Ray Comfort is a writer who likes to engage atheists in debate. He has recently published an edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species that has thrown his opponents into a tizzy. They're not upset so much with the text of the book that he has had reprinted because that is left as Darwin wrote it, except for the omission of several chapters. Instead they're mostly up in arms over his introduction in which he quotes some of Darwin's beliefs about race and women.
Dan Gilgoff blogs at U.S. News & World Report and he's carrying a back and forth between Comfort and National Council on Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott, a stout Darwinian and atheist. Comfort's initial salvo is pretty interesting. Here he is on his provocative introduction to Darwin's famous work:
Why are many atheists so angry? Why are they talking about book burnings, threatening to resist the giveaway and rip out the Introduction, etc.? Why was richarddawkins.net encouraging people to collect copies and rip out the Introduction? Professor Dawkins himself said that even though "a lot of people seem to be very worried about this," he wasn't at all worried. Why did he then tell Toronto university students to tear out the Introduction? There have been more than 140 different editions of On the Origin of Species, many with special Introductions, so what's the big deal with this one? If I am (as Professor Dawkins says) "an ignorant fool," why are so many feeling threatened by what I've written? Surely, the Introduction will be ignorance and foolishness, and simply confirm the students' presuppositions that intelligent design isn't worthy of even a first look.
There's a reason that they are deeply concerned.
The Introduction quotes Charles Darwin saying that blacks are closer to gorillas than whites and that natural selection has left men more intelligent than women. It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf showing Hitler's undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that Nazi Germany was the natural outcome of what Darwin called "one general law." Darwin said the law of natural selection is "Let the strongest live and the weakest die" (Chapter Seven, "Instinct"). Adolf Hitler put the theory of Darwinism into practice.
The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything-which is a scientific impossibility. Professor Dawkins believes that nothing created everything, and his belief is a big intellectual embarrassment to his followers.
For her part Scott chastises Comfort for the aforementioned omission of several chapters and for misrepresenting evolution by overplaying the paucity of fossilized transitional forms in his Introduction. I think Scott's being a little misleading here, but read her for yourself, and let's wait for Comfort's reply to see how he answers her.
RLC
