Darwin’s Darling Theory

On February 12, 1809, two families, half a world apart, were blessed with robust infant sons. In a backwoods log cabin on the Illinois frontier, Abraham Lincoln was born. As that same day dawned over Shrewsbury, England, a fifth child was born to Dr. Robert Darwin—Charles Robert Darwin, as he was christened. Both babies were destined to alter history. Lincoln was to champion a cause built upon the belief that God created all humans with intrinsic rights. Darwin was to propose a theory known today as evolution, a theory which later was used to justify the genocide of “inferior races” under the Nazi regime.

Where did Darwin get his revolutionary concepts on the origin of life? Firstly, from his own natural observations. As a boy, Darwin had been fascinated by nature. After spending three years preparing to become an Anglican clergyman, Darwin’s boyhood passion, naturalism, won out.

Secondly, Darwin’s observations were greatly influenced by the philosophies of his time. The premises of evolution were not new ideas, just undeveloped ones. In the early 1800s, a French zoologist named Jean Baptiste de Lamarck proposed a theory known as “acquired characteristics.” He believed “that use and disuse, exercise and activity, could affect one’s body and those effects could be passed on to one’s offspring.”¹ Lamarck’s theory supposed that because giraffes must stretch their necks when eating leaves from high trees, a progressively longer neck would be passed on to later generations of giraffes.

On his famous naturalist tour of the world aboard HMS Beagle, Darwin devoured Sir Charles Lyell’s writings. Lyell, a lawyer who pursued geology with the same zeal that Darwin pursued naturalism, had rejected a six-day creation and was promoting the long-age theory of earth’s origins. He believed this could be observed in the earth’s geologic column, which he theorized had evolved slowly, layer by layer, at the same rate we see change happening today. Darwin once remarked that his books “came hot out of Sir Charles Lyell’s brain.”²

Once Darwin’s mind had been tantalized by the heretical concept of the geologic column, all future perceptions of natural history would be marred. The deadly seed of doubt had been sown.

The Theory is Born

It was Darwin’s five-year stint as a naturalist on HMS Beagle that confirmed in his mind the theory of macroevolution through natural selection. After five years of observing and collecting specimens from remote islands, jungles, deserts, and primitive rain forests in every part of the globe, Darwin and the Beagle arrived back in England. As he returned, Darwin’s memory was replete with sights and sounds most ordinary men would never experience. He cloistered himself at his home until he completed the official journal of his observations. He also continued his diligent research, gradually formulating his now-famous theory and preparing his book, On the Origin of Species, for publication.

When Darwin’s first thought paper was presented before a society of scientists and philosophers in 1858, it received almost no response at all. But when On the Origin of Species was published just 16 months later, it was an immediate sellout. Its reception, however, comprised a mingled outcry of praise and stormy protest. Darwin’s theory—the refined thoughts of his foresighted predecessors coupled with the observations that had guided his conclusions—fomented explosive argument among both scientists and orthodox theologians.

The religious community went into an uproar. Darwin’s theory demolished the underpinnings of the biblical creation account. Humankind was no longer unique, but simply a more recent outgrowth of the animal family tree. And making natural selection function automatically, it removed any need for divine planning or supervision.

Scientific colleagues gave On the Origin of Species mixed reviews. Ironically, “the scientists who opposed Darwin did so mostly on theological grounds, whether or not they said so.”³ These critics lambasted him for his slightly deranged and heretical reasoning. And the geologists were uniformly thrown over a barrel because the theologians had expected the geological evidence to support the Genesis story rather than to work against it. Many of Darwin’s old friends forsook him, and some, due strictly to professional jealousy, took the critic’s seat, unwilling to let Darwin take credit for the new theory. But by and large, the greater portion of scientists were ready for these new views and were eager to test the theory in all its dimensions before actively refuting his ideas.

In the heat of all this controversy, Darwin, a quiet and retiring individual, was not one to advance his ideas. Nonetheless, he was ably represented by his avid admirers, among them Aldous and Thomas Henry Huxley and Sir Joseph Hooker.

What, actually, did Darwin promote? In short: it was a forthright denial of the Genesis record, which establishes, in three separate verses (Gen. 1:11, 21, 24), that the birds, sea creatures, land animals, and vegetation were all made to procreate after their own “kind,” or family, setting limits on how far variations could go. “Darwin himself posed the question: ‘Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine graduation, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?’”⁴ 

The Theory Goes Mainstream

If Darwin himself questioned the premises of evolution, we must seriously question how the theory became the only acceptable explanation of origins. The most obvious conclusion is that the human mind was looking for just such an explanation, an explanation that would free it from the implications of a divine Creator. Through rationalism, science and theology had been on uneasy terms for over a century. The theory of evolution did not precipitate the alienation; it merely revealed it. The majority of scientists were tired of the premises of Creation and were ready for an alternative. Those who desired to cling to Creation’s premises were either so uninfluential or so few in number that their reservations were eventually swept aside. Even Darwin’s serious reservations with his own theory could not slow its progress.

Today, the theory of evolution is considered the undisputed explanation of origins, even though there are large pieces of contradictory evidence against it. To question it is a virtual admission of a lack of intelligence and scholarship. Yet the cracks in the scientific armor are widening as the premises of the theory are tested against advances in genetics and cosmology. Perhaps evolution will eventually be brought to its knees, not by creationists, but by scientists admitting that Darwinism can no longer be upheld without compromising the integrity of the scientific community.