Monday 12 February 2024
Time for Darwin to throw down?
For Darwin Day, Robert Shedinger Calls Darwin’s Bluff
It’s Darwin Day 2024, the birthday of Charles Darwin, and Discovery Institute Press has a new truth bomb for the occasion — Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished. The book, by Robert Shedinger, Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, drags from Charles Darwin’s closet a long overlooked skeleton devastating to the Darwinian mythology.
Tucked away in Darwin’s surviving papers is a lengthy manuscript he never finished, The Origin of Species’ oft-promised sequel on speciation he said would finally supply solid empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection. He admitted such evidence was largely absent from the Origin, a work he repeatedly described as a “mere abstract.” And yet Darwin soon abandoned his sequel, and without ever revealing this decision to his reading public.
A Long-Unsolved Mystery
The question of why Darwin set the work aside has never been satisfactorily resolved. In this fresh and engrossing piece of historical detective work, Shedinger probes Darwin’s letters, notebooks, and the unfinished manuscript itself to piece together the solution to the mystery — namely, that Darwin never finished his big sequel because in the end he couldn’t deliver the promised goods. His book, begun in earnest, devolved into a bluff.
Shedinger previously authored The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion. That earlier book received praise from scientists inside and outside the intelligent design community.
Scientists and scholars are also singing the new book’s praises. Historian Richard Weikart, author of Darwinian Racism, calls Darwin’s Bluff “fascinating.” Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, UK, describes it as “nothing short of a demythologization of modern biology’s origin story.”
“History of Science at Its Best”
The book resonated at a personal level for Günter Bechly, an internationally distinguished paleontologist. As he explains, “In 2009, as a card-carrying Darwinist serving as a fossil curator in one of Germany’s natural history museums,” he came to the startling realization that modern Darwinism rests “on a carefully constructed bluff.” Shedinger’s new book helped him see that, as Bechly puts it, such evolutionary “bluffing has a long pedigree, stretching back to the master of Down House himself. What emerges from Shedinger’s deep dive into Darwin’s private writings is a picture of a man wracked by doubts and insecurities about his evolutionary theory, but also a man not above a good bluff, one he sold so artfully that he may even have persuaded himself.”
Jeffrey Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University, says the new book also exposes modern Darwinism. Kripal lauds Darwin’s Bluff as “a minutely researched piece of new scholarship,” which shows that “the confident scientific naturalism for which Darwin is mythologized today is largely a set of rhetorical devices and dogmatic beliefs that add up to a massive bluff.” Shedinger’s book, Kripal concludes, “is the history of science and the study of religion at their best.”
On JEHOVAH'S Woman: the watchtower society's Commentary.
The “woman” of Genesis 3:15. At the time that he sentenced humankind’s parents, Adam and Eve, God gave the promise of a seed that would be brought forth by the “woman,” and who would crush the serpent’s head. (Ge 3:15) Here was a “sacred secret” that God purposed to reveal in his due time. (Col 1:26) Some factors in the circumstances existing at the time of the prophetic promise provide clues as to the ‘woman’s’ identity. Since her seed was to crush the serpent’s head, he would have to be more than a human seed, for the Scriptures show that it was not to a literal snake on the ground that God’s words were aimed. The “serpent” is shown at Revelation 12:9 to be Satan the Devil, a spirit person. Consequently, the “woman” of the prophecy could not be a human woman, such as Mary the mother of Jesus. The apostle sheds light on the matter at Galatians 4:21-31.—See SEED.
In this passage the apostle speaks of Abraham’s free wife and of his concubine Hagar and says that Hagar corresponds to the literal city of Jerusalem under the Law covenant, her “children” being the citizens of the Jewish nation. Abraham’s wife Sarah, Paul says, corresponds to “the Jerusalem above,” who is the spiritual mother of Paul and his spirit-begotten associates. This heavenly “mother” would be also the “mother” of Christ, who is the oldest among his spiritual brothers, all of whom spring from God as their Father.—Heb 2:11, 12; see FREE WOMAN.
It would follow logically and in harmony with the Scriptures that the “woman” of Genesis 3:15 would be a spiritual “woman.” And corresponding to the fact that the “bride,” or “wife,” of Christ is not an individual woman, but a composite one, made of many spiritual members (Re 21:9), the “woman” who brings forth God’s spirit-begotten sons, God’s ‘wife’ (prophetically foretold in the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah as cited in the foregoing), would be made up of many spiritual persons. It would be a composite body of persons, an organization, a heavenly one.
This “woman” is described in John’s vision, in Revelation chapter 12. She is shown as bringing forth a son, a ruler who is to “shepherd all the nations with an iron rod.” (Compare Ps 2:6-9; 110:1, 2.) This vision was given to John long after Jesus’ human birth and also after his anointing as God’s Messiah. Since it obviously has to do with the same person, it must have reference, not to Jesus’ human birth, but to some other event, namely, his being installed in Kingdom power. So the birth of God’s Messianic Kingdom was here pictured.
Satan is shown later as persecuting the “woman” and making war with “the remaining ones of her seed.” (Re 12:13, 17) The “woman” being heavenly, and Satan by this time being hurled down to the earth (Re 12:7-9), he could not reach those heavenly persons of whom the “woman” was made up, but he could reach the remaining ones of her “seed,” her children, the brothers of Jesus Christ still on earth. In that way he persecuted the “woman.”
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