Darwin And God Poem by gershon hepner

The most diabolical aspect of Charles
is making the highest of all rationales
survival of fittest, thus claiming that God
believes evolution to be a jihad,
a fight to the death for the ones with distinction
who conquer their rivals whose fate is extinction.

If this is the God that Charles Darwin conceived
I do hope my writing will make him relieved;
his role is like mine, he creates all the species
with changes of script with divine exegeses,
determined not only by laws of the bible
but chromosomes where he’s demonically scribal.


Czeslaw Milosz, in “Milosz’s ABC’s” (American Poetry Review, January/February,2001) writes: “Biology. The most demonic of the sciences, because it undermines our faith in the higher calling of man. The Manichaeans, who believed that the world was created by an evil demiurge, ought to have invented the science, but it developed much later…The basic assumption is conflict, and the survival of the strong, the extinction of the weak. The most diabolical aspect of biological discoveries is not that on the basis of scientific data even philosophy can only arrive at pessimistic conclusions. The most diabolical aspect is this placing of might on a pedestal….The religious dimension was not unknown to Darwin, who studied theology in Oxford in his youth. When he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he announced with regret that his work proclaimed the devil’s theology. This can mean only one thing: that he had succumbed to his own observations, and they pointed to a structure of life that was no less repellent to him than to the churches which fought against his theories.”

1/30/01