Dealing with Darwin Place, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution

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Dealing with DarwinPlace, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution

Columbia, Woodrow and the Legacy of the Lost Cause

…into the theological world like a plow into an

ant-hill … Those who were thus rudely awakened from their old comfort

and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused

Andrew Dickson White

If Uncle J. is to be read out of the Seminary, Dr. McCosh ought to be

driven out of the church, and all private members like myself ought

to withdraw without waiting for the expulsion which should follow belief

in evolution. If the brethren of the Mississippi Valley have so precarious

a hold upon their faith in God that they are afraid to have their sons

hear aught of modern scientific belief, by all means let them drive

Dr. Woodrow to the wall

Woodrow Wilson

Tadpole Theology on Trial

Old Plumer James Woodrow

It would be as plainly absurd to ask these questions as to inquire whether the doctrine is white or black, square or round, light or heavy. … These are qualities which do not belong to such subjects

James Woodrow

The Lord formed man of the dust of the ground

Man was born of an ape by ordinary generation

HERESY

mischievous

godlessness sensuality

Minds already degraded

The question which, in my judgment, is really before the Synod is in regard to the relation between Dr. Woodrow’s hypothesis and the Bible as our church interprets it: between the scientific view and our Bible – the Bible as it is to us

John Girardeau

The Evolution hypothesis … is, beyond all question, atheistic … In this form evolution is confessedly irreconcilable with the Bible and our Christian Faith

George D. Armstrong

I confess my inability to see the grounds of this objection … So far as I can see, the unity of the human race depends in no way upon the material of which God formed Adam or the changes through which he had previously caused that material to pass. It seems to me to depend … solely upon the descent of all men from our first parents Adam and Eve. If all men are Adam’s descendants, is there not a ‘perfect race unity’? And how is that unity involved in the question whether Adam’s body was created by an immediate or by a mediate act? What more than community of origin, descent from the same pair, can be needed to ‘preserve the perfect race unity,’ which we all believe to exist?

James Woodrow

… betrays an entire ignorance of what is involved in the doctrine of descent with modification. The first principle of that doctrine is that the modification appears in a single individual and not in many

James Woodrow

‘Pope’ Agassiz

Josiah Nott

scientific error … political folly

Human and pigeon breeds were all of a piece: prove that these extraordinary pigeons had all come from one ancestor, and the case would be so much easier for humans … It remained true that one of the best places to pick up contemporary chicken lore was a human-race book like Bachman’s

Adrian Desmond & James Moore

rash, blundering synodical decrees

William Flinn

Prehistory of the Dispute

… not been able to determine, with all their collections and measurements of craniums and facial angles, the color of skin, the weight of brains … whether there be two, three, five or a dozen different species

Richard S. Gladney

that shallow and fickle policy … in hastily adopting some

newly coined exposition … to suit some supposed exigency

of new scientific discovery

Robert Dabney

the most unbiased readiness to accept as truth whatever is proved

James Woodrow

Fort Sumter

You must resist or you must practically surrender your

Bibles. You will have to ‘take sides’ for or against your God

Robert Dabney

… dangerous

James Woodrow

Towards a Deeper Archaeology

Why else is it that Bushmen are poorer, shorter, uglier and feebler than Englishmen?

Providence … prevents that disastrous intermingling of types of organization, shading off in every direction into interminable confusions

Robert Dabney

Yankee heresy … rank … fatal … deceptive … farcical and dishonest

Robert Lewis Dabney

inexorable barrier of alien race, color, and natural character … a

dense ignorance of the rights and duties of citizenship … a general

moral grade so deplorably low as to permit their being driven or

bought like a herd of sheep … a parasitical servility and

dependency on nature … an obstinate set of false traditions

Robert Lewis Dabney

curse of mixed blood … this poison of hybrid and corrupted blood

will be enough to complete the

destruction of the white States

Robert Lewis Dabney

This apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble before the righteous resistance of Virginian freemen; but will have a race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political subjection, which they desire to fix on the South

Robert Lewis Dabney

Dealing with Darwin Place, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution

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