Darwin on Display

The South African Museum is a terrific museum.  It is situated in the middle of a large, beautiful garden, so it is a bit hard to find.  No, better to say, it is very hard to find, especially with a GPS.  But eventually, we found it, and it was well worth the trouble.

For a very few rand, we gained admittance.  And of course, we closed it down.

One end of the first floor was devoted to Chuck Darwin, the man credited with neo-Darwinian evolution.  It turns out that Darwin on the Voyage of the Beagle stopped over a the Cape and made a long trek through the area east of Cape Town.

Darwin revolutionized biology.  His thinking was brilliant, his promulgation of those ideas was astounding.  He was an excellent scientist.

Yet, Darwin was wrong.

If you know anything about the origins debates, you know that is a bold statement.   My life would be much easier, if Darwin’s thinking was correct, but alas, there is a wealth of evidence against Darwinian evolution.  I won’t make the arguments here, but concluded many years ago, that evolution is essentially a FAITH commitment, and I simply did not have sufficient faith to believe in it, given the contradictory evidence.

Here’s the point.  All of us are faithful to something/someone/some idea.  Richard Dawkins of “The God Delusion” fame, is a scientist of tremendous faith.  He has scant evidence, but he has built a huge faith from that tiny evidence.

And you too, are a person of faith.

The choice is simple, in what/Who/which philosophy  will you and I put our faith?