BIBLE AND EVOLUTION
Posted on: May 7, 2014
BIBLE AND EVOLUION
FROM TORONTO STAR
Next week will mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of the Species.’.
By: Stephen Marche Special to the Star, Published on Sat Nov 21 2009
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Next week will mark one of the greatest anniversaries in the history of ideas – 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Often such classics – particularly classics overwhelmed by their controversy – are lost over time in the miasma of their own reputations. The question for anyone thinking of picking up a copy becomes: How good is it really? Naturally, comparing The Origin of Species to light non-fiction or novels is silly, like comparing The Odyssey to Dora the Explorer. Darwin’s masterpiece has to be judged in the context of its peers, and it really has only one: the book of Genesis. Genesis is the only other book that explains all of nature in a few terse sentences.
Genesis, it has to be said, is tough to beat as a piece of writing. It contains both the best of the wilderness, emerging over several generations from the greatest poets of the Judean desert, and the best of civilization, being polished by its proximity to the original cities in Iraq and Persia. Darwin did not have such good fortune in his time and place. He spent the most important years of his life collecting beetles in places where nobody spoke his native language. And he wrote The Origin of Species in the throes of illness.
You can spot the difference in the quality of the writing from the very first lines of the respective books. The first line of Genesis – “In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth” – is simply the best sentence ever composed: strong, active, concise, clear, complete and yet turgid with hidden depths. Though not a single word is out of the ordinary, each word radiates with startling power on examination. “In the beginning” is an everyday expression, but in everyday speech, it always describes the beginning of something, a book or a road or a life. When we hear the phrase “in the beginning,” we immediately ask “the beginning of what”? The beginning of Genesis is just The Beginning. The absence clarifies, more than words could, how high the stakes are.
“The heaven and the Earth” is also a powerfully succinct expression. Instead of God creating everything, God creates duality from the beginning: He created out there and in here, the universal and the particular, the cosmic and the terrestrial.
Compare that perfection of expression with the first sentence from the introduction to The Origin of Species: “When on board HMS Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.” What the hell are you on about, Charles Darwin? We have to wait for the next sentence to understand his subject (in newspaper-speak, this bad writing habit is called “burying the lead.”): “These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.” It’s a perfect model for what not to do with a lead sentence. Not only does it contain a passive construction, it is also a tissue of conditionals, stuffed with “seemed to me,” “some light,” and “one of our greatest.” Its vagueness and weakness have real consequences, too. They lead Kansas school board trustees and ex-U.S. Presidents to believe that there’s reasonable doubt about the ideas in The Origin of Species, when there is not. Good writing matters.
Good writing matters not least in the pleasure it gives to readers. The Bible, unlike The Origin of Species, has a sense of humour. In the original Hebrew, Genesis is full of delicious wordplay. Even the name of Adam is a pun. The word “dam” in Hebrew means mud, and the letter A, or aleph, in Hebrew is more of an inspiration of breath than a vowel. Every time you say the name Adam, you’re breathing over mud, just like God did.
The Bible also has the advantage of possessing real characters. People in The Origin of Species are entirely one-dimensional, as in: “Lamarck first called attention to this distinction, and he has been ably followed by Macleay and others.” That’s what the people in Darwin do: they call attention, they ably follow, they remark upon. I don’t know anybody like those people. Adam and Eve? Now them I recognize. He lives in a lonely paradise. She wants the only fruit she can’t have. In Eden, they manage to make themselves miserable. I’ve met a million people like that.
And what of the vision of life? The Bible is all health and strength: “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” In each successive day, life is created in order, beautiful, as it should be, sacred in itself. Living things in Darwin are much more difficult and broken. The majority of species that the Earth has produced have become useless, and so extinct. At the end of the book, he tries to excuse the brutality of his central idea: “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.” But this defence comes too late. The gorgeousness of life remains a mere byproduct of a brutal, unthinking, unending war among all things.
And so we are forced to the conclusion that, in almost every respect, Genesis is a better book than The Origin of Species, in the purity and intensity of its style, in its recognition of human realities. It’s just that Genesis is a pack of lies that has served the cause of bafflement for millennia, while The Origin of Species is true and has done more to liberate us from ignorance than any other book.
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SOURCE
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2009/11/21/analysis_darwin_vs_genesis_a_literary_smackdown.html#
A
TREASURE CHEST 
June 8, 2016 at 3:44 am
I started out to delete this entry. However I am leaving it as it is for the present with the comment as below.
Evidence gathered from astronomical data now gives solid proof that Darwin’s theory is deeply flawed. Evidence now available proves that the universe came into sudden being 14 billion years ago. It was not “evolved.” In the entire universe, our Earth holds a special place. Everything in its make up is “fine tuned” to become habitable by man, who has not evolved from any lower species. This theory is much too detailed and cannot be described here.