Perhaps you are aware that this coming Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection. It is truly one of the major books that has shaped the world of human thought over the last century. It continues to this day to cause uproars, and not always just among Christians or people of other faiths.
Being 150 years old puts old Charlie’s text into the public domain. There have been more than 100 diffferent editions of the book, all with different introductions. Anyone with a press or a checkbook may publish the book. Which brings up this morning’s story. A gentleman named Ray Comfort decided he would like to produce a version of the book, with his own introduction offering “the other point of view” and giving a fuller explanation of where the “science of evolution” really sits today. And hey, wouldn’t it be a great idea to give them away free to university students?
Kicked a hornets nest, he did.
An online Google search on the topic returns 16,600 postings, and a search on YouTube pulls up 151 video reports and video responses to the book giveaway. Many of the postings – online text or video – are on atheist Web sites, as well as media outlets such as U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American and Discover magazine.
Ray Comfort is a Christian evangelist and apologist, dedicated to expressing and sharing the Christian faith and explaining the reasons to believe that it is true. His introduction to Darwin’s work provides the Christian explanation for creation, life, and death. The actual text of Darwin’s work is complete and unchanged.
More than the arguments concerning the validity or lack thereof of the theory of evolution of new species by random mutation and selection, I am struck again by the tiny little people who profess to be so open minded and enlightened, yet are so threatened by someone’s words in a book. I’m speaking of the tiny little minds of the atheists and scientists. For example, famous atheist preacher evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had a thing or two to say about Comfort’s edition of Darwin.
“Presumably, the people in universities are capable of seeing through that kind of thing and I imagine they would be rather flattered to be given a free copy of the Origin of Species,” said Dawkins in late September, when asked about the then-pending giveaway. “Just rip out the 50 pages … and use the pages for the purpose they’re best suited.”
In response to Dawkins remarks, evangelist Ray Comfort said on his Web site: “It seems very strange that Professor Dawkins would say that my Introduction didn’t worry him at all, and in the next breath tell university students to rip it out. If, I am, as he says, an ‘ignorant fool,’ then what I have written will be nothing but ignorance and foolishness. So why is he so concerned? I think the man protesteth too much.”
Indeed. Rather like the bookstores in San Francisco refusing to carry Sarah Palin’s book. Ignore it, it’ll go away. Or perhaps Dawkins’ suggestion is more like Thomas Jefferson’s treatment of the New Testament… just rip out what you don’t like, what makes you uncomfortable, what you don’t want to believe? Cut and paste until you get what you want, remove the threats to your own belief system. How very, well, “human”.
There, there, it’ll be all better now.
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