I’d offer up Neil Gaiman for an invite to that party and keep my firstborn 
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Do you have a particular text in mind? He often criticizes philosophical positions that the intellectuals of his day were advancing based on evolution. He constantly railed against the sorts of thinking that we’d call scientism today. But I don’t think I’ve run across him addressing actual scientific aspects of evolution. (And if he did, I’m curious to know what it was. He was writing about evolution a century ago, after all…)
Aptly titled “Doubts about Darwinism”
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Doubts_About_Darwinism.html
Also a great point that I have noticed so often:
God condescended to argue with Job, but the last Darwinian will not condescend to argue with you. He will inform you of your ignorance; he will not enlighten your ignorance.
Here’s another:
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/On_Darwinism_and_Mystery.txt
I do not know the true reason for a bat not having feathers;
I only know that Darwin gave a false reason for its having wings.
And the more the Darwinians explain, the more certain I become
that Darwinism was wrong. All their explanations ignore the fact
that Darwinism supposes an animal feature to appear first, not merely
in an incomplete stage, but in an almost imperceptible stage.
The member of a sort of mouse family, destined to found the bat family,
could only have differed from his brother mice by some minute
trace of membrane; and why should that enable him to escape out
of a natural massacre of mice? Or even if we suppose it did serve
some other purpose, it could only be by a coincidence; and this
is to imagine a million coincidences accounting for every creature.
A special providence watching over a bat would be a far more realistic
notion than such a run of luck as that.
Thanks for both of those references! I haven’t read them, but will do so. Looks like those are ILN articles from 1920… He wrote thousands of periodical articles.
Just from the bit you quoted from “Darwinism and Mystery”… It sounds like as usual he’s arguing against a purely materialistic, non-teleological notion of Darwinism. I rather agree with that last line: “A special providence watching over a bat would be a far more realistic notion than such a run of luck as that.” As a Christian, I certainly hold to a special providence watching over creation. I don’t think this is necessarily inconsistent with evolution.
I’ve not seen GKC critique anything along the lines of evolutionary creation (a la Biologos). And, again, in the bit I quoted above, he says “If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.”
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Yes, he’s not against evolution, per se, but he is against the dysteleological evolution which is modern mainstream evolutionary theory, AKA Darwinism, which Dawkins says is the only coherent evolution game in town.
Yes, that’s greatness. GKC expands on that theme of the great gulf between humans and other creatures in the first couple of chapters of The Everlasting Man.
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Well, I for one do not recognize the Magisterial Authority of Pope Dawkins. 
Dysteleological evolution falls into that category of “a thought that stops thought” (c.f. the quote above from “The Suicide of Thought”).
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Basically, GK Chesterton agrees with ID.
I’m not sure what that claim means, or how GKC could be said to agree with a position he never encountered. That’s setting aside the fact that “ID” comes in different flavors, and in essence doesn’t even require the Christian God (which GKC most certainly did).
GKC clearly rejected dysteleological, materialist evolution. I’ve never seen him make a positive case for exactly how life on this planet came to be the way it was, beyond the basic claim that the Christian God was responsible for it.
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Absolutely not!
Not at all necessarily. What does he say that would disagree with lowercase ‘id’? I would cheerfully count him as an evolutionary providentialist (not that he is not totally a class unto himself). 
If I didn’t offer my firstborn first, he’d offer me up for the invite!
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I don’t know–McIan says he has to keep fighting Turnbull because he told the woman he fell in love with (and presumably married) that the fight mattered. At the end, both McIan and Turnbull told their respective love interests that they fought for their intendeds (even though both women were shocked at their duel).
Chesterton does show some evidence of humor at the persistent attempt to kill each other, toward the end.
Nice quote, but I still think GKC here assumes too much–the stereotypes have much more continuity with apes than he realizes. He doesn’t seem to approach purpose with an open mind.
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He writes a bit confusedly with a misunderstanding of adaptation here–it’s what I used to ask as a teen, but the evolutionary biology developed much more an accurate description of what happens.
ID is all throughout the classics and Paley wrote his argument before Chesterton was born. If you understand ID theory, you’ll see the ideas all throughout Chesterton’s writings.
no as my quote shows Chesterton cannot be a gradualist, which puts him firmly in the ID camp.
I read this and it makes me wonder. Do they really lack the imagination to see it. For me it is clear as crystal. I can see it developing quite easily by the smallest steps not only in my imagination but in actual examples as Darwin did. It could be a lack of imagination for some, but mostly I think they don’t even employ their imagination to see it because they simply don’t want to. And it goes hand in hand with the willful ignorance that will not even see the actual examples so easy to find all around them if they but wanted to… let alone the DNA evidence which agrees perfectly. Matthew 13:13 “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” So they use literalism to refuse to understand the parables of Bible. They bury their coin in fear because they do not want the truth.
I read “Orthodoxy” and watched father Brown, but if the above is G. K. Chesterton, what reason do I have now to waste any time on someone like this.
But is he really?
IF evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.
Looks to me like he was much more opposed to the use of evolution by atheists to attack Christianity. What a coincidence? So am I and most of the other people here. He said that evolution was irrelevant, which just goes to show that science wasn’t his interest. But for those interested in science like F Collins and myself, science is hardly irrelevant. In it we see more reason to believe rather than less.
I don’t think that’s what your quote shows. I’ve said this several times, but GKC’s issue isn’t with gradual change. It’s with random, dysteleological change.
Perhaps I’m misreading, but you seem primarily concerned with determining what “camp” GKC can be identified with, rather than what actual claims he’s making. GKC makes hardly any positive claims at all about how he thinks life came to be, beyond that the Christian God was responsible for it. He frankly doesn’t care about how. He only cares about the Who and why, because his opponents care only about the how and deny any Who and why.
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