A Creationist Appreciation of Darwin Part 2

Darwin spends much time on the question of just what exactly constitutes a species as opposed to a variety. In Chapter 2, Variation Under Nature, he writes:

Many years ago, when comparing, and seeing others compare, the birds from the separate islands of the Galapagos Archipelago, both one with another, and with those from the American mainland, I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties. On the islets of the little Madeira group there are many insects which are characterized as varieties in Mr Wollaston's admirable work, but which it cannot be doubted would be ranked as distinct species by many entomologists. Even Ireland has a few animals, now generally regarded as varieties, but which have been ranked as species by some zoologists.

Richard Leakey, who wrote the introduction and edited the abridgment of the edition of the Origin I've been reading lately, says:

[Darwin's] opponents believed that each species had been separately created by God, but that varieties had arisen within these species by natural variation.

This would be a reasonable distinction from the creationist point of view today as well, if there were any way to know which was which with any certainty, but even now when we have the science of genetics it isn't always possible to know. In Darwin's day it was entirely a matter of the degree of difference in appearance from other groups as subjectively judged. When a new distinct group was known to have descended from another it was called a variety, but in most cases this was not known for wild species, so naturalists determined which was which according to the degree of difference they thought they could identify from observation.

It's tempting to quote Darwin at great length where he describes the species-variety confusions of his day because it's really quite fascinating to see how they thought about these things in those days, but Darwin's main intention in spelling it all out was to lay the groundwork for his theory of how a species can evolve into another species, as Leakey says:

Hence Darwin's overriding objective is to minimze the distinction between species and varieties

Where to draw the line between species and varieties is still the problem for creationists, though no longer for evolutionists, who have found an objective way of defining a species -- not necessarily true of course, but objective at least. As Leakey puts it: (62)

Modern biologists would define a species as a group of individuals all of which can potentially interbreed one with another. This is a working definition which holds good in the majority of cases. There are anomalies however, some of which Darwin deals with ...

So evolutionists have a definition of species that sounds fairly definite and objective although of course they maintain that a species can eventually change to the point of producing another species. But at least since a species in Darwin's time was subjectively determined by judgment from the appearance of the creature, meaning there was no way to establish it as fact, so now there seems to be a criterion that works and at least puts a stop to the subjective uncertainties.

But now creationists have been deprived of the very term species. It has now been defined to support the theory of evolution, assuming endless ability to change from one species to another, where it used to imply the immutability attached to special creation. Consequently, creationists have had to scramble to find a different term to refer to the Biblical created kinds, sometimes resorting to "type" or "group," and sometimes using that very Biblical term, kind. The problem is that all the relevant terms are more or less interchangeable. Species simply means "kind" or "class" or "type."

But the earlier creationists had already stretched the concept of the Biblical created kinds to such an extent that it had lost all meaning anyway. Creationist naturalists had no problem splitting many of what today would be considered to be immutable separate Species -- such as Cats or Dogs or even possibly Birds -- into several species rather than varieties, considering them to be special creations in their own right, judging subjectively by the appearance of their differences. Creationists in those days could very easily have accepted Darwin's many "species" of finches for instance, regarding them as separate creations. (And this way of artificially multiplying species, which evolutionists continue to do today, is the reason for the challenge by evolutionists that there would have been far too many species ever to have fit on the ark. But if most of what are now called species are really just varieties of an original Kind, room on the ark for the species of that ancient time is not a problem).

But these days the evolutionist redefinition of species now precludes this kind of classification for creationists. And that's a good thing. This is one of the effects of Darwin's work for which I think we should thank him. It seems to me easy to sympathize with Darwin's objection to the arbitrariness of the subjective distinctions of his day. There was clearly a need for a more objective system to distinguish a species from a variety, and not only biology in general but also creationism could only stagnate under the imprecise subjectivity of classification he criticized.

Of course creationists must object to the evolutionist definition, but thanks to that definition we are now forced back to the Biblical perspective. The unbiblical idea of separate creations after the original creation described in Genesis had to be abandoned, the readiness to assume that striking differences between groups make them species as opposed to varieties had to go, the glib explaining-away of odd phenomena as simply having been created for some purpose had to give way to an empirical way of thinking about those things.

A Creationist Appreciation of Darwin Part 1

Despite creationist objections to Darwin and to the theory of evolution that developed from his work, it really ought to be recognized and acknowledged that some of Darwin's observations have been of value to creationism, as well as to biology in general. I just realized this after some rereading of his Origin of Species and being reminded of the impression I had when I first read it back before I was a Christian. I enjoyed the book enormously then. I always enjoyed reading someone who could lead me through a well-presented argument and Darwin does that in his careful measured way. He's a genuine thinker. His observations are well described and well used in the service of his theory; his conclusions are logical and easy to follow.

This time around I have an entirely different perspective, of course. I notice things I wouldn't have noticed forty years ago; I have objections I didn't have then. But in spite of all that I find myself again impressed with his methodical presentation of evidence and clear arguments.

This time around I was also struck by some ideas for which I think he should even be thanked by creationists. The creationism of Darwin's day was a pretty subjective affair that needed the sharp kicks Darwin administered in his Origin. Special Creation as it was called then was such a feeble excuse for a scientific position it didn't take much to topple it, and even his first edition changed many minds, as he indicates in the Preface to a later edition:

Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created.

"Until recently" means "until the publication of the first edition of the Origin of Species."

I'm sure it seems that a creationist should grieve at the success of Darwin's argument for evolution, but the creationism he reveals in his book is not the creationism it should have been. For one thing, the idea of special creation of immutable species was used to explain anything and everything. Whatever was observed was attributed to the organism's having been created for that purpose. At the beginning of Chapter 9, Hybridism, for instance, Darwin says:

"The view commonly entertained by naturalists is that species, when intercrossed, have been specially endowed with sterility in order to prevent their confusion."

That is, sterility is observed in some hybrids and the explanation from special creation is that they were made that way for a purpose. It's the sort of answer that would stop all thought in its tracks rather than stimulate further investigation into the reason for the sterility.

In Chapter 13, Geographical Distribution, he says something that suggests that the belief in special creation included the unbiblical idea of continuing or periodic creation over time, which is far from the once-for-all-time creation as described in Genesis.

Here he's commenting on an island devoid of mammals and remarks:

"It cannot be said that there has not been time for the creation of mammals; many volcanic islands are sufficiently ancient...."

Of course there would be no question of the time needed if the prevailing creationist view was that all living things had been created at once as reported in Genesis 1 and not created for particular locations at later particular times.

And he goes on to demonstrate the uselessness, even the absurdity of the creationist understanding:

"Although terrestrial mammals do not occur on oceanic islands, aerial mammals occur on almost every island..." "Why has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands?"

He answers that the most probable explanation is they weren't created just for the islands, it's simply that bats could have flown the distance whereas terrestrial animals had no way to get there.

At the end of Chapter 5, Laws of Variation, he is objecting to an idea about the genus that includes horses that was prevalent in his time, that

"...each [equine] species was independently created with a tendency to vary ... so as often to become striped like the other species of the genus," and "created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus.

To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least an unkonwn, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells living on the sea-shore.

I have to say that I agree. Even back then it would have been far more reasonable to consider that the separate "species" in the genus were in fact varieties of the same species, and that the striping showed up as a reversion to a characteristic of the species closest to the original. It comes off as a cop-out, or intellectual laziness, to invoke God's purpose to explain such a phenomenon.

It looks like Darwin has done quite a good job of thoroughly trouncing some of the creationist ideas of his day, and it seems to me they needed to be trounced. The creationist ideas were subjective and silly, but more important, they weren't Biblical. They had already been much compromised by what naturalists of the day thought science had proved, which is always the big danger for creationism. Creationists had been rationalizing the Biblical revelation away to accommodate the current interpretation of the evidence, and this still goes on among some who consider themselves creationists. Seems to me Darwin illuminated a problem and to a great extent even solved it, so that biology could move in a more constructive direction and creationists could regroup from a Biblical perspective, which they must do if they are to hope for any success in answering evolution.