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He said it: Why Darwin’s personality matters

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Isaac Newton: Nuts but right?
Charles Darwin: Neurotic and wrong?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now it may be argued that Darwin’s hostility to Christianity is beside the point. Shouldn’t a scientific theory be judged on its own merits, rather than on the motives and psychology of its progenitor? Yes, of course – if the theory is truly scientific and confirmed by empiricl observation. Isaac newton was as strange as they come; as John Maynard Keynes pointed out., Newton’s private philosophical notebooks make one think of an ancient Babylonian magician. Bit Newton’s scientific theories were rigorously formulated. They can be tested ands shown to be true for most of material reality. But anideology dressed up as a science is a different matter. Theories like Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism have an explanation for everything (natural selection, economic repression, the unconscious) and so finally explain very little; they are elastic and vague enough to absorb almost any contradiction; when they run into falsifying data, they simply mutate. And since these theories began, consciously or not, as highly skewed readings of the available evidence, the biographies of their founders are very much to the point.

– George Sim Johnston, Did Darwin Get It Right?: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution (OSV, 1998), p. 22.

Comments
I agree Newton was nuts. I read some of his stuff on the internet. its stupid. it just shows again he was working in a area few people put their minds too and was so virginal you couldn't miss. In fact all these things always were dealt with by few people and not SMARTER people as history said. Newton or Einsteins stuff was not the great smart thing as they present it. They simply fixed wrong ideas. Biological processes after all really are the most complicated. Thats why speculation about them is so easily made. No boundaries to what can be as in physics which can only bump around so much.Robert Byers
May 3, 2011
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Vladimir, Citation needed.paragwinn
May 2, 2011
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Demonic oppression is another explanation for Darwin's vast armada of peculiar mental and physical afflictions.Vladimir Krondan
May 2, 2011
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