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Impossible Monsters
- Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion
- Narrated by: James MacCallum
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
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Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
Impossible Monsters is the captivating story of the discovery of the dinosaurs and how it upended our understanding of the origins of the world.
In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline. They belonged to no known creature and were buried beneath a hundred feet of rock. How this was possible was unclear, but over the next two decades, as several more of these ‘impossible monsters’ emerged from the soil, the leading scientists of the day were forced to confront one profoundly disturbing implication: as a historical account of creation, the Bible was wildly wrong.
This is the dramatic story of the crisis that engulfed science and religion when we discovered the dinosaurs. It takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women who made and grappled with these heretical discoveries, those who resisted them as well as those pioneering thinkers, Darwin most famous among them, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. It took seventy years for them to win their case: that the earth was millions of years old and that man, like every other living being, was an accident of evolution. Doing so had plunged Britain into a crisis of faith, liberated science from the authority of religion and ushered in the secular age.
Impossible Monsters is the riveting story of a group of people who not only thought impossible things but showed them to be true. In the process they revolutionised the way mankind thinks about itself, and so they changed the world.
‘Truly marvellous ... an intellectual thriller’ RICHARD HOLMES
‘The most talented young historian around ... A triumph’ SATHNAM SANGHERA
‘An astonishing book about an extraordinary subject' PETER FRANKOPAN
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- M. Bellamy
- 22-03-24
Best history book I've listened to this year
I found this book fascinating.So many of us are fascinated by dinosaurs. What we never realised is that these animals who disappeared from the face of the Earth over sixty million years ago, would act as a means by which those who had doubts about religion, which was the dominant force in life for nearly two thousand years, would be able to use the fossilised bones found by pioneers like the amazing Mary Anning, to change the Victorian world and lead to our present predominantly secular society.
The author shows how Bishop James Ussher determined the first day of biblical creation was October 23, 4004 BC. This was to defend the Bible's version of the history of the Earth. The ancient fossilised bones told a different story. They would support those who used the bones and the rocks within which they were found, to develop a vastly longer timescale for the Earth"s history.
The central figure in the changes that took place in the middle of the nineteenth century was Charles Darwin.
The book shows how his ideas and the ideas of Alfred Russell Wallace on evolution would lead to a clash of ideas that would eventually change society.
The author introduced us to so many of the main protagonists in this powerful clash of ideas. It is very well written and narrated.
If you are still obsessed as I am, by the weird and wonderful beasts that dominated the Earth well before 4004 BC then you will get a lot out of this book which explains the role they played in influencing how we live our lives today.
Recommended.
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