DARWIN WROTE IN THE FIRST EDITION OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES that North American black bears had been seen "swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water." What did this have to do with the subject of his book? "Even in so extreme a case as this," Darwin continued, "if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."

Critics poked fun at this, and Darwin removed it from later editions, but he defended it privately. "The bear case has been well laughed at, and disingenuously distorted by some into my saying that a bear could be converted into a whale," he wrote in an 1860 letter. "As it offended persons, I struck it out in the second edition; but I still maintain that there is no especial difficulty in a bear's mouth being enlarged to any degree useful to its changing habits, — no more difficulty than man has found in increasing the crop of the pigeon, by continued selection, until it is literally as big as the whole rest of the body.”

So wrote Jonathon Wells in his book Zombie Science. But Darwin’s Theory of Evolution had problems. Problems that he knew and worried about from day one and they were as big as a whale. In fact the first and biggest , most threatening problem to his Theory of Evolution that he knew about was as big as a Blue Whale – or a 200 ton aquatic American black bear.

Tag words: Charles Darwin; On the Origin of Species; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Stephen Meyer; Return of the God Hypothesis; Neo-Darwinism; the modern synthesis; Richard Dawkins; The God Delusion; Bishop Samuel Wilberforce; Thomas Henry Huxley; Daniel Boorstin; The Discoverers; Alister McGrath; The Twilight of Atheism; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker;

Now I’m about to enter into a discussion of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. I’ll be putting material that doesn’t agree with that theory, and that’s very brave of me. Maybe insanely brave. Maybe mad.

John Lennox, in his book, God’s Undertaker explained why recounting this story:

A leading Chinese palaeontologist Jun-Yuan Chen ran into this problem when visiting the USA in 1999. His work on the remarkable discoveries in Chengjiang of strange fossil creatures led him to question the orthodox evolutionary line. In true scholarly fashion he mentioned his criticisms in his lectures but they elicited very little response. This lack of reaction surprised him and so he eventually asked one of his hosts what was wrong. He was told that scientists in the USA did not like to hear such criticism of evolution. To this he gave the delightful reply that it seemed to him that the difference between the USA and China was: 'In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.'

This is in line with the view in England also it would seem from my last programme, when I quoted Richard Dawkins saying that anyone who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but he said he didn’t wish to consider that possibility.

The first great fall of man, that we know about, happened with Adam and Eve. Man was expelled from paradise, the Garden of Eden. Paradise was lost.

But then thousands of years later, in 1859, the world, looked at from the point of view of the British Empire, was living in another golden age, perhaps in a new Garden of Eden, as if we’d somehow managed to find our way back into Eden. But then, perhaps even more startling, a new revelation was unveiled to us when the scales fell from our eyes. God didn’t create man, man created God. Freud revealed this staggering truth to us. As we all know today, Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, in his 1859 published book, The Origin of the Species, killed the very idea of God. At least that’s what we’re told, or was that just fake news. So let’s look closely at Mr Darwin and his contribution that lead to the cover story on Time magazine of 22 October 1965 asking, Is God Dead?

Tag words: Adam and Eve; Garden of Eden; Charles Darwin; Theory of Evolution; The Origin of the Species; God; Is God Dead; New Atheists; Richard Dawkins; Genesis; William Whewell; natural philosophers; John Ray; Carolus Linnaeus; Daniel Solander; Captain Cook; Sir Joseph Banks; HMS Beagle; Georges-Louis Leclerc; Comte de Buffon; James Ussher; Archbishop Ussher; Daniel Boorstin The Discoverers; God of the Gaps; Sir Isaac Newton; the Creation;