Colin Maxwell and Quote-Mining

Colin Maxwell hard at work in the quote mines

Colin Maxwell is a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, and the former pastor of their congregation in Cork. I interacted with, and refuted, John Greer, the current moderator of the FPC, on baptismal regeneration (click here) and wrote a response to a youtube presentation on the Book of Mormon Maxwell produced back in 2008; though it is a bit old, it holds up and shows that Maxwell cannot be taken seriously on any issues relating to LDS and biblical matters (click here).

In a video, "Charles Darwin on his own book," Maxwell shows that his is ignorant, not just about the Bible, "Mormonism," and other topics, but is more than willing to engage in quote-mining. Here is the video:

The presentation is nothing but pure deception. For example, here is the entire quote from Darwin on the human eye:

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. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.

This is the polar opposite of what Maxwell (and other young-earth creationists) claim Darwin meant..

To see fuller discussions, see, for instance the following from Talk Origins:

An old, out of context, quotation

The quote mine project: Or, Lies, Damned Lies and Quote Mines--Darwin Quotes