- From: S. D. Muni
- Subject: Donation for Scientific Sankirtan Services
- ['The Origin of Species' was published by Charles Darwin in 1859. This had lead a radical change in the people's perception about life and world. To support his objective evolution theory throughout, Darwin had also claimed that first life spontaneously originated from dead chemicals. For more than 150 years the only major focus of biologists has been to uphold the Darwinian vision intact.]
- While theistic sentiments expressed in defense of the Gaudiya Vaisnava siddhanta are much appreciated, unfortunately, broad-brushed statements such as these do not hold up well in light of the historical record.
- To date, the scholars on this site appear to wish to avoid acknowledging the possibility of a factual dilemma.
- Two quick points: (1) Darwin did not argue for the origins of life, rather, his argument pertained to the origins of species, or biological diversity, and (2) the statement "for more than 150 years the only major focus of biologists has been to uphold the Darwinian vision intact" is historically blatantly wrong, hence the scientific significance of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Of course, it depends on what you define as "the Darwinian vision" - a scientific hypothesis, or an atheistic worldview? The second, Mr. Darwin did not promote in The Origins of Species, and in fact, rather suggested the contrary.
| - Response:
- Dear S. D. Muni
- Thank you for your response to the content of our posting Support and Participate in the Scientific Sankirtan Seva. Your first point, "(1) Darwin did not argue for the origins of life, rather, his argument pertained to the origins of species, or biological diversity" is a common argument found in the discussions of atheistic scientists like Dawkins and his followers. It is true that Charles Darwin avoided discussing the origin of life in his famous book The Origin of Species. However, some other literature by Darwin and the communication he had with friends and colleagues clearly reveals that he blindly believed the possibility of a natural emergence of the first life forms. Darwin was convinced that "the intimate relation of Life with laws of chemical combination, & the universality of latter render spontaneous generation not improbable".[1] In a famous letter [2] to his botanist friend Joseph D. Hooker in 1871, he stated
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- "It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present which could ever have been present. But If (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes at the present such matter would be instantly devoured, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
- For more than a century this idea of Darwin's was accepted dogmatically as scientists were ignorant about the primordial bombardments. In recent times however, scientists have come to believe that the earth's first billion years witnessed murderous bombardments by large projectiles. Many leading scientists in the field of 'the origin of life' now feel that the hostile conditions of early earth warrant a total reconsideration of this preceding conviction. James Kasting, who chaired a Gordon Conference on the origin of life, and who was coauthor of one of the key papers dealing with the early bombardment, says that "The field is in ferment." An additional apparent confirmation of the same can be found from the first two paragraphs of the article 'Goodbye to the Warm Little Pond?'[3], published in Science magazine:
- "Ever since 1871, when Charles Darwin made his oft-quoted allusion to life's beginnings in a "warm little pond," scientists have tended to imagine the origin of life as being a rather tranquil affair-something like a quiet afternoon in a country kitchen, with a rich organic soup of complex carbon compounds simmering slowly in the sunlight until somehow they became living protoplasm.
- "Sorry, Charles. Your Warm Little Pond was a beautiful image. It's been enshrined in innumerable textbooks as the scientific theory of the origin of life. But to hear the planetary scientists talking these days, you were dead wrong. The Warm Little Pond never existed."
- You can read our article "Sorry, Darwin: Chemistry Never Made The Transition To Biology" for further details on this subject.
- Your second point, "(2) the statement "for more than 150 years the only major focus of biologists has been to uphold the Darwinian vision intact" is historically blatantly wrong, hence the scientific significance of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Of course, it depends on what you define as "the Darwinian vision" - a scientific hypothesis, or an atheistic worldview? The second, Mr. Darwin did not promote in The Origins of Species, and in fact, rather suggested the contrary." is also showing your misunderstanding about Darwinism.
- Darwin speculated in The Origin of Species that a series of minute developments in reproductive success would progressively guide towards major alterations that discriminate one species from another. Darwin learned this gradualist assumption from the uniformitarian theory proposed by his geology professor, Charles Lyell. Admirers of Darwinism following the same line of thinking proclaimed that natural selection boosts fitness (optimization of reproductive success) and, thus, generates new life forms, including their sophisticated and complex adaptations. Darwin stated in chapter 6 of The Origin of Species "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case." This concept throughout its history suffered from technical shortcomings and in present time genome sequence data can easily invalidate the foundation of this mechanism for Darwinian evolution.
- Darwin proposed that all organisms have descended with modification from a common ancestor and, in addition, advocated natural selection as part of the mechanism of evolution. During the first half of the 20th century, the integration of genetics and population biology into Darwinian evolution led to a Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, also known as Modern Synthesis. Neo-Darwinism recognized the importance of mutation and variation within a population. Natural selection then became a process that altered the frequency of the appearance of viable genes in a population and this defined evolution. The short summary of this conventional evolutionary theory, or Darwinism, is: the environment poses problems and the organisms posit solutions, of which the best is at last chosen. Darwin was not aware of molecular biology and hence he gave his theory in very simple terms. On the other hand, neo-Darwinian theory or Modern Synthesis was an attempt to provide a molecular interpretation for Darwinism. So the original idea of gradual small changes that Darwin proposed in his theory was maintained even in the neo-Darwinian synthesis, although it changed form from physiology to molecular biology, along with natural selection.
- Darwinism makes several over-simplifying assumptions which are no longer valid in contemporary biology. In a very recent article Raoult and Koonin [4] stated:
- "At the time of the publication of the Origins of Species in 1859 (Darwin, 1859), Darwin's vision of evolution revolutionized the scientific worldview and even the human perception of the world beyond science. However, a century later, with the consolidation of the Modern Synthesis (neo-darwinism), evolutionary biology has adopted a rather rigid, somewhat dogmatic framework."
- Molecular genetics, genome sequencing and many such powerful empirical testing tools are rigorously questioning the validity of Darwinian evolutionary anecdote. The invalid assumptions of Darwinan abiology are still commonly recognized and used in the scientific literature on objective evolution. In the last issue of our newsletter, The Harmonizer, April 2013, Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. expertly summarized many key assumptions in Darwinism that are disproven in the 21st Century Biology.
- Regarding your inquiry, "the Darwinian vision" - a scientific hypothesis, or an atheistic worldview?" we must say that the Darwinian vision is nothing but an irrational fanatism. In an 1879 letter, written around the same time as the autobiography and first published in Life and Letters, he writes:
- "In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind."
- Other people were definitely influenced toward atheism by Darwin's theory, like Dawkins,
- ". . . Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." – Richard Dawkins
- "'Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism,'" [says Cornell biology professor William Provine]
- "Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere material mechanisms—but this seems to be the message of evolution." — Douglas J. Futuyma
- "Haeckel says that Darwin's theory of evolution leads inevitably to Atheism and Materialism…This does not mean that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic, that the exclusion of design from nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to atheism." — Charles Hodge (Princeton theologian). 1994.
- Darwin also said,
- "I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation."
- "But I was very unwilling to give up my belief ... Thus disbelief crept over me at very slow rate, but was at last complete."
- "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."
- "The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which seemed so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man"
- Darwin's Grandfather was a radical deist, his father, and brother were non-believers so it's reasonable to suppose that Darwin was influenced by them. Was Darwin an atheist? His own words state,
- "I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convinced me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress."
- Did he promote atheism in his Origins? I think he did so in an implicit and sometimes explicit way, as for example in his comment on the bivalve. Otherwise why have so many people been convinced of atheism by his theory? Stanley Jaki has noted:
- "The publication in full of Darwin's Early Notebooks forces one to conclude that in writing his Autobiography Darwin consciously lied when he claimed that he slowly, unconsciously slipped into agnosticism."
- Darwin wrote:
- "With respect to the theological question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I wish to do so, evidence of design and benificence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. . . . I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance."
- "The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator, does not seem to arise in the mind of man until he has been elevated by long-continued culture." (In other words, he thinks God is a fabrication of the human mind.)
- Darwin seems most strongly to have leaned toward atheism, so if he was an agnostic, it was almost certainly an agnostic atheist. His writings could hardly be said not to deliver that message, however deceptively.
- We have explained before in our postings that the foundation of Darwin's objective evolution theory suffers from epistemological incoherence and hence is self-defeating in nature. Darwin was seriously concerned about the philosophical implications of his dogma, as is very clear from his own statement [5]:
- "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
- Darwin's objective evolution theory fails to provide a practical pathway to guarantee that humans developed trustworthy, true beliefs about reality.[6] Darwin by comparing human rationality with animals introduced an open license to practice animalism within human civilization. This idealism is the main cause of suffering of modern civilization. Animals cannot practice any religion, because animals are not capable of higher inquiry apart from immediate biological needs like eating, sleeping, mating and defending. Modern biologists in the succession of Darwin only propagated animal survivalism in the name of Darwinism. This fact is evident from the statement of world renowned biologist Francis Crick [7]:
- "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendants."
- Based on such incongruous mental speculation, which even questions the rationality of human being, world renowned atheist of modern times, Richard Dawkins, explains that religiousness in human culture is basically an outcome of a defective 'mental virus.'[8] However, these scientists forget that the very foundation of science is based upon humans having trustworthy and true beliefs about reality.
- Hence it is necessary to scientifically inform the real situation to everyone so that they can confidently practice bonafide religions to achieve the ultimate goal of the human form of life. Under the guidance of Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D., (Director of Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science located in Princeton, NJ: www.bviscs.org) devotee scientists from Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math in India (www.mahaprabhu.net/scsmath.siliguri) are continuously traveling and delivering talks on these subjects and informing scientists about the scientific basis of the teachings of ancient Indian wisdom contained in Srimad Bhagavad-gita and Srimad Bhagavatam. We have presented a few highlights of our recent activities at: http://scienceandscientist.org/donate.html
- We invite one and all to join us in this scientific sankirtan to rescue our human civilization from the load of Darwinian ignorance (maya) and thus help each other to progress towards a harmonious God centered scientific civilization.
- References:
- 1. Peretó, J., Bada, J.L. and Lazcano, A. (2009). Charles Darwin and the origin of life. Orig Life Evol Biosph., Vol. 39. pp. 395–406.
- 2. Darwin, C. (1898). The life and letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2, p. 202. New York: Appleton, D.
- 3. Mitchell, W.M. (1990). Goodbye to the warm little pond? Science, Vol. 250, pp. 1078-1080.
- 4. Raoult, D. and Koonin, E.V. (2012). Microbial genomics challenge Darwin. Front Cell Infect Microbiol., 2:127, doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2012.0012.
- 5. Charles Darwin to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (1897; repr., Boston: Elibron, 2005), 1:285.
- 6. Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press, chapters 11–12.
- 7. Crick, F. (1994). The astonishing hypothesis. New York: Touchstone, P. 262.
- 8. Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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