![]() ![]() Indeed, historians of science note how relatively quickly the educated Christian public did in fact accept Darwin's theory, despite the polemics of the anti-clerical Huxley that it ruled out religious faith altogether. As Charles Kingsley put it, God is wise enough to make things make themselves. This emphasis on God working through secondary causes over an immense period of time was the theme of the sermon of Frederick Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford. He wrote that what he had discovered through his researches “accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator” than the traditional alternative. This mention of God raises the question of Darwin's own beliefs and their relation to the theory of evolution by natural selection. ![]() Wilberforce claimed to be swayed by the scientific facts alone and not by what is in scripture, but he is self-deceived in this, because his review also shows that he regards some views as honouring to nature and God, and others not, on the basis of the Bible. He wrote a 39-page review in Quarterly Review, which probed the weaknesses in Darwin's argument in a well-informed way. For example, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, whose encounter with Thomas Huxley at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860 has gone down in history through a distorted report put about many years later, had a first-class degree in mathematics and was a keen amateur natural scientist. So when some religious figures opposed Darwin, on the grounds that his case was not yet proven, it was not simply on the basis of dogma. We must remember that in 1859 all the major palaeontologists except Charles Lyell believed in the immutability of species, and Darwin acknowledged how rash of him it was to depart from the opinion of these experts to whom, he said, he owed so much. He is no cheap polemicist trying to win a case with any argument that will serve. At the same time he is absolutely clear, and determined to show, so far as it can be shown, that the theory of natural selection can account for a huge number of extraordinary features in nature for which the belief in immutable species has no answer. He says that he wants to present the strongest case he can find against the truth of his own position, and does so, grappling in particular with the apparent absence of intermediate species living now and the even more serious difficulty of the patchy geological record. He argues that only by making a supreme effort of imagination to think about the vast stretches of time in which tiny changes in form can take place and be passed on, can we begin to grasp the truth of what has happened. He is fully aware of the difficulties that the reader is likely to feel, and he admits that he feels them himself. Time and again Darwin acknowledges the huge gaps in knowledge. The Lancet Regional Health – Western PacificĪnother reason for the book's huge influence is that the reader is conscious of listening to an honest man. ![]() The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia.The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology. ![]()
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