Darwin Day Series

OPEN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI6-g6Xe8kc (missing in action)

All this month we’ve been focusing on “holidays” in January that you may not have heard of. Today we’re going to stretch a little outside the month to touch on the International Darwin Day that is celebrated February 12th and this year it celebrates the 207th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.

Now, the reason I accidentally included this in our list (of January special days) was because, when I first started looking at holidays in this month, I saw that the San Francisco Atheists celebrated his birthday on the 30th of this month (yesterday) and I mistakenly concluded that was the day everyone observed it. My bad.

This Tuesday (February 2nd) the Circular Congregational Church - in Charleston, SC – are sponsoring 10 events in 10 days to glorify Darwin. And of course there are numerous events on the 12th (Darwin’s birthday) including on in Colorado sponsored by the “Central Colorado Humanist.”

http://darwinday.org/events/

One site declared: “International Darwin Day (is intended to) inspire people throughout the globe to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin.” http://darwinday.org/about/

But despite the fact that Darwin’s views on evolution had influenced culture for nearly 200 years, evolutionary scientists are still frustrated by the fact that only about 40% of Americans accept Darwin’s theory of “The Origin of the Species.” (the name of his book)

(Newport, F. On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution. Gallup News. Posted on gallup.com on February 11, 2009, accessed February 17, 2009.)

Actually, the full name of Darwin’s book was:

“The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

But we’ll talk more about that later.

Charles Darwin was the father what we call “Darwinism” which is an ALTERNATE and unbiblical way of looking at how life came to exist on our planet. And Darwinism is the foundation of the “science” we know as Evolution.

Whereas, the Bible tells us that:

“in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them…” Exodus 20:11

Darwinism maintains that NATURE (not God) took millions and millions of years to evolve life from a primordial soup of minerals, rocks and water. And this primordial soup sat and interacted until it created a simple molecule. (show a graph of the Evolutionary tree of life).

This simple molecule then bonded together with other molecules to form a simple form of life. And over time, this simple life-form became more and more complicated until it became a more complex organism. And this transformation continued over millions of years until dinosaurs became birds and fish became amphibians and amphibians became dogs and cats… and ultimately life evolved until we came into existence.

They trace man’s existence all the way back to that primordial soup, and as someone once put it:

Darwinism is the theory of “Goo to you by way of the zoo.”

Now, in the simplified form in which I’ve phrased this… it all seems fairly bizarre doesn’t it? In fact, it sounds unbelievable.

But there is a multitude of scientists who embrace this strange view of life’s origins. And evolution has come to dominate (to the exclusion of all other possible explanations) the teaching of science from Elementary school thru High School and into College.

No other view is allowed.

So, if this view is embraced by so many in the scientific community, you have to ask “why?”

Now, I have so much information on this topic in my files that I could talk for hours on this, but instead I’m going to focus on presenting 3 of the basic underlying concepts that drive Darwinism in our culture.

For example, one of the foundational reasons given for evolution is that there is so much variation within a species (Darwin’s book was driven by his finding differences in finches in a given locale)

Look at this picture (I showed a picture of several breeds of dogs).

What are these? (Dogs)

Do you see how different they are?

How did they get to be so different?

They were bred that way weren't they.

An evolutionist will say – this is an example of how evolution works. If you have enough interbreeding in a species of animal - viola... you could eventually have a NEW species of animal.

But there are a few problems with this.

First these dogs have been bred to have the kinds of characteristics that appeal to dog owners, but that often comes at a price.

What’s the price?

Deformity, weakness, illness and an early death. One of our Elders had a brown lab that he loved deeply, but eventually it developed arthritis in its joints and died a painful death… all because specified breeding led to that breed’s ultimate destiny as an invalid.