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Every year on February twelfth, many people celebrate Darwin Day. Darwin Day was created in memory of the scientist Charles Darwin, father of the evolutionary theory, and is held on his birthday. This year, the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth, a seminar took place at New Covenant Church, where Kenneth Samples was the speaker.
The seminar was called Darwin’s Doubt. The subjects of Evolution, Darwinism, and Naturalism have always been very controversial, especially with the church, and now there are many Evolutionist-Creationists, who also have other names. The latter is the belief that some higher power used evolution to help along the process of life, and the idea is balked at by most people in the religious community. Mr. Samples was there to denounce all of the previous ideas in favor of Creationism, the belief in an absolute higher power who created everything and that those things stayed exactly the same forever.
Interestingly though, many people attending were scientists. They came to challenge Mr. Samples and give their side of the argument in a venue where they had little support. Scott Hatfield, teacher of Biology at Bullard, was attending, and tried to convince Mr. Samples that it was possible for science to be correct sometimes and that you could not take these two parts of the human mind, religion and science, and pit them against each other.
“I think that it’s kind of a falsehood to oppose two realms of human activity as if we don’t have anything to learn from each other. It’s certainly true that sometimes the claims of religion and the claims of science can overlap and their can be conflict but they’re both part of being a human and I think that a mature human being is going to explore both of them.” – Scott Hatfield
Another person there was Brett Nelson, a pastor at Northwest Church. He is not anti-evolution entirely, he is only against macro-evolution, the belief that one species can change to another. He does, however, believe in micro-evolution, the belief that there can be small changes within a species.
“I know for a fact that I can go home right now and breed a few new kinds of dog if I want to, but it’s still a dog. I can’t take a gorilla and a dog and try to make them mate, it just doesn’t work that way.” – Brett Nelson
One of Mr. Samples’ arguments against evolution was that “a rational mind cannot come from an irrational source” and that “humans are far too complex to have come from some kind of animal in the wild.” And Mr. Hatfield counters, saying that “there are good models within evolutionary biology that can in fact show where our intellect comes from.”
“I think people just need to get over it. If one person believes in evolution while the other holds their religion as the only truth, so be it. I just think that it’s beautiful to see the human mind at work, no matter what it’s working on, and seeing it bring forth new ideas to be studied and explored by all of us.” – Erin Brodie Przekop