Seattle Atheists

Celebrating Darwin is fine, kind of annoying but fine, but most importantly let’s not forget a few things:
Darwin by no means personifies atheism or disbelief in gods. Darwin himself was not an atheist. Evolution does cause problems to the doctrines of certain religions, but i don’t believe it negates the existence of God(s). There are also famous evolutionary arguments against atheism (A. Plantiga) that are not to be taken lightly.

No doubt, Darwin did a comprehensive study of evolution and popularized it. But, the idea of evolution did not originate by him. Here are some historical:

About 2500 years ago, Anaximander said that life originated in water
and that simple forms preceded complex forms. Democritus thought that the
simplest forms of life arose from a kind of primordial ooze [Carl
Sagan, Cosmos].

The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre de Maupertuis (1698-1759) writes:
“Chance one might say, turned out a vast number of individuals; a small proportion
of these were organized in such a manner that the animals organs could satisfy their
needs. A much greater number showed neither adaptation nor order; These last have all
perished — thus the species which we see today are but a small part of all those
that a blind destiny has produced.” [Essaie de Cosmologie]

Darwin was fine, but let’s not attribute to him much more than what he deserves. And more importantly, atheists should not make the mistake in elevating Darwin into a “saint” for a new “atheistic religion”.

Michael

I’m also a bit turned off by the conflation of evolution and atheism. As to the importance of Darwin—yes, there were other theories of evolution (Lamarckianism is probably the best known alternative). And others would have/did have similar ideas as to the mechanisms of natural selection (especially Wallace).

To me, Darwin’s big achievement was in the synthesis of diverse types of information into a consistent theory to describe the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Before 1859 an adequate explanation for the diversity of life was simply not available.