The Brilliant Charles Darwin

When we give away 170,000 copies of Origin of Species to university students in November, I want every one of the 170,000 students to make sure they don’t stop at the Introduction. I want them to thoroughly read Origin of Species.

When I read the book I was impressed with the brilliance of Charles Darwin. If he was alive today I am sure that he would quickly rise to the top of Disney’s imagineers, or earn big bucks as a Hollywood screenwriter for science fiction movies.

Among other things, Darwin noted that black bears swam for hours with their mouths open, catching insects in the water. He believed that if they kept their mouths open all day, every day (for a long period of time), that they would acquire "larger and larger mouths, until a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."

Students can read his own explanation as to why there is no empirical evidence for his theory--that all "intermediate varieties" have disappeared--just like the Mormon’s golden plates that the angel Moroni supposedly gave to Joseph Smith. There’s one big difference though between the golden plates and the intermediate varieties. The Mormon’s say that only two golden plates are missing. Darwin says that millions of fossils (what he referred to as "innumerable") are missing. After 150 years of searching, the missing links are still missing.

Students can read about how the giraffe’s tail evolved because it needed it to swish away flies. Think of how many millions of years the poor animal had to put up with those pesky flies before the tail evolved so that it could do its work. They can also read how Darwin wondered if the vulture became bald (over millions of years) because it kept putting its head into rotting meat. But he advised caution because "the head of the clean-feeding turkey is also naked." Students may also notice that millions of men are bald, and hopefully doubt that it’s because their ancestors rubbed their foreheads into rotting meat.

In Darwin’s book, nothing is as God created it. God didn’t create the giraffe with a tail to swish away flies. Neither did He create the vulture or turkey with a bald head. Instead, all of creation miraculously evolved--from the bear’s mouths to the giraffe’s tail, and for some reason it has all reached the point of maturity during our lifetime, and (after millions of years of redundancy) now functions as it was intended. Move over J. R. R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clark and J. K. Rowling. These three combined don’t hold a candle to Charles Darwin. Most of their fans know their writings were fantasy. Darwin’s faithful followers don’t.

There’s a lot of anger in the atheist community about our Origin of Species giveaway. Many have resorted to asking how I would like it if Richard Dawkins published a Bible and put his own Introduction in the front. How would I like it? I would be delighted if he would go to such trouble and expense. I want to get the Scriptures into the hands of every man, woman and child on this earth, and if he would help reach that goal I would be overjoyed.

If students were given the Richard Dawkin’s Bible and they read where he speaks of God as being "a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully," they could check the Bible for themselves to see if it is true. Or when they are told that the Scriptures teach that the sun goes around the earth, or that the earth is flat, they can instantly check for themselves, because Richard Dawkins gave them a Bible.

I’m not so insecure in my belief system that I feel threatened by such a thought. Not in the slightest. Go for it professor. I will help you give them out.

Notes:
Origin of Species, chapter 6 "Difficulties on Theory."
Ibid
Ibid