Jun

15

A turn to the Origin is always good to put the moves of the markets most beautiful and wonderful and often circling back to the beginning according to the fixed laws of gravity, constructalism, and flexionism after a week where SPU begins and ends at the exact same level.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

-Charles Darwin

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

The tangled bank is Darwin's theology; no one, certainly not John Murray (his publisher), forced Darwin to insert and keep the phrase "by the Creator" into the 2nd and subsequent editions. Blaming "popular pressure" is a libel on the pubic which embraced Darwin; the demand from the public is what caused Murray to print another 3000 copies (what would be 300,000 now). The criticism of Darwin's views about God and Nature came entirely from the schoolies.

There is no question Darwin ceased to believe (if he ever did) in the literal truth of Jesus' resurrection. In that regard he was following a hundred years of apostacy going back to George Washington and Voltaire and Hume. What he believed in was the miracle of life itself, what Washington called Almighty Providence. As to the origins of that miracle– as opposed to the laws that governed life's evolution, he declined to offer any opinion and was happy to have his remains left in a church with the memorial markers conventional for that time and place.


Comments

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

Archives

Resources & Links

Search