Excellent National Geographic cover. In huge type, it asks all the religious medievalists inside by asking "Was Darwin wrong?" only to answer on the first page of the article in even bigger type.
NO
The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.
He wasn't wrong. There is evidence. All your counterarguments are phony and easily attributable to some religious or pseudo-religious compulsion.
Recently here in Denmark, an otherwise forward looking and well balanced modern society, where all the universities are government run and we even have a "state church", promoting a fairly open minded version of lutheranism, we have university theologians questioning evolution on "theoretical grounds". All of these theories of course come back to legalistic arguments completely orthogonal to any kind of sound scientific reasoning. It is shocking and a bit disturbing that the identity-creating force of religion is so powerful that people are willing to turn a blind eye to the coherent body of evidence for the rational understanding of the world that all modern science is part of. It boggles the mind that people are still suggesting that there might be a fundamental problem with the scientific method when society is so full of practical, not theoretical, proof that the method works.
Re: 'we have university theologians questioning evolution on "theoretical grounds"'
My guess is that you are referring to Jakob Wolf, lektor at Copenhagen University. I recently read the foreword of his new book, Rosens R?b (available online at http://www.anis.dk/res_detail.asp?ID=1263 and felt compelled to write him. In short, I told him that the scientists he base his evolutionary knowledge on are not taken seriously by the scientific community, and that they are funded by creationists. He reply was that I shouldn't use 'creationist' as a bad word without carefully explaining the intent, and that he will await my reading his book, to have something more concrete to discuss. True, I should read the book. I would, but I live in the US, and can't easily buy it. It will have to wait. However, I fear that nothing much will change. His foreword is like many written before this one, and, as you mention, has nothing much to do with sound scientific reasoning (I do realize that you may not be referring to Jakob Wolf at all, but anyhow...). And, I wasn't using the term 'creationist' as a bad one at all. It is a common term for those who oppose evolution for religious reasons. That I should have to define it to mention that creationist funded Michael J. Behe's research, for instance, is just plain stalling.
Posted by: Bj?rn on November 17, 2004 10:55 AM