The Ray Comfort edition of The Origin of Species. Photograph provided by Living Waters Ministry.
On Wednesday, November 18th the DFP blitzed out a news alert about The Origin of Species paperbacks being passed out on campus, and since then we’ve received many varying responses. Almost all thanked us for getting the information out to campus about the disingenuous campaign to subvert the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.
For those who missed the creationists passing out their “Special 150th Anniversary Edition” of The Origin of Species undercover, here is a description of the event by Campus Progress:
“Ray Comfort, famous for partnering with Kirk Cameron and arguing that bananas are proof of God’s intelligent design, claims he’s going to distribute 170,000 copies of an adulterated Origin, including an egregiously inaccurate introduction by Comfort. The introduction lists the usual litany of nonsense: claiming Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust, that evolution is a doomed science, and that it encourages atheism. Then he spends a while deriding Islam, Buddhism, and the theological value of ‘good works.’ He plans to distribute these books on 100 college campuses in the US, and 20 in Canada.”
Dartmouth was one of the campuses specifically targeted by Comfort, and on Wednesday morning, November 18th, followers of Comfort descended on Hanover, taking up positions that are usually occupied by individuals passing out New Testaments. But instead of the New Testament, they were passing out these special copies of The Origin of Species, holding up signs scrawled in red marker sloppily celebrating something about the 150th anniversary of the book.
Now, to answer some of the qustions we received after our alert:
Who is responsible for this?
Living Waters Publications (livingwaters.com), which is part of The Way of the Master (thewayofthemaster.com), a Christian Evangelical ministry based in California. The organization believes in direct outreach “in the way of the master,” by which they mean the way of Jesus Christ. In fact, WDJD (What Did Jesus Do?) is literally part of their logo. The people that passed out the books near Collis, on the Green, at Baker, and a variety of other points on campus are a part of the thousands of volunteers organized by The Way of the Master to pass out these books.
Is the actual text of The Origin of Species changed?
No. They added an introduction, which is typeset in a significantly larger font than the actual text and adorned with various comics deriding Charles Darwin. If you wanted to read The Origin of Species, you can. It’s manageable, but the text is not only smaller, but more squished together than you would normally see in a published book. As such, it’s not the most pleasant reading experience in the world, but for some strange coincidence, the introduction doesn’t seem to suffer from this problem.
But either way, the text doesn’t have to be changed for Comfort to achieve his purpose. Darwin’s work—while revolutionary for his time and surprisingly insightful given his context—is now 150 years outdated. Since then, entirely new fields of evolutionary science have emerged. They are all in some way based on the original theory, but Darwin’s Origins is far from state of the art.
Comfort not only frames the argument with his introduction, but he also avoids debating living scientists by simply attacking the original inspiration of evolutionary theory. It’s far easier to “debate” someone who had none of the tools of modern science and was just starting to feel out the basics of his theory. To add to all of this, Comfort disingenuously disguises his (flawed) criticism in the context of an “impartial” introduction.
How can I respond to these people?
They quickly moved out after 10s, so students didn’t have much chance to talk to them even if they wanted to. Some were told to “talk about this book in your science class,” but other than that, we haven’t heard of any instances of sustained conversation between any of the distributors and Dartmouth students (if you did have a conversation, we’d love to hear about it).
Many students across the country have already flooded livingwaters.com with angry comments and responses to the ministry, and as a result, the ministry has now refused to comment further than this initial response:
“An angry backlash from atheists has prompted best-selling author Ray Comfort to stop answering questions about a special edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species he plans to give away on university campuses this fall.
‘From now on I will refuse to answer questions about the book or its contents,’ Comfort said, ‘because there is such a deep-rooted anger in the atheist world about this publication.’”
