Darwin at 22 after leaving Christ’s College, Cambridge, and previously raised in a Unitarian environment, jumped upon the opportunity to join a an evangelical trip abroad on the converted brig ship, the Beagle, to return Christianized natives to Tierra Del Fuego circa 1832, personally financed by his father’s 400 pound annual allowance and labeled himself a self-financed gentleman’s companion to the 26 year old Captain.
The Christian communities at that time believed in the harmony of science and theology, but sought to explain Scripture based upon science, rather than science upon the Providence of God. Cambridge considered his findings more heretical than scientific a he definitely lacked the prior academic background to be considered a postgraduate student at the time. Many of his assertions for transmutation were within several years pointed out as improper identification of well known species and improper labeling, rather than ancient evolutionary evidence.
The consequence of begging the question, placing science before God, simply seeks to justify its premise by reasserting its premise, placing the Creation before the Creator.
There are two ideas, that without the existence of each, I should have become the most ardent of atheists....
The question of the origins of matter and energy which science can not even begin to touch and this premise of Paul’s...”If there be no resurrection of the dead, (including the first born of men, Christ Jesus) then let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die!”
Everything about Christianity hinges on the resurrection of Jesus. For it proves God’s love for man and it also supports everything else in the Bible as being true. If Christianity be not truth, then there is no other truth....thus why bother to live righteously, love your neighbor, help the stranger? Life would be nothing but a party, assuming you are the one at the top of the food chain...otherwise life becomes the law of tooth and claw, the survival of the fittest!