In a recent episode of Tony Robinson's Britians Ancient Tracks: The North Downs Way, he came to Down House, Darwin's family home; and had this to say:
My last stop on the North Downs Way is at the house of someone who knew these downs intimately and drew a conclusion from them that turned religion on its head.Note the emphasised words. Robinson is an 'ordinary bloke'. Not a scientist, not an academic or an expert in the history of science and ideas. He's a 'simple' film maker, so what he says represents what the ordinary everyday understanding is; and here it is, of Darwinian evolution: it doesn't point to God for him or his typical viewer; it obliterates God, it certainly changes our understanding of us within the universe and our place in the world, because by Darwin's theory, basic reality is not personal, not about love and relationships, but about mute, meaningless, randomly interacting buffeting matter. Mindless, loveless and without hope, will or significance, because the only significance-givers: minded beings, are mere arrangements of matter in a cosmos that is basically matter. So nothing 'matters'!
Charles Darwin is one of the greatest thinkers in history. And his theories on nature made us re-examine our place in the world. In 1842 after his round-the-world trip on HMS Beagle, Darwin moved to Down House, just off the North Downs Way.
[narrative about his study decor]
And it was here that Charles Darwin wrote a book that transformed our understanding of us within the universe and that book was ‘The Origin of Species’. And he wrote it here. I think that’s really exciting. Darwin’s book ‘The Origin of Species’ marked a dramatic turning point in scientific thought, that life on earth was a process of evolution and not an act of God.
The rhetoric of theistic evolution falls flat for the ordinary person; evolution doesn't turn them to a creator, but inward to their own reference point: themselves and their 'feel good' scale of evaluation. A dead end!
