February 12 2009 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and April the 150th anniversary of the completion of his manuscript entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (hereafter referred to as Origin). Few books have had such an influence on people, education and parliamentary laws during the past 150 years. The sanctity of the life of the unborn child has been eroded, together with loss of the importance of traditional family structure and sexual morality.
Darwin was essentially a deist, believing in an impersonal God who created the earth, giving a spark of life to some primitive life form, and then left everything to evolve without any divine aid or direction. His ideas were not truly original, but were a system inherited from the classical Greek and Roman philosophers, as outlined below.
Classical Greek philosophy
Anaximander (c. 610-546 BC) traced the origin of man back to the transition period between the water and land stages of the development of the earth. He was the first to recognise fossils as the remains of animals once alive, and to see in them proof that once the seas covered the entire surface of the earth (Newman, 1921). His pupil was Xenophanes (576-480 BC) who argued, on the basis of fossil shells on mountains, that land animals had evolved from marine animals. He maintained that there was only one god — namely, the world. This god was also one intelligent, incorporeal, eternal being, yet spherical in form and of the same nature with the universe, comprehending all things within himself, bearing no resemblance to human nature either in body or mind.
