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Evolution Or Creation?

Blue bottle fly (Calliphora) Portrait, Austin’s Ferry, Tasmania, Australia. 3.5:1 magnification. J. J. Harrison
Blue bottle fly (Calliphora), Tasmania. 3.5x:1 by J. J. Harrison

You cannot simultaneously ride two horses that are running in opposite directions. Choose one. Evolution or Biblical Creation narrative?

Philip P. Eapen | Jan 26, 2026

Outline

Good morning! I count it a privilege to be here to lead this seminar on “Evolution Versus Creaion”.

I suppose most of us here are Christians. If any of us is from another faith or if you are a person who does not subscribe to any faith, let me take this opportunity to welcome you.

I would like to know:

Let me introduce myself briefly.

Besides, I hope most of us will gain a basic understanding of the theory of evolution. I shall quickly take you through the basic tenets of Darwin’s theory, The Origin Of Species. Evolution is not just about the formation of living species. It is incomplete without the supporting theories of Cosmic evolution and Chemical Evolution.

I hope you will also be able to explain why the theory of evolution is unsustainable. If any of you think that you can hold on to the Christian faith and to the theory of evolution, my prayer for you is that you will see how incompatible the two are.

Let’s dive in.

PART ONE: The Biblical Creation Narrative

Right on the first page of the Bible, in the first chapter of Genesis, we find the creation story. You may already be familiar with it. Allow me to read it out aloud for us.

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water.
3 God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light! God saw that the light was good, so God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was morning, marking one day.

 6 God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. It was so. God called the expanse “sky.” There was evening, and there was morning, a second day.
9 God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.” It was so. God called the dry ground “land” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” God saw that it was good. God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.” It was so. The land produced vegetation—plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. God saw that it was good. There was evening, and there was morning, a third day.
14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years, and let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” It was so. God made two great lights - the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. He made the stars also. God placed the lights in the expanse of the sky to shine on the earth, to preside over the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. There was evening, and there was morning, a fourth day.
20 God said, “Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” God created the great sea creatures and every living and moving thing with which the water swarmed, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth.” There was evening, and there was morning, a fifth day. 24 God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” It was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the cattle according to their kinds, and all the creatures that creep along the ground according to their kinds. God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.” God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.”
29 Then God said, “I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the animals of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to all the creatures that move on the ground - everything that has the breath of life in it - I give every green plant for food.” It was so. God saw all that he had made - and it was very good! There was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. 2:1 The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in creation.

As a Christian, if you have never been able to appreciate this creation account in Genesis, I suggest that you should do yourself a favour. Get a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and try to read and understand it. After you read Darwin, I can assure you, you will an insane amount of respect for the Bible’s creation account.

The biblical account is simply marvelous.

PART TWO: The Theory of Evolution

Evolution: Six Different Meanings

Evolution has six different meanings:

  1. Cosmic Evolution: the origin of space, matter, time, etc.
  2. Chemical evolution: the origin of higher elements from Hydrogen
  3. Stellar and planetary evolution: The origin of stars and planets. No one has ever seen the formation of a star!
  4. Organic Evolution: The origin of life from inorganic substances. No one knows howw life can originate from non-living things
  5. Macro evolution: The origin of species (speciation)
  6. Micro evoluition: Variations within each kind of living creature.

The Darwin Family

As always, there were people who did not accept the book of Genesis as God’s Word.

In England, there is a place called Shrewsbury in Shropshire county. This town is famous because the Industrial Revolution started there with the construction of a large Iron Bridge. I have been to this place and stayed there for a couple of days.

One of the “englightened” men in Shrewsbury was a man called Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus was a skeptic who rejected traditional religious beliefs. Erasmus studied the created order from an atheistic perspective. In 1794 and 1796, Erasmus published his book Zoonomia in two volumes, explaining his views about the origin of life. He proposed that all life forms arose from a “single living filament.” It was Erasmus who promoted the idea that life forms could improve and evolve into higher and more complex forms through their own “inherent activity” without any external, divine intervention.

Erasmus’ son Robert Darwin was a physician. He inherited his father’s skepticism. But he maintained a nominal connection with the Church of England so that his wealthy patients would not get offended. He also concealed his doubts about God and religion from the women in his household. Once he told his son Charles Darwin that women can get too anxious about the salvation of their male relatives if they came to know that they did not subscribe to traditional relgious beliefs.

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury. That very year, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Zhon Bah-teest La-mark) offered a fully formed naturalistic theory of evolution. (Naturalism is the view that there is nothing apart from the physical, material world. It is a rejection of the supernatural. When applied to a scientific study, naturalistic methodology keeps God out of the picture).

Charles Darwin was sent to the University of Edinburgh in 1825, when he was 16, to study medicine; he dropped out after two years. Later, he went to the University of Cambridge to get trained to become a clergyman. After his graduation, in 1831, he went on a geological expedition in Wales. There, he met Capt. Robert Fitzroy of the Royal Navy. On the 27th of Dec 1831, Darwin boarded the ship HMS Beagle to the South Pacific and coastal areas of South America. During the next five years, Darwin wrote thousands of pages of scientific observations, and collected more than 1,500 specimens of living and fossil life. He spent around five weeks in the Galapagos Islands. After returning to England, he never left Britain.

It was during his voyage on board HMS Beagle that Charles Darwin devised his theory on the origin of species. Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution. A number of people who lived before Darwin had claimed that all creatures descended from a common ancestor. But it was Darwin who proposed a mechanism by which, according to him, all species on earth descended from a single-celled protozoan.

All of these men – Erasmus, Robert, and Charles Darwin – considered themselves to be “free thinkers” but they were afraid of being socially ostracised from their church and community.

Why did the Darwins Reject Special Creation?

I believe motivation is as important as methodology and evidence.

Why did Charles Darwin feel compelled to think along these lines? He was familiar with the Bible. He might have had a little faith in God when he embarked on the voyage. Probably, he was a Deist. According to Deism, God created the world and then withdrew from it so that it could go on forever without His intervention. Darwin, too, could have believed that God set the ball rolling by creating the first living cell. He certainly did not believe that each and every species was created by God’s special creation. He wanted to come up with a naturalistic explanation for the amazing species diversity we see in the world. Over the years, Darwin became an agnostic. Why?

1. A Naturalistic Worldview

Charles Darwin grew up under the influence of his grandfather Erasmus and his father Robert. He read his grandfather’s book and left notes in the margins. Charles, too, became an agnostic later in life. But Charles did not wish to acknowledge his grandfather’s influence on his line of thinking. He maintained a strategic distance from his grandfather’s views. He wanted people to believe that his study was a scientific enquiry that had nothing to do with personal philosophical motivations. But I think the agnostic background in which he was raised played a big role in pushing him towards a naturalistic worldview that denied God any role in the creation of species diversity. He felt compelled to keep God out of the picture while he struggled to explain the origin of species in a naturalistic way.

There were several distinguished scientists who had no problem acknowledging God as the Creator of the universe. Isaac Newton was one of them. But during Darwin’s time, educated folks in England already doubted the existence of God. Many believed that life came about without God and that various life forms descended from a common ancestor. But they did not have a theory that could explain the mechanism by which one species could become another species. In this general climate of agnosticism, Darwin came up with a mechanism called “natural selection” to explain the formation of one species from another.

Charles Darwin was the first scientist to apply naturalistic methodology to this field of study. Since then, scientists have been promoting an atheistic, materialisic worldview. Scientists and professors insist that science must not take God or the supernatural into consideration. They demand a naturalistic explanation even for things that could be happening due to supernatural reasons. Any belief in the supernatural is ridiculed. People who believe in God are not given a fair hearing. Their evidence is not even considered as evidence.

The funny thing is that scientists today have reached a point where they are forced to recognize even those things they cannot observe or measure! Instead of using the word “supernatural,” they use the word “multiverse.” They say that there are other universes that cannot be observed or measured or studied. The very people who reject the notion of God and insist on emperical evidence are now talking about intangible, invisible universes other than our own.

Apart from this philosophical or metaphysical reason, Charles Darwin came up with other reasons for his rejection of the biblical account of creation.

Morse sent the first telegraphic message
Samuel Morse, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, invented telegraphy and the Morse code. He sent the first telegraphic message on May 24, 1844 from Washington DC to Baltimore. While many “enlightened” Englishmen were saying, “Look, what evolution has done!” Morse transmitted, “What hath God wrought” or “Look, what God has done!” Instead of keeping God out of the picture, he put God right at the center. Morse acknowledge God as the Master Creator who made it possible for Morse to discover and use telegraphy.

2. The Discovery Of Rock Strata And Fossils

In the late 18th century and early 19th century, due to increased mining and contruction, people in Britain were discovering quite a number of fossils in rock layers. They discovered the fossils of extinct animals in different rock layers. What did geologists and biologist conclude after discovering these fossils? Before we answer that question, we need to look at certain assumptions that geologists had.

Firstly, geologists from that time promoted Uniformitarianism—the belief that all geological processes in the past must have happened at the same speed as seen in similar processes happening today. Charles Lyell was a pioneer of this view. For example, these geologists would argue that if today it takes a 50 years for a small channel in the soil to develop into a gully, and then slowly get deepened through soil erosion to become a deep stream, such a process would have taken 50 years in the past. Similarly, if continents are drifting apart a few centimeters every year, they must have been moving at that rate ever since they started moving.

This belief in the uniform speed of geological processes led geologists like Charles Lyell to conclude that it must have taken millions of years for the formation of various rock layers with fossils in them. ‘If the earth is just 6000 years old as the Bible suggests, how could all these rock layers have formed?”, they wondered.

rock strata with fossils
Geologists assumed that it took millions of years for the formation of each rock layer. They study the presence of fossils in rock layers in one place. If the same fossil is found in a rock layer in a different place, they assume that the two rock layers are of the same age. That is, they use fossils to date the rock layer. In this diagram, sections A and B represent rock layers 200 miles (320 km) apart. Their ages are established by comparing the fossils in each layer. But interestingly, geologists have used rock layers to date unknown fossils. Circular reasoning! [Courtesy: Ency Britannica]

A Scottish preacher, Dr. Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), who believed the “scholarly” view that the earth was millions of years old, wanted to save the Bible and Christianity from any possible embarrassment. He suggested that Christians should reinterpret the biblical creation story. In 1814 – forty-five years before Charles Darwin published his theory – Chalmers began teaching that there must have been a significant “time gap” between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. He argued that God created the heavens and the earth millions of years ago just as Genesis 1:1 says. According to Chalmers, the animals and plants that God initially created were destroyed in a flood. Those animals got embedded in sediments and became fossilized. After the earth became “formless and void,” God decided to create order and life on earth, as described in the biblical story from Genesis 1:2.

It is astonishing that this faulty view is accepted by many Christians even today. Instead of interpreting the fossil record on the basis of biblical narrative, Chalmers bent backards to re-interpret the Word of God to make room for the views of some geologists and biologists!

Why do I believe Chalmers was wrong?

I shall cite just two reasons, although there are several:

  1. In the Ten Commandments, God said that He made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in it in six days.Exodus 20:11. There is no time “gap” between the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the creation of life on earth. There is no gap between the first and second verses in Genesis 1. There is no basis for introducing a “gap” between the first and second verses of the Bible. Even the language and grammar of the text do not support it.
  2. There is a biblical way to explain the layers of sedimentary rocks and fossils found in them. You don’t need to invent an imaginary flood called “Lucifer’s flood” prior to the creation of man. The Bible tells us about Noah’s Flood, which can easily explain the formation rock layers in a relatively short time. I shall explain this.

There are thousands of fossil samples all over the world that prove that sedimentary rock layers containing fossils were created in a very short span of time. It did not take millions of years. It just took minutes, or hours, or even a few weeks. It was not a gradual process. The formation of fossils in these rocks happened very quickly.

Take a look at these images of fossilized trees and animals. These vertical fossils of tree trunks cut across several layers of sedimentary rocks. There is no way the tree stood still for millions of years to allow slow deposition of sediments around it, across multiple geological ages! These layers were formed very quickly.

polystrate fossil tree trunk
Will evolutionists consider this evidence? A polystrate tree trunk fossil cuts across many rock layers! It did not “millions of years” for the formation of these rock layers.
fish eating fish fossil
This fish must have been buried in sediment rather quickly while eating a smaller fish. There was not enough time even to swallow the meal!
fish eating fish fossil
This story was published in the New York Times on July 18, 2023. In this remarkable fossil, we see a small mammal struggling in the grip of a dinosaur. Both were instantly killed and buried in sediments that later hardened to form a rock.

Despite the discovery of thousands of polystrate fossils and fossils that were obviously formed as a result of a catastrophe, geologists who believe in evolution refuse to accept them as evidence. This is because of their arbitrary decision to consider a fossil a “real fossil” only if it is at least 10,000 years old! Such is their bias against any view that goes against their atheistic, naturalistic explanations. You can take an atheist to the waters but you cannot force him to drink.

So, the first question that troubled geologists was, If God created the earth just 6000 years ago, how do we explain the formation of these fossils that must have taken millions of years to form? The second question they asked was closely related to the first.

They found fossils of different kinds of animals in different rock layers. The fossils found in the bottom layers were not found in the upper layers. Many of the fossils of found in the bottom layers were of creatures that are no longer found on earth. Obviously, those creatures had gone extinct. Since the geologists believed that it took “millions of years” for the formation of each rock layer, they concluded that newer forms of life replaced came into existence over millions of years and became successors to the older ones that had gone extinct. They were forced to ask,

If God had created all species in the beginning, how did newer species succeed the older ones in a region after the older ones got extinct?

They concluded that the biblical account of creation was faulty. The earth, they said, was millions of years old. Newer species are being formed. But until Darwin published his work, these British geologists and naturalists did not have a theory that could explain a mechanism by which new species could arise from older ones.

The geologists and biologists who estimated the age of the rock layers and fossils made a cardinal mistake. Their methodology was based on two considerations:

  1. The order of a rock in a stack of rock layers; and
  2. The use of fossils to date a rock layer; and the use of such dated rock layer to determine the age of a fossil found elsewhere in a similar rock layer.

The first one is logically sound. In any undisturbed stack of rock layers, a layer found at the bottom is the olderst and the layer found at the top is the youngest. This is the Law of Superposition discovered by Christian Steno in the 17th century. He is regarded as the father of Geology. He also said that all sedimentary rock layers were originally laid down horizontally. I have no problem in accepting these laws of geological science. Although Steno studied rock layers, he continued to remain a devout Catholic. He never felt the need to go against the biblical creation narrative.

But the second consideration stated above is a logical fallacy. Suppose they found a fossil of a Trilobite in a rock layer. They would then date the rock on the basis of that “index” fossil and call it “Cambrian” (around 540 million years old). Suppose they found another fossil in a similar rock layer at another site. There, they would guess the age of the fossil on the basis of the rock layer! This is a classic case of circular reasoning. They dated the rock on the basis of fossils; and they date fossils on the basis of which layer they come from. Geologists and biologists were guilty of this error.Today’s scientists claim to overcome this error by using High-Precision Geochronology to date volcanic ash layers (tuffs) that are sandwiched between fossil layers.

“The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks.”J. E. O’Rourke, American Journal of Science, 1976, 276:51

Geologists studied rock layers all over the world. Using their faulty dating methods, they came up with a diagram that showed the ideal geological time scale.

geological time scale
A diagram that shows geological time scale using rock layers and fossils found in different sites all over the world.

There are a few problems though. None of the rock layers on earth come with labels such as “Pre-Cambrian” or “Cambrian” or “Permian.” The labels are a result of geologists’ interpretations based on circular reasoning. Most importantly, ALL these rock layers cannot be found together in this order anywhere on earth! This strata of rocks with ALL these layers is found only in textbooks and museums of Geology.

3. Species Diversity

Charles Darwin and his grandfather Erasmus found it difficult to believe that God could have created millions of species found on earth. It was clearly as issue of faith. Their understanding of God was so limited.

As of 2025, there are approximately 2.5 million known species on the planet. This could be just a fraction of the total species!

With all the technological advanced that human achieved during the past century, we have barely scratched the surface of biodiversity. Around 80% of total terrestrial species and 90% of aquatic species are yet to be discovered.

During Darwin’s time, scientists were aware of only a fraction of what a 21st century biologist is exposed to. Darwin claimed to have gathered a “mountain of evidence” to prove his theory. Considering the severe limitations in human knowledge in 19th century, it can be safely said that Darwin’s “mountain of evidence” for evolution was not even the size of a mole hill. And yet, Darwin postulated that all living species descended from a single unicellular life form through natural selection. This is like observing 1% of books in a library and proposing a theory on the origin of all the books. The audacity of “enlightened” men who engage in such follies and still call themselves Homo Sapiens, the wise ones!

4. “Imperfections” in Nature

Darwin claimed that there were several imperfection in the animal and plant world. One of his arguments is about vestigial organs. He referred to such organs as “rudimentary” or useless organs.

He asked: Why do animals and humans have “rudimentary, atrophied and aborted organs”? Why do calves in the embryonic stage have teeth? Why do humans have an appendix or muscles of the ear, wisdom teeth, the tailbone, body hair, and the semilumar fold in the corner of the eye? If God had created each species with a purpose, why did he include such useless parts? Darwin claimed that these organs served various purposes in the evolutionary past of these animals. These organs are “leftovers” from the evolutionary process. As far as Darwin was concerned, vestigial organs prove the theory of evolution. It also proves that God did not create each and every species.

There was a small problem, though. Darwin could not explain why “useless” organs continued to exist in humans or animals for all these “millions of years”. Once an organ has been rendered useless, why was it not dropped through natural selection? Darwin did not have an answer to that question!

Darwin listed a dozen “useless” parts in the human body. In 1893, Robert Wiedersheim expanded Darwin’s list to 86. He included the tonsils, adenoids, third molars, and valves in veins. Evolutionists used this list to mock the human body as a “veritable walking museum of antiquities.”The World’s Most Famous Court Trial, Dayton, TN: Bryan College, 1990. In 1986, evolutionist Alfred Romer published a book titled, The Vertibrate Body. In it, he said this about the appendix: “Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession.”A. S. Romer and T. S. Parsons, The Vertibrate Body, Philadelphia: Saunders College Publishers, 1986, p. 389.

There are two problems with this kind of reasoning.

Just because evolutionists do not know the function of an organ, it does not mean that the organ is useless!

The Appendix is not a “useless” digestive remnant. It supports immunity and serves as a storehouse of gut bacteria. The tail bone is not a “useless” remnant of a tail. It serves as a muscle anchor for pelvic stability. The tonsils are our first line of defense against infections. The pineal gland helps with sleep regulation. The thymus is essential for our immune system.

Some organs serve a useful purpose during embryonic stage. After birth, these organs may remain apparently useless. For example, during fetal development, blood is shunted from the pulmonary trunk to the descending aorta through the ductus arteriosus. This is used to bypass the lung. After birth, blood is sent to the lungs. This duct is then rendered useless.

5. The Problem Of Evil

After the publication of his book The Origin Of Species, Darwin wrote to a friend,

“There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice.” Quoted in Steven Jay Gould, “Nonmoral Nature,” in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

According to Darwin, if God is all powerful, He must remove all suffering from the natural world. If God is merciful and benevolent, He must not allow one animal to cause harm to another. How can a good God allow a tigher to kill a hog or a buffalo, for instance? Since there is so much suffering in the natural world, he concluded that there God was neither good nor all-powerful. In other words, Darwin rejected the God of the Bible.

The question of suffering is an old one. If Darwin had continued his studies at Cambridge and had become a priest, he would have had his answers. The Bible says that God created a perfect world without pain or suffering. It is human sin that subjected every creature to pain and decay. Less than a century after Darwin’s book was published, the world went through two World Wars and a holocaust. We cannot blame God for the moral and natural evils that are there in today’s world.

And yet, God offers a new heaven and a new earth to those who will receive his salvation through Jesus Christ. The prophet Isaiah describes the much-awaited Messiah and his kingdom:

A Shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a Bud will sprout from his roots.

The Yahweh’s spirit will rest on him - a spirit that gives extraordinary wisdom, a spirit that provides the ability to execute plans, a spirit that produces absolute loyalty to Yahweh. …

Justice will be like a belt around his waist, integrity will be like a belt around his hips.

A wolf will reside with a lamb, and a leopard will lie down with a young goat; an ox and a young lion will graze together, as a small child leads them along.

A cow and a bear will graze together, their young will lie down together.

A lion, like an ox, will eat straw.

A baby will play over the hole of a snake; over the nest of a serpent an infant will put his hand.

They will no longer injure or destroy on my entire royal mountain.

For there will be universal submission to the Yahweh’s sovereignty, just as the waters completely cover the sea.Isaiah 11:1-1,5-9

Darwins Theory: Natural Selection

The main question that troubled Darwin and other thinkers of his day was: How did all the millions of species originate?

This is what Darwin concluded at the end of all his travel, research, and observations:

Darwin did not publish his ideas for over twenty years. He kept studying various animals and plants. He thought he had gathered a “mountain of evidence” over the years to prove his theory.

In the meantime, Darwin read the works of a priest called Malthus, who was worried about population explosion. He believed that human population growth would lead to scarcity of resources and a struggle for survival. Malthus’ writings influenced Darwin. In his own words:

“… it at once struck me that under these circumstances [in which plants and animals the struggle for existence] favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work.”Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species, ed. Charles W. Eliot, Danbury, Connecticut: Grolier, 1909. p. 6.

Darwin rushed to publish his theory in the form of a book titled, On the Origin of Species, in 1859, after receiving a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace indicated that he was arriving at a theory of origins that sounded similar to Darwin’s theory. To beat Wallace, Darwin quickly published his book. Only 1250 copies were printed at first. All the copies were sold off in a single day!

Atheists Hailed The Book

One of those who obtained a copy was Friedrich Engels who lived in Manchester at that time. He wrote to his friend Karl Marx about this book:

Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect.Friedrich Engels, "Engels to Marx in London, 12 December 1859." Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 40, International Publishers, 1983, p. 550.

To put this in today’s language:

Darwin, who I’m reading right now, is straight-up awesome. He totally crushed the last bit of that old-school “everything has a purpose” nonsense in nature. No one’s ever pulled off such a massive, epic explanation of how nature evolves over time—and nailed it so perfectly.

Karl Marx read On the Origin of Species a year later. He was very enthusiastic about it. Later, he wrote that this book ‘contains the basis in natural history for our view’.

These atheists were so glad that someone had come up with an explanation for the origin of life and life forms that did not require belief in God.

PART 3: Refuting Darwin’s Origin Of Species

Notes