This booklet contains the lecture delivered on February 8, 2006, in Shreswbury, Darwin's birthplace, in the context of the annual celebrations there in Darwin's honor. The lecture aims at giving a balanced view of Darwin, who failed to keep his science separate from his ideology. Three days after this lecture was delivered, Richard Dawkins, the well-known professor of biology at Oxford and also the notorious village atheist there, spoke in Shrewsbury's Music Hall, and declared Darwin to be the greatest man who has ever walked on earth. This claim is a verbal acrobatics that one would try in vain to unmask for the benefit of those who revel in mental somersaults. To keep one's sanity about Darwinism, one has to have a clear idea about Darwin's various designs, some distinctly scientific, some brazenly ideological.

    This was overlooked by Darwin's first prominent critique, Samuel Butler, also a famous son of Shrewsbury, best known for his posthumous The Way of All Flesh. The Erewhon ("nowhere" read backward), or the best remembered among Butler's anti-Darwin books, is a case of jumping into vitalism, which is to abandon science. This booklet also outlines the "somewhere" to which one has to go in order to do justice to Darwin, the scientist, and to remain free of the tidal wave of ideological confusion his work triggered.

New, revised edition (2024).

By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki

ISBN 978-0-9774826-5-8  •  16 pages  •  softcover