Darwin's Debt to Christianity

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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While many words have been written about the differences between evolution and religion far few have been written about the similarities and parallels between the two – that is mainly the parallels between Christianity and Evolution. The point is that there are many parallels and understanding this will uncover the dynamics of the conflict that has been raging for the past 150 years.

When we look at evolution we find that it parallels Christian thought. This is most easily seen by treating Christianity as evolution. We begin by posing the question, “If evolution is true then who in history would be a prototype for human evolution?”

Surprisingly, Jesus is the most logical choice. No one else in history has had as much influence. If we treat Jesus as an evolutionary prototype we will find that he exactly fits the evolutionary model for a prototype. Jesus was different at birth, and as such was the first member of a new species who proved his survivability by being resurrected. Members of the old species are faced with the choice of transforming and becoming like Jesus or becoming “extinct”. From an evolutionary view point Jesus is the prototype for mankind’s next evolutionary leap. While Jesus did not procreate - his “spiritual genes” are in billions of people making him the most prolific of all humans.

There is a one to one correlation of themes between Christianity and Evolution. It would seem that Darwin took from Christian thought and simply gave things a different name. For example redemption became survival and transformation became mutation. The main differences are the Christianity is concerned with the redemption of the unfit and evolution then focused on the survival of the fittest (that is until it became PC incorrect). The other difference is that in Christianity God is in charge whereas in evolution things happen by chance.

What needs to be brought out is that Darwin’s evolution was not as novel and original as many people believe. He plagiarized 19th century Christianity and this I believe is the true source of the conflict. At the core both Christianity and Evolution are very similar but with differences that lead to strikingly different philosophical values. Evolution seeks to displace and take over the Christian platform and install a new set of moral values.

If evolution is built on a plagiarized Christian foundation then the strength of evolution as a world view must in turn validate Christianity also. The point is we may not have a correct understanding of the Christian message but its ideas and thought forms are so powerful that no one can ignore them and many wish to use them for their own ends.

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Where to start. . . where to start . . .

  1. Spencer was wrong. Survival of the fittest has nothing to do with Darwinism, let alone the modern theory of evolution.

  2. Evolution isn’t teleological.

  3. Scientists who study evolution don’t posit moral systems based off it, I am unaware of any actively practicing scientists who do this.

  4. ‘Prototype’ isn’t a meaningful term, evolutionarily speaking.

  5. While memetics has clear parallels to genetics (that is how it was designed, after all) memetic theory is unsupported by scientific investigation at the present time and, more importantly, even on a philosophical level, that crossover hasn’t been shown to be meaningful in any way.

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Hi, thanks with your reply I really don’t disagree with what you have listed above. The point I am making is where Darwin’s basic concepts came from. If you have any ideas on that I like to hear them.

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Hahahah…

But, more people in the world are theist, and hardly any are atheist. This is the statistic I am told… We could even take that a step farther.

Humanity is, in many ways, more powerful than any other species…

If natural selection, and mutations are the source of all things, and all superior things outnumber and replace the inferior, then, theism evolved for a specific, evolutionarily benifician purpose, and it is impossible to absolutely use the theory of evolution in order to promote atheism. :laughing: =D>

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This is assuming Jesus existed, and if he did, was somehow different than any ordinary human, and not just another cult leader of the times. There is little or no evidence supporting his existence, and no evidence to support any claim of superhuman abilities.

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Well, Darwin got his ideas from a lot of places. First, the actual idea of ‘evolution’ was older than Darwin himself. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, wrote some poems on the topic. That was coupled with the notion of the ‘gentleman farmer’ post-agricultural revolution where the success of artificial selection was plain to see. Naturally, that was coupled with the good ol’ fashioned aristocratic sense of superiority due to ‘blood’.

That was also coupled with naturalism, which was a really big deal in Industrial Revolution England (I’d want to get out of a smokey city and into cleaner areas too!!). Now, here there is a huge influence from Christianity – one of the precursors of modern science was ‘Natural Theology’ where people observed the natural world in the hopes of understanding God. This occasionally lead to some curious conclusions, such as the fact that God has an “Inordinate fondness for beetles.”

That was all coupled with the writings of John Malthus, who wrote extensively on the limited nature of resources in the world. As well as some recent geological discoveries that found out that the world was much older than had previously been thought.

So, these all got put together to form the initial spark for the theory of evolution through natural selection.

While I think it is tempting to use Christianity as “the one true myth” and feed every system back into it, I don’t necessarily think that that approach is the best and/or most honest approach to understanding the non-Christian components of the world.

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That is actually irrelevant to the OP, since it deals with Darwin’s inspiration and Darwin would have taken Jesus’ reality as a given. Furthermore, in discussing ideas, there needn’t be a real basis for an idea for that notion to go on and support something that does have a real basis.

After all, Newton’s physics was inspired by his absolutely insane/heretical theology. Likewise Leibnitz developed calculus to help demonstrate his outlandish monad theory. Or Freud, who was almost completely wrong on all accounts and used very flimsy pseudo-science to justify his positions, gave rise to psychology and modern therapeutic methods. As I said in a recent thread, “We can acknowledge their contributions without repeating their mistakes.”

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I always assumed that Newon’s physics was inspired in spite of his insane/heretical theology. Previously, it was believed the laws of the universe were only known to God, can couldn’t be understood by man. Or so I thought. Feel free to enlighten me.

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Well, part of it is that Newton thought that he was the messiah, so it makes sense that he would have the audacity to conquer God’s Laws, since that is why he was born.

Really crazy stuff.

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I ask where Darwin got his ideas – not from whom. You seem reluctant to face the fact that he took “his” concepts from the Christian world view that he lived in. His genius was to alter the Christian transformation/redemption scenario and apply it to the natural world. This led to such evils as Social Darwinism.

Applying a human conceptual framework to the natural world is inappropriate Especially one that views the world as amoral. The world is not amoral or moral these are purely human concepts that reflect ones views and attitudes and are not in any way an accurate description of what is “out there”.

Darwin’s Evolutionary theory attempts to describe the natural world but fails in many important ways to do so.

From Quantum Theory we know that the natural world is discontinuous. This fact is also reflected in the fossil records where there are many unexplained gaps. According to Evolution, life evolves in small changes in a smooth and continuous manner. However there is ample evidence that this basic assumption does not fit the real world where it can not explain the evolution of many complex biological structures such as the eye. Evolutionists have avoided facing this issue and try to explain the problem by saying future findings will fill in the gaps. It is far more likely that futures findings will only create even more gaps.

We know that the natural world is governed by nonlinear equations such as: e = mc2. Being nonlinear means that rate of change of any system can at time vary widely. This too is reflected in the fossil record where there are times when many new species appear to have come into being all at once. Evolutionary theory is linear in nature, that is: a + b = c. It reflects the way we think and not the way world actually is. We are unable to think rationally in a discontinuous or nonlinear manner and this is why Relativity and Quantum Theory are so hard for people to get their heads around. Evolution, on the other hand, is easily to imagine but it provides a poor fit for understanding the real world.

Evolution depends on long time frames to provide enough opportunity for changes to happen and as such it treats time as fixed constant. Time, as we all know is not constant but relative - where 20 years for one observer can be 5 minutes for another observer or 300 years for third. When speaking of billions of years many evolutionists assume some universal time frame that doesn’t exist. An observer on a beam of light that travels from the edge of the universe finds that our planet has instantly come into being in its present state. For that observer there are no billions of years since the Big Bang – there is the Big Bang and then instantly our world just as it is now.

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Quantum theory only works at sizes/values so small as to be irrelevant to what could be considered ‘normal’ life. This is important, and ignorance of this fact is the root of the abuse of QT by New Agers and the like.

I agree, to a degree. Biosemiotics suggests that all we can ever do is apply a human perspective to the reality of the world and common sense would seem to agree with this theory. I think this ties into the quote by Master Eisai in my sig . . . we can talk about a world beyond human understanding, but given our humanity, I have to ask what the utility of such an endevor would be?

As for the ‘who’ vs. the ‘what’, Erasmus was heavily influenced by all sorts of aristocratic notions about what makes the upper-class better than the lower-class. Given that he was of the lower gentry, his views on this issue weren’t dissimilar to modern white-supremacists, where sure they are poor-as-dirt, but they are better than those people due to birthright. Add that to a healthy dose of Locke. Lamarck would be pre-emptive, but he was almost certainly also an influence on Darwin.

Now, if you want to suggest that any philosopher who has ever drawn inspiration from a Christian element is, by default, entirely Christian, I can have no argument with you because finding any western philosopher ever post 400-odd-AD whose thought isn’t hugely influenced by Christianity is an impossibility. But the question is: how much? In many cases, the influence is quite small.

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no1nose it’s difficult not to read in between the lines something you may not be trying to say. Are you saying that Evolution is an successor to Christianity. Or are you saying the Evolution is a faulty Grand Narrative that has sucked most everyone in?

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At the heart of quantum theory is Bohr’s concept of complementarity. This he made great pains to point out can apply to macro systems. Bohr I believe was the first to point out that Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” was a case of “observer created reality”. In the case of evolution it is the slowness of the process that gives the illusion that there can be an objective observer. This then leads one to self-fulfilling observations rather than any so called objective reality.

“Powerful” in science translates as the ability to make predictions. This in turn requires some maths. Powerful in politics implies ability to move people and requires no math just some lose concepts that most people can get their heads around. This is the description that best fits the Theory of Evolution. A math free zone because the correlation between its concepts and the real world are too weak to describe mathematically.

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There is little or no evidence suggesting that Darwin was thinking of Jesus while developing his theory of natural selection. All you’ve given us is a theory, but it is an interesting one.

If this were to seem like an actual argument (which it doesn’t), it would only take a minute’s consideration to expose it at vacuous. Asking for every single ‘step’ in the fossil record for convincing proof is like a defense attorney asking for a frame-by-frame construction of her client’s murder as the only grounds on which the jury could ever dream of beginning to convicting him. It is an unrealistic task, one which no rational person would expect to ever see completed. What’s important to look at is what we have discovered. It is enough to suggest evolution and natural selection at the least, and enough to make it just as obviously sound as any other scientifically approved idea at the most.

Wow, for someone who is posing a theory that completely questions and underminds evolution, you haven’t done much of your research. Here:

youtube.com/watch?v=furcepFlfZ4

While you have a valid point concerning relativity, it’s ridiculous to try and use it to hold up what you’re claiming. I don’t know of any observers that are traveling the speed of light, do you? I’d have to say that pretty much everybody here on earth is experiencing time on the same level, otherwise, somebody would have noticed this phenomenon a long time ago and Einstien’s papers in 1906 would have been old news. It’s from our perspective here (by’ here’ I mean our everyday speed of travel through space and time) that these theories are constructed, and should be understood that this is the light in which they are meant to be viewed.

But even disregarding all that, your application doesn’t make much sense. Even if one observer, say a sentient photon for argument’s sake, saw no time pass at all due to its lightspeed, that doesn’t mean all of other amounts of time potentially experienced by non lightspeed-traveling things just don’t exist. The photon is simply oblivous to it. So in your example of the beam of light suddenly stopping and finding life on Earth, it’s not so much as that evolution didn’t have enough time to happen as it is that this observer, due to his speed, was ignorant of it.

Addendum: Sorry if I seem rude. This entire theory sounds like a suspicious way for Christianity to escape the guillotine it finds itself under and ride evolution’s coat tails all the way to success and prestige.

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Too weak? Have you checked out the molecular data?

Let’s take, for example, primates. Humans are primates, so it is always a nice example to show how humans are a part of nature.

Now, in primates, Vitamin C-synthetase is a pseudo-gene. Now, that is fine, as long as the primates aren’t high-seas pirates, their chances of getting a vitamin C deficiency is quite slim – their diet has more than enough vitamin C. So, why is it a pseudo-gene? Well, there is a single amino-acid changed in the protein, due to a single base being different in the gene.

Now, this mutation isn’t different across primates, it is completely the same in all higher primates. Now, if we assume the chances of mutations being random (which is common for non-selective mutations, which this is) and for the average primate’s genome to be 2.0 billion base pairs (actually, about a billion shy of a proper average, but I’ll work with small numbers because I’m feeling generous) . . . so, for each primate the chance of this specific mutation occurring from the fully functional gene to the non-functional one is one in two-billion (2x10^9).

Now, let’s just, for a moment, look at New World Monkeys – a very small sub-set in the higher primate group (because I am too drunk to bumble around for a complete list). There are sixteen species of New World Monkeys. So, that is 16x2x10^9. So, the chances of this mutation arising independently in each case is one in thirty-two billion.

Now, if we assume that they have a common ancestor, than this number becomes much more reasonable, since the chances of them repairing this gene, randomly, is around one in 1x10^10 for any given case (a common statistic derived from empirical evidence). So, if we assume them to have a common ancestor, the chance of them having a functional gene if their ancestor had a non-functional gene is 1x10^10 for any of them.

So . . . basically, taking the ‘no evolution’ is, statistically, a terribly flawed path to take. And this isn’t an isolated case. Do a BLAST search on the NCBI homepage and you’ll find many, many genes that are likewise similar. These are very much the rule, not the exception.

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I thinks no1nose’s point is that nature is discontinuous - gaps with nothing in between are natural.

I watched this, its dumb. “Now imagine a little skin growing. . .” Whose side are you really on?

I don’t get this either. Maybe no1nose is saying that time should always be treated as a variable and any theory that treats as a constant is in error.

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](*,)

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This kind of scenario doesn’t require Evolution to explain it. We are talking monkeys here not monkeys and something else. Really need maths that connect the Theory to something in nature.

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There is no distinction between micro and macro evolution – those are, quite literally, made up terms. Species is a construct that only pertains to a human observer – we use it as a shortcut to make understanding nature easier but that shouldn’t be reified into the actual situation itself.

The Tree of Life, now that shows the relationships between species in a mathematical and biological manner. You might want to check out some Woese and see where that goes.

Furthermore, that does demonstrate evolution since, for those values to make any sense, a common ancestor needs to be hypothesized. We aren’t dealing with just monkeys, we are dealing with all higher primates (monkeys, apes, and man).

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It is this sort of infinite regression that I find so dishonest about critics of evolution.

If I show how a gene demonstrates a common ancestor between monkeys, well it is just monkeys . . . not good enough.

So, if I expand it to all higher primates, well, that would just be all higher primates.

So, if I pick another and show all primates, well, that is just all primates.

So, if I pick another and show all placentals, well, that is just all placentals.

So, if I pick another and show all mammals, well, that is just all mammals.

So, if I pick another and show all vertebrates, well, that is just all vertebrates.

So, if I pick another and show all animals, well, that is just all animals.

So, if I pick another and show all multicellular life, well, that is just multicellular life.

So, if I pick another and show all Eukarya, well, that is just all Eukaryotes.

So, if I pick another and show Eukarya and Archaea, well, that is just Eukaryotes and Archaeons

So, what would happen if I cut to the chase and picked a single gene and, through tracing the changes in this single gene, I said I could link Eukaryotes and Procaryotes (including Bacteria and Archaea)? One gene, all life on Earth.

Well, fortunately, I can – it is called the ribosome. This delightful piece of RNA is the factory that builds the proteins that all life depends on. Knowing this, a man named Carl Woese at the University of Illinois sequenced the small ribosomal subunit for a large variety of lifeforms and was able to show how all life is related. The more organisms we sequence, the more complete the tree becomes.