For my 500th post in almost two and a half years, I impart a ditty of a story that manages to combine the horrific with the sublime, the banal with the beautiful, and the seminal with the sickening.On Thursday I was making a whistlestop journey to the campus library whereupon I saw a woman holding a stack of books. As I drew nearer I glimpsed the spines, reading "The Origin of Species". I caught the woman's eye and she thrust a copy of Darwin's masterwork of evolutionary biology into my hand. What could I say? I beamed a smile at her, believing she was a wealthy proponent not only of secularism, but also of free speech. I clutched the text gratefully: my own pristine copy of a book that anyone should retain in their personal collection. "Good for you", I said. "Read the first fifty pages", she replied. So I did, I turned, with an element of suspicion to page 49.
To receive the gift of eternal life, you must repent of your sins (turn from them), and put on the Lord Jesus Christ as you would put on a parachute - trusting in Him alone for your salvation.Well, that caught me, shall we say, off guard. I flicked through the next few pages, and there it was: the opening chapters of Darwin's text, printed so small one could hardly read it, continuing on to the last page. The first fifty pages, it seems present a "Special Introduction" by a certain Ray Comfort (one "of" short of being curiously laughable). The woman had fooled me, fooled everyone who graciously accepted her offer. I saw a boy sit down five feet from where she stood and turn to page 51. I felt like shaking his hand. A stubborn resistance to a Chaucerian fraudster, an exponent of every sort of secular profanity that could conceivably exist. If blasphemy existed in a non-religious form, this was it. I quote from the blurb, which references zoologist L. Harrison Matthews:
"The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and thus biology is in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory - is it then a science or faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation."Does the conclusion follow from the presmises? I think not. The concession that evolution is a "fact", quickly followed by the determination that, therefore, biology is based on a "belief", I hope you will agree, gives a perfect, definitive example of equivocation. Needless to say, as an artifact in itself, the book is a peculiar thing, expensively put together, and proudly proclaiming it's timeliness: "150th Anniversary Edition", and I use the word 'timeliness' with all the ironic subtext I can muster.
I return to the UK in a month's time, and when I do I shall send Professor Richard Dawkins a card to explain myself, and a very unwelcome Christmas gift.
3 comments:
They were giving out the very same edition on the street in Oxford the other day too. So it seems to be a pretty large scale operation...
Oh dear. Maybe my parcel to Richard Dawkins would seem a bit irrelevent if this is international news. I should have known - on the last page they give a "Special Note":
"When [atheists] learned about this publication they threatened lawsuits, book burning, and even censorship in vowing to tear the Introduction out of the book."
As if this is really a matter of free speech. If this is being bandied around the quadrangles of Oxford I think we can put faith in the intelligence of its potential readership. No educated or remotely sane individual would succumb and be taken in by the simple hucksterism of the book. It's pretty clever when you think of it, but it won't do any damage, though I can see Dawkins getting his eyebrows in a twist about it. Poor chap.
I did a little research about the edition. Apparently they've given out something like 170,000 free copies at Universities etc worldwide.
You've got to give them full marks for their marketing at least.
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