Church magazine joins with humanists for Darwin exhibition according to Yahoo News Canada, 5 Mar 2008 and The Star (Toronto, Canada) 15 Mar 2008. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is currently presenting a biographical exhibition on the life and work of Charles Darwin developed by a group of USA and Canadian Museums for the upcoming Darwin Bicentennial. However, the ROM was unable to attract corporate sponsorship, so the exhibition is jointly sponsored by the magazine United Church Observer and the Humanist Association of Canada. The museum approached over 40 of its usual corporate sponsors but they refused on the basis that Darwin was too controversial. In the end the humanists provided 50,000 dollars and the church magazine 40,000 dollars.
David Wilson, the editor and publisher of the United Church Observer claimed “We’ve never seen a need that was so clear.” His magazine has published many articles on creation and evolution and claims that Christians have nothing to fear from evolution. He told the Toronto Star, “There is an inherent beauty in the theory of natural selection that illuminates the inherent beauty and wonder of creation.” Pat O’Brien, President of the Humanist Association said he was pleased to share sponsorship with the church magazine, and said, “They’ve really shown some leadership in the religious community. There are a lot of religious people who are happy with evolution.” Chris Darling, senior curator of natural history at the ROM said that Darwin’s ideas are relevant to today because “We see things like disease, things like SARS, epidemics. These are really good documentations of evolution in action. There’s a big concern now about the overuse of antibiotics. Well, why is that a problem? Why shouldn’t we be hitting every little infection with … the strongest antibiotics we have? Well, what will happen is we’ll select for the ones that are resistant to that drug and then those will be the ones that propagate and those will be the ones we’ll be dealing with next time.”
Editorial Comment: We wonder how much the United Church Observer editor actually knows about Darwin, evolution or the Bible. There is nothing inherently beautiful or wonderful about natural selection and the struggle to survive. Darwin summed it up at the end of his book as the “war of nature” and he eventually turned away from the Christian faith because he could not reconcile a good God with such a bad process.
The museum curator’s comments about needing evolution to explain antibiotic resistance in bacteria are a perpetuation of a lie that started with Darwin. Darwin convinced people that natural selection is the same as the origin of new species, and because natural (and unnatural) selection can be observed, the origin of species by purely naturalistic processes must be true. As Chris Darling correctly describes, antibiotics “select for the ones that are resistant to the drug.” However, this does not make them into new species – it merely eliminates those members of the same species that are sensitive to the antibiotics, leaving the resistant ones to survive. There is no evolution from or into different species, and Darwin’s theory is not needed to understand it or deal with the problem.
Evidence News 18 Mar 2008