What Was Darwin's Theory Of Natural Selection?

Although Charles Darwin formulated his idea of natural selection at age thirty, he published his work years later for fear of the controversy that would overshadow his work. Darwin’s theory of natural selection challenged the normal science of the time: the belief that a divine creator created all the species, which were incapable of change. Darwin’s theory also challenged the overarching authority of the time: the church, which supported the ideology of God creating a static species. Furthermore, Darwin lacked the evidence that would convince the scientific community that fully believed in life being created by a divine being. Fossil evidence of the time did not show the transitional or intermediate forms that his theory called for. Nor, could
Darwin explain how life originated or definitively how a new species is created. Prominent religious authority, Archbishop James Ussher determined the age of the Earth to be 6000 years.
Ussher claimed in The Annal of the World, according to the bible the Earth was 6000 years old because the “…true Nativity of our Savior was full four years before the beginning of the vulgar Christian era, as demonstrable by the time of Herod's death.” According to the bible, “ the building of Solomon's Temple was finished in the 3000 year of the World and in the 4000 year of the world…” Mary was impregnated with Christ. This claim was detrimental to Darwin’s theory of natural selection because 6,000 years was not enough time for life to reach the complexity of man through evolution. Moreover, scientific authority, Lord Kelvin’s theory of the consolidation of earth claimed that the Earth was to be no less than 20 million and no more than 40 million years old. Kelvin’s claim made Darwin’s theory improbable because that age would not have allowed life to evolve to the complexity it has today. English clergyman, William Paley claimed that the level of complexity found in humans could not have come from random adaptation, just like the complex inventions of man. In Natural Theology, Paley juxtaposes the complexity of a watch and the complexity of
life: “…Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place…the watch might have always been there… there must have existed, at some time… an artificer who formed [the watch] for the purpose which find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use… every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceed all computation.”

Paley questioned how the level of complexity seen in humans could come from a randomized series of events that negated the fundamental principle of natural selection. Catastrophist Georges Cuvier claimed that the reason for the extinction of species found in fossils but not on the current Earth could be accounted for by a natural disaster. In Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, Cuvier claimed that the reason for extinction was that the “...crust of our globe has been subjected to a great and sudden revolution… farther back than five or six thousand years ago...” that created mass destruction. He asserted that this epoch marked mass extinction but a small number of men and animals escaped death and “…have since propagated and spread over the lands.” Catastrophic arguments are inspired by the tale of the biblical flood. Darwin waited twenty years to publish his theory of natural selection because he feared the outcry that would distract from his theory and because he lacked the evidence that would conform to or disprove the religious and scientific authority.