Forum för vetenskap och folkbildning

With respect to immortality[5], nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicist, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life. -- Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentinent beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

Another source of conviction in the existance of God connected with the reason and not the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look at a first cause having an intelliegent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a theist.

This conclusion[6] was strong in my mind about the time, as far I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as the possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such a grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.[7] [Det fetstilta är citerat på bloggen]

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me 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 man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domestic Animals and Plants[3], and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.

Charles Darwin skulle ha kunnat varit kreationist -- evolutionsteorin är ingen personkult.

Skrev PekkaS något personangrepp där, eftersom Nineve tog bort kommentaren?

Det är spännande med såhär konstruktiva dialoger...

T.ex. skriver Darwin vidare: "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 man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows."

Jag skulle snarare kalla det för motsatsen till intelligent design.

Frågan är inte helt viktig, eftersom det är Darwins vetenskapliga arbete, inte religiösa föreställning, som var banbrytande. Men om rätt ska vara rätt, var Darwin "anti-kreationist", vilket framgår tydligt om man läser texten i sin helhet.

Då så. Jag tackar CauchySchwarz för tipset och provar om jag kan påpeka det, om nu du inte fick.

Vi behöver en ny rymdkapplöpning !

Ett program handlade om skolundervisningen i USA. Fram till slutet av 50-talet hade kristna grupper stort inflytande på läroplanerna. Evolutionen var inte populär.

Sedan dess har religiösa grupper så sakteliga åter lyckats skaffa sig mer inflytande.