Moreno Glacier, a large glacier that used to be a kilometre high. When the glacier broke off, there was enough water to cut all the valleys in the area, in days, not aeons of time.
Darwin encountered the people of Tierra Del Fuego, who had been trained in Britain in the manners of civilised people, but by the standards of that time, the people returned to savagery. Darwin found it difficult to believe that they were his fellow men, and didn’t believe that they could be elevated into being proper human beings, but such ideas are now considered extremely racist. The Biblical view is that all people have descended from Adam and Eve, but in 1834 his experience, and his grandfather’s evolutionary ideas gave him another way of looking at his ideals.
Darwin also read the other two volumes of Lyell’s books and these books expounded long ages of time. He was in the third year of the voyage when he found some fossilised trees, but he believed that the trees grew there and were slowly buried over millions of years. In Argentina, you see two trees – one that has grown there, with soil and roots in place, but there was a tree stump that had no soil, nor roots, so it had to have been broken from a distant forest and buried rapidly - then fossilised – more evidence of a great, global flood. Rapid catastrophic change is accepted today, but it may be unfair to judge Darwin by today’s standards, as science, philosophy and religion were still closely intertwined in his day.
He visited the Galapagos Islands and studied nature, but he missed vital pieces of information because he failed to document where he took certain specimens from, and it wasn’t until he returned home to England that he was asked where he collected the species. Anyone who believes in a global, catastrophic Flood would also believe that species can disperse and adapt. In Darwin’s mind, MADE BY GOD meant unchanging fixity of species, although his ideas changed later on. The Marine and Land Iguanas have hybridised, and it was an amazing occurrence. This is evidence of a species explosion, and shows that species can merge rapidly.
The beaks of birds on the Galapagos Islands rapidly change from large to small, from one generation to the next, and were affected by the food supply. Darwin couldn’t see this, as he was only on the islands for about five weeks in later 1835.
Charles journals were a sensation, and his friend published them while he was away. His writings undermined all that people believed. Charles belief that we descended from apes was very disturbing to his friends, and he became very ill. His beliefs were influenced by good and evil.
Charles couldn’t accept death and suffering as a result of the Fall. He had three out of ten of his children, who died, and this only served to make him retreat from a loving, creator God to the theory of evolution. He believed that the unfit were going to die, and that they weren’t going to go on to produce the next generation. The death of his children contributed to his theory of the natural selection of the species.
Darwin presented this theory as acceptable to people. He asked people to look at things his way, and explained some of the difficulties. By drawing on the information of his grandfather’s book and Lyell’s books, he was able to create The Origin of the Species, but he still couldn’t explain the origin of life itself. Perhaps he didn’t want to make the commitment of faith! Darwin’s theory (and that’s all that it is) of evolution is not about science – it’s all about God!
I am a daughter of the King of Kings, seeking to live a godly life and mirror the love of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
