Yes it is Charles Darwins birthday. He turns 200 on the same year that Calvin turns 500. I wonder if they will share a pint in heaven? Of course many a fundamentalist hack who has the continually odd delusion that Darwin was among the elitist secularists who were trying to rid the public sphere of Christianity will no doubt reject the notion that Darwin was "saved."
Here is the strange thing about the constant barrage of stones slung at Darwin from so many religious folk. The rhetoric paints this strange ideological picture of "Darwinism" as if evolutionary biology is somehow a religious quest with Darwin as its ideological deity. Leave it to Ken Ham to make that position clear.
"Because this year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary (later this year) of his book On the Origin of Species, secularists are pushing Darwinian evolution and celebrating Darwin as never before. It’s almost like Darwin worship around the globe (even posting “praise” billboards about the man."
Here is the thing, Darwins understanding of science was radically different than the basic approach to science in this day and age. Darwin was an heir of the Baconian system which was basically a process of taxonomy and categorization. The basic philosophy is that the world presents itself to our senses, and we then organize that world as it is. Towards the end of the nineteenth century things were different as hypothetical reasoning became the governing structure of scientific reasoning. There one makes an assumption based on the known in order to explain otherwise unknown processes through experimentation. The idea that science would postulate what we could not readily observe was absurd at one time. It was fictive and false. But then hypothetical reasoning began to produce results that the previous method could never have achieved.
The point is that scientists do not do science like Darwin anymore. Darwin had a powerful idea that change occurs over time in a species in a dialectical relationship between the species and the environment. When the scientific method changed, this idea has simply not been refuted well enough for contrary positions to gain any respectable merit among scientists now. Darwin did infer a process. That inference has been tested and expanded to where it predicts other processes as a result with a startling degree of regularity. That is why it is a theory (or theories) and not because of what Darwin said.
If evolution is wrong, we must therefore submit that the idea that the earth revolves around the sun is wrong, gravity not as a force that exists on the surface of an aether in space but as the fundamental attraction of objects in curved space-time, the constant speed of light, or many vaccines which use principles of evolution must also be rejected. The myopic rejection of Darwin is a single-minded absurdity which boggles the mind. He was a touchstone for evangelical fervor because, while other theories forced the Bibles hand more abstractly, Darwin messed with Gods crown of creation in humankind. But he did so using methods and ways of thinking that are outdated and scientists simply do not use any more in the scientific process except as a function of hypothetical methods. There is no Darwin worship in as much as there is no worship of Einstein, Bohr, or Maurice Hilleman. They lie to promote their agenda in order for it to gain respectability. The question is where something so disrespecting can ever gain the respectability it desires.
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