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Harry Baden-powellRev Harry Baden-Powell, FRS, (22 August 1796 – 11 June 1860) was an English mathematician: He held the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford from 1827 to 1860. His son, Robert, was the founder of the world scouting movement. Evolution His views were extremely liberal, and he was sympathetic to evolution in the early 1850s, before Charles Darwin had revealed his ideas. Baden-Powell's theological argument was that God is a lawgiver, miracles break the lawful edicts issued at Creation, therefore belief in miracles is atheistic. This led Joseph Dalton Hooker to comment "These parsons are so in the habit of dealing with the abstraction of doctrines as if there was no difficulty about them whatever... that they gallop over the science course... as if we were in the pews and they in the pulpit. Witness the self confident style of...Baden Powell". Essays and Reviews He was one of seven liberal theologians who produced a manifesto titled Essays and Reviews around February 1860, joining in the debate over The Origin of Species. These Anglicans included Oxford professors, country clergymen, the headmaster of Rugby school and a layman. Their declaration that miracles were irrational stirred up unprecedented anger, drawing much of the fire away from Charles Darwin. Essays sold 22,000 copies in two years, more than the Origin sold in twenty years, and sparked five years of increasingly polarised debate with books and pamphlets furiously contesting the issues. Referring to "Mr Darwin's masterly volume" and restating his argument that belief in miracles is atheistic, Harry Baden-Powell wrote that the book "must soon bring about an entire revolution in opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature." He would have been on the platform at the legendary British Association for the Advancement of Science debate that was a highlight of the reaction to Darwin's theory, but died of a heart attack a fortnight before the meeting. External links Baden-Powell,Harry Baden-Powell, Harry Baden-Powell, Harry
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