Page 2 - Reader Emeritus News Today

French writer Bernard de Fontenelle expressed the belief that there really was a man on the moon — and a whole civilisation to boot, if you please.

One might, with Darwin, theorize that the development of the biosphere was simply down to that empirically unattested variant of chance, “natural selection.”

The ideas of Ernst Haeckel, in his youth a hardline Darwinian materialist, were to evolve to a surprising degree.

This form of objection left the door ajar to the kind of “hybrid” interpretation favored by some in both Britain and America in the later Victorian period.

Darwin began casting around in his mind for supplementary theories, sometimes going so far as to reconsider evolutionary thinking he had once firmly rejected.

Notoriously, one of the shrewdest of Darwin’s “reticences” concerned the lack of fossil evidence.

A colleague remarked to me (in an uncharacteristically unscholarly disclosure) that he could not share my interest in “all this old 19th-century stuff.”

As is the case with the Biblical parables of Jesus, this one is entirely self-explanatory and needs no further comment from myself.

Charles Darwin himself exemplified the Argument from Pique, alluded to in past entries in this series, to a tee.

The threat which such thinking posed to theistic beliefs was not lost on the Roman Catholic Church when Pope Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council of 1869.