I am astonished to discover that the fundamentalist pastor Grant Swank has a new article in which he promotes the long discredited tale of Lady Hope and Darwin’s death-bed conversion. Unreal. It is completely false, and doesn’t even ring true — those of us who are familiar with Darwin’s writings wouldn’t recognize the naive Jesus-praiser of Hope’s account, and yet still this dishonest clown throws the fraudulent story of an evangelical con-artist as if it were true. He does put in a little disclaimer.
There are those who protest the above with extreme vehemence, concluding it is all fabrication and that Darwin made no Christian profession.
Right. We protest with vehemence because the story is idiotic and transparently false, unsupported by any historical evidence and contradicted by all that we do have. We have accounts of Darwin’s death by witnesses…there is no American preacher lady hovering in the wings, no joyful bible readings.