by Playfuls Staff |
12th February 2006
Charles Darwin has been the father of the theory of evolution, for a long time the worst enemy of the religious belief in creationism. However, things seem to have changed over the years, as nearly 450 Christian churches around the US plan to celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin on Sunday with programs and sermons intended to emphasize that his theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science. [more]
"It's to demonstrate, by Christian leaders and members of the clergy, that you don't have to make that choice. You can have both," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who organized the event, according to The Chicago Tribune.
"Evolution Sunday" has drawn participation from a variety of denominational and non-denominational churches, including Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Congregationalist, United Church of Christ, Baptist and a host of community churches, including at least 16 congregations in Illinois.
The event grew out of Zimmerman's The Clergy Letter Project, another effort to dispel the perception among many Christians that faith and evolution are mutually exclusive
Since its inception in 2004, the project has drawn 10,000 Christian clerics to sign a letter that concludes, "We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth."
Zimmerman said the letter project and the Sunday event were designed to educate Americans about two things.
"The first part was to demonstrate to the American public that the shrill fundamentalist voices that were demanding that people had to choose between religion and science were simply wrong," he said.
"The second part was to demonstrate that those fundamentalist leaders that keep standing up and shouting that you can't accept modern science were not speaking for the majority of Christian leaders in this country." .
However, "Evolution Sunday" drew sharp criticism from the Discovery Institute. The Seattle-based think tank funds research into non-Darwinian concepts such as intelligent design, which posits that some complexities of life that are yet unexplained by evolution are best are attributed to an unnamed and unseen intelligence.
In a statement issued under the title "On Evolution Sunday It's Give Me That Old Time Darwinist Religion," Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman said, "Evolution Sunday is the height of hypocrisy."
"Our view is not that pastors should speak out against evolution," he added, "but that the Darwinists are hypocrites for claiming--falsely--that opposition to Darwinism is merely faith-based, and then turning around and trying to make the case that Darwinism itself is faith-based."
Zimmerman, a former biology professor, said, "Science is limited under what the scientific method allows you to do. I fear the Discovery Institute and these other fundamentalists have science envy. They want science to ratify their faith and beliefs and, by definition, you've got to take faith on faith."
Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British naturalist who achieved lasting fame by convincing the scientific community of the occurrence of evolution and proposing the theory that this could be explained through natural and sexual selection. This theory is now considered the central explanatory paradigm in biology.
He developed an interest in natural history while studying first medicine, then theology, at university. Darwin's five-year voyage on the Beagle and subsequent writings brought him eminence as a geologist and fame as a popular author. His biological observations led him to study the transmutation of species and, in 1838, develop his theory of natural selection. Fully aware that others had been severely punished for such "heretical" ideas, he only confided in his closest friends and continued his research to meet anticipated objections. However, in 1858 the information that Alfred Russel Wallace had developed a similar theory forced early joint publication of the theory.
His 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (usually abbreviated to The Origin of Species) established evolution by common descent as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, continued his research, and wrote a series of books on plants and animals, including humankind, notably The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to William Herschel and Isaac Newton.
(Source: Wikipedia).
