In The Origin of Species (sixth edition, 1876), chap. 6, p. 222, Darwin says:- "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
To the last he admitted that this thought gave him "a cold shiver," and well it might, for natural selection is the very foundation of his system.
Again in Darwin's Life and Letters, Vol. 3, p. 25 he says:- "When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed [i.e., we cannot prove that a single species has changed]; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory. Nor can we explain why some species have changed and others have not. The latter case seems to me hardly more difficult to understand precisely and in detail than the former case of supposed change."
What confusion of thought we have here. Darwin first tells us that there is no proof of a single species having undergone change. Then he goes on to write of "supposed changes," and that these are the ground work of his theory. Fancy a theory resting on guesswork! Finally he calmly writes of some species having changed, when he has just told us there is no proof. No wonder he finds it difficult to understand the difference between no change and "supposed change." The quotation is marked by complete confusion of thought.
No wonder Mr. Darwin could write:- "I for one, can conscientiously declare that I never feel surprised at any one sticking to the belief of immutability." (Darwin's Life And Letters, Vol. III., p. 26).
What surprises the writer is that Darwin should have clung to the idea of mutability, that is the evolution of one species into another, when he had not one scrap of evidence in proof.
Dr. Etheridge of the British Museum declared: -"In all this great museum, there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species. Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observations and wholly unsupported by fact."
The following admissions are extracted from Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" (popular shilling edition).
"The laws governing inheritance are, for the most part, unknown (p. 10).
"The origin of most of our domestic animals will probably remain vague forever" (p. 13).
"As we have no facts to guide us [that is, as to the origin of life], speculation on the subject is almost useless " (p. 93).
"Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied" (p. 122).
" If we must marvel, let it be at our own presumption in imagining for a moment, that we understand the many complex contingencies on which the existence of each species depends " (P. 279).
Many more such quotations could be given, but space forbids. " We may well suppose " and similar phrases occur hundreds of times in Darwin's Origin of Species. How much shift would be given to the Bible, if it said only once, "We may well suppose "?
If only scientists instead of using the Greek-derived word hypothesis, would use the old Anglo-Saxon word, guess, Darwinism would not have got the foothold it has. A standard dictionary says:- "Hypothesis, a supposition of something not proved, but assumed for the purpose of argument; a theory assumed to account for known facts."
It would be well if an hypothesis were always assumed for what are believed to be facts, but in our inquiry we shall see how many hypotheses are assumed for fancies, and not facts at all.