Remembering the life of Charles Darwin

HUMANIST ASSOCIATION

By Dave Silva

LW contributor .

Feb. 12, 1809, is a special date in history because both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on that day. For Humanists, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as explained in his landmark book “The Origin of Species,” published on Nov. 24, 1859, laid the foundation for a naturalistic view of life.

Darwin knew the publication of his book would come under severe criticism. The theory of evolution by natural selection wasn’t entirely original to Darwin. British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace and Darwin came to the same conclusions about how animals adapted to their environment, and they jointly published a paper on evolution in 1858. Realizing he couldn’t put off revealing his controversial theory any longer, Darwin published his book the following year.

Before the theory of evolution, there was no clear idea about how life on Earth began. Consequently, the “god of the gaps” argument was invoked as a default explanation, since there wasn’t any competing scientific theory. The two problems with the God-created-life explanation are which God did it and how did that God do it. There have been many creation stories, many of them interesting, but they all rely on other worldy means to explain the diversity of life. Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on observation and science. For 162 years, it has stood up against all criticisms and alleged flaws. It explains how life-forms change over time. It even explains how the COVID-19 virus mutated into different strains. Although 98 precent of American scientists believe in evolution, 18 percent of the public does not. Advocates of Intelligent Design, who sought equal time in the classroom for religious explanations, have argued that because evolution doesn’t explain all the intermediate transitions between species, it isn’t valid. They lost that case in court, and science is gradually solving that puzzle, piece by piece. Young- Earth creationists believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Although Darwin didn’t know it, scientists have calculated that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and life began 4 billion years ago.

In 1950, the Catholic Church accepted evolution as a scientific fact, but claimed that God created evolution as his method of change. Humanists embrace evolution because it explains how things work without resorting to miracles, which by definition have no explanation. There are still things humans don’t understand, and that’s okay, because it gives them something to work on.