New Year, New Start, New Topic: Darwinism

The ensuing series of blog posts I have adapted from a class I taught in the first part of 2008. It was a kind of sequel or continuation of a class on the broad subject of creation and evolution that had spent practically all of its time concentrating on matters of cosmology and geology; when it came to the biological aspects of the subject, the original discussion leader believed himself inadequately prepared to discuss those matters and so I assumed the mantle. What you will read here over the next weeks (possibly months) are distillations of class discussions largely taken from my teaching notes.

By way of introduction, consider the current cultural controversy over the issue of origins as encapsulated by our car decorations. Most of my readers will know about those silver appliques often found on the rear of motor vehicles in this country that look like minimalist drawings of a fish. Sometimes within the "body" of this fish representation are the letters "JESUS" or the Greek "IXΘYS," an acrostic of ancient origin taken from the first letters of the phrase in Greek that means "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior." The acrostic in Greek spells the word for "fish." So it was the practice of early Greek-speaking Christians to employ the symbol of a fish as a succinct confession of faith. Contemporary American Christians seem to have picked up the practice again.

What is somewhat ironically amusing is that persons who prefer the modern "scientific" explanation for the origin of life on this planet have, in some instances, taken up the gauntlet and affixed to the rears of their vehicles a similar minimalist fish-like device, only this one has a pair of stick-figure legs and feet under the body and often the letters "DARWIN" within the body of the fish. This is undoubtedly supposed to be humorously challenging, maybe even a bit pugnacious and aggressive, toward the benighted souls who still believe in things like God and creation. But it has always struck me as archly funny that in order to assert the supposed superiority of their theory of origins they co-opted a religious symbol that makes no sense when taken out of its Christian context. Even more ironic is that this act underscores the essentially religious nature of the controversy, although the typical philosophical materialist would likely angrily deny this. It will be a major purpose of this blog series to flesh out the truth of that last sentence.