Lincoln and Darwin, Part 1

^{Note: This article is reprinted with permission from As I See It, a monthly electronic magazine compiled and edited by Doug Kutilek. AISI is sent free to all who request it by writing to the editor at dkutilek@juno.com.}

Parallel Lives, Divergent Legacies

Plutarch’s famous Lives of Illustrious Men, a standard volume from antiquity, pairs and compares the lives of selected individuals from the Greek and Roman empires. Were he alive today, Plutarch might be tempted to pair the lives of the greatest of American presidents, Abraham Lincoln, and that of the most famous and influential philosopher of science, Charles Darwin, since both were born on precisely the same day, February 12, 1809. This year marks the bicentennial of that event as well as the sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin’s most famous book, The Origin of Species, in 1859.
Though born on precisely the same day, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin in their beginnings and in their legacies could not be more in contrast. Darwin was born in comfortable upper-class circumstances in England with prospects for a first-rate education—with the luxury of changing his focus from medicine (the profession of both his father and grandfather) to religion (for which he was notably unsuited) to amateur naturalist—and a place in the easy life of English aristocratic society. The other, Lincoln, was the second child of an abjectly poor American pioneer family, the son of an at-best semi-literate father and a mother of questionable pedigree. He grew to manhood amid all the severe disadvantages of the cultural and economic realities of frontier life and had but small prospects for any kind of education except the most rustic. The panorama of his life held out hope of little beyond an existence of hard and bitter labor in the unforgiving wildness of the frontier. Only a life of unremitting toil seemed to lie ahead; many years of such toil did, in fact, mark his path from youth to manhood.

The portraits of both men are today enshrined on the currency of their respective nations. Lincoln’s profile is on the penny (and has been for a full century), and a full-face portrait is on the five-dollar bill (beginning I know not when—at least as early as the 1930s). Darwin’s likeness is currently on the ten-pound note of the United Kingdom. I obtained one during my last visit to England two years ago and frankly was glad to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

Both men are buried in prominent memorials—Lincoln in a massive mausoleum in a cemetery in Springfield, Illinois; Darwin in the scientists’ corner of Westminster Abbey near the markers of such prominent Bible-believing Christians as Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and Lord Kelvin.

Lincoln’s mind and thought were molded by a limited but excellent corpus of literature he read, re-read, and mastered as a youth—chiefly the Bible and Shakespeare, but supplemented with such other books as he could find.

Darwin studied medicine for a time at the University of Edinburgh, then divinity at Cambridge University. But he was more interested in riding, hunting, and shooting than in academics. He was much drawn to the study of nature—for which Cambridge offered no degree. Young Darwin, still just into his twenties, signed on as the unpaid naturalist for a planned two-year voyage (that stretched to five) aboard the H. M. S. Beagle. His role was to study the east and west coasts of South America, with its flora, fauna, geology and geography. Out of the raw materials of this journey, Darwin published a journal, took part in writing the official reports, and spun his hypothesis of biological evolution.

Lincoln’s one notable journey by water, also undertaken in his twenties, was a barge trip down the Sangamon and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. Accounts of his pledge there of lifelong hostility to slavery are apocryphal.

Darwin is most noted for his books—The Voyage of the Beagle, On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, among others—plus numerous papers and studies on various scientific subjects (an important study of earthworms among them). His The Origin of Species is beyond doubt the single most influential work of the nineteenth century.

Lincoln wrote no books and kept no diaries; he was best known for his speeches. His debates with Stephen Douglas on the slavery issue in the 1858 Illinois senate race brought him national prominence. Particularly memorable are his two inaugural addresses, especially the second one, and his Gettysburg Address, the most famous speech of the nineteenth century. His written items include the Emancipation Proclamation and, among other things, his letter to the Widow Bixby. Lincoln was an absolute master of English prose.

Darwin was not the first to propose a purely naturalistic (i.e., non-supernaturalistic) explanation for the origin and existence of life in general and of human life in particular; the ancient Babylonians and Greeks (with myths of spontaneous generation of the gods out of eternal matter) and more recently Lamarck and even his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin had done so. But the net effect of each of these was the same: to thereby distance man from God—or rather God from man, making man a product of natural forces and not of God’s direct creative activity. This has as a logical outflow the denial of the direct accountability of man to God or of the constraint of human behavior by supposedly “divine” laws and commands, which after all must be just merely human constructs, not divine revelations.

Darwin’s theory (or, strictly speaking scientifically, hypothesis, since its posits are neither observed nor testable) was built on at least two faulty presuppositional foundations: 1. the then-recently hypothesized uniformitarian geology (that is, that current slow processes of erosion and deposition or land mass uplift or recession, for example, can be confidently and endlessly extrapolated into the past, requiring a very great age for the earth and its geologic features in millions, not thousands, of years) instead of the catastrophism that had held sway, and to which the earth’s surface features regularly bear witness; and 2. Thomas Malthus’s theories of population growth, namely, that populations of organisms increase geometrically while food supplies only grow arithmetically, setting the stage for intense competition for survival—“nature red in tooth and claw”—resulting in the “survival of the fittest.” Darwin, in complete ignorance of the genetic transmission of traits, accepted this competition as the driving force behind the improvement of each species and its eventual transformation by small steps into a new species or, by branching, into multiple new species. (What this competition for food supplies actually does is not drive the species to higher levels, but it acts to preserve it from the degenerative drag of genetic defects, deformities, and such. Rather than “the survival of the fittest” at the top, it is more accurately portrayed as “the elimination of the defective/unfit” at the bottom.)

Darwin himself admitted that the weakest link in his argument was the absence of transitional forms in the known fossils, but he held out hope that with further discovery, these “gaps” in the record would be filled. Now 150 years and literally millions of examined fossils later, the absence of any transitional forms is as troubling for the theory as ever—indeed more so, since the hope that theory-supporting transitional forms will be found out there somewhere has faded nearly to despair. Rather, the fossil record testifies repeatedly to stasis rather than transition—both plants (for example, gingko trees) and animals (for example, the coelacanth fish) appear in fossils allegedly tens and even hundreds of millions of years old without perceptible change from forms found living today. Occasionally a fossil bird or primate will be found and widely touted in the popular press or in National Geographic (which has gotten egg on its face more than once in this regard) as “the missing link,” only to be discredited in short order. In truth, there is no one missing link or ten or a hundred or a thousand, but literally millions of them, since the necessary genetic changes from one species to another would require many thousands of generations and a multitude of transitional forms—and this for every species. But they are simply non-existent. Oops!

Doug Kutilek is editor of www.kjvonly.org, a website dedicated to exposing and refuting the many errors of KJVOism, and has been researching and writing about Bible texts and versions for more than 35 years. He has a B.A. in Bible from Baptist Bible College (Springfield, MO), an M.A. in Hebrew Bible from Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati), and a Th.M. in Bible exposition from Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). A professor in several Bible institutes, college, graduate schools, and seminaries, he edits a monthly cyber-journal, As I See It. The father of four grown children and four granddaughters, he and his wife, Naomi, live near Wichita, Kansas.