Darwinian Fallacies (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE GENESIS OF DARWINISM DURING the earlier years of the nineteenth century wonderful progress was made in the science of geology, by which means certain discoveries were made which tended to prove that our Earth must be of an age incalculably greater than that assigned to it in the Mosaic writings. T Before that date the beliefs of mankind, in all departments of science, had been dominated, to a very large extent, by the ideas which find expression in these writings, these having long been regarded as an inspired and infallible expression of the mind and will of God, And this was more particularly the case as regards the cosmogony contained in the Book of Genesis, according to which this world, with all that is contained therein, was created by the Divine fiat in six days, some 6,000 years ago. The results of geological research, however, towards the beginning of last century, all went to show that this account of the creation of the world could not possibly be true. For these researches showed unmistakably that definitetraces of the earliest beginnings of life were found in the Primary or Palaeozoic formations, in connection with forms of great simplicity. Then, rising higher in the strata of the earth, the fossil remains of plants and animals continue to show an ever-increasing complexity of form until, in the Tertiary and Quaternary formations, we come upon an order of vegetable and animal life which must have been very much the same as that which exists at the present day. Wherefore, seeing that the various strata of the earth's crust must have occupied many millions of years in their formation, it became an obvious impossibility for any thinking being, cognisant of these facts, to continue in the belief that the Universe had been created in the space of six da...