- Reading Number Three -

 

Darwin and the Amazing, Evolving Eyeball

 

 

Even Darwin had his times of doubt, his dark moments of struggling with the utter preposterousness of his theory of evolution. But then, through the sheer force of his will to reject God, and with the help of more flourishes of rhetoric, he lifts himself out of the pit and finds his way back to faith! We can all learn from his example.

 

 

What do you know? Darwin is confessing here that even he has moments of weakness...moments of doubt when all this evolution stuff seems absurd. What courage and raw honesty to admit this, huh? How inspiring to know that even he suffers from doubt! Well, he gets over it. Read on...

 

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [“The voice of the people is the voice of God”], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.

 

You’ve got to admit, Darwin shows a real talent here for appealing to our sense of elitism. Hey, the common people cannot be trusted to know anything, right? Only philosophers and scientists have anything worthwhile to tell us. I feel better already.

 

Reason tells me,

 

Now this is something wonderful. Darwin is in direct communication with “Reason.” And who is this Reason? A goddess? A universal principle? It doesn’t matter. We can just feel reassured that Darwin is led not by his own fallible human reasoning abilities (perish the thought), but by the very principle and personification of Reason (as are all of us skeptics, right?).

 

that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist,

 

And how many is “numerous”? Ten, twenty? One thousand? Who knows? Don’t worry about how many would be required. Remember, Darwin receives his ideas from Reason herself!

 

each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case;

 

I think we all know that “useful” is the same as “conferring a life-and-death advantage that will ensure that any being not having the same advantage will die out in its struggle for survival against beings who do have it.” That goes without saying, right?

 

if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case;

 

Variation? Heck, I have three cousins who were born with simple light-sensitive spots instead of human eyes!

 

and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life,

 

You’d think those variations would have to be useful to the animals that happened to have them! But no, Darwin shrewdly slants things in his favor by saying these variations need only be useful to “any” animal. What a guy!

 

then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

 

Yeah, what’s a little thing like not being able to imagine a solution to the problem? Vague assurances from Darwin are enough to convince me, how about you?

 

How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated;

 

We just have to have faith that somehow it could happen on its own.

 

but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible

                          

Hey, all I need to know is that “it does not seem impossible,” and I’m convinced. That’s good enough for me!

 

that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

 

I have no idea what he’s talking about here, but I’m sure he’s absolutely right!