Posted on 07/27/2006 3:00:03 PM PDT by BrandtMichaels
Which is evidence of what exactly? Far more is inferred than is reasonable or rational.
Also, if one replaces your pejorative "pervasive heavy-handed brainwashing"
That wasn't pejorative, it was a description of the alternative that would explain the evidence whether one was a believer or not. There are two possible options: the universe is in fact not being tweaked by higher being du jour, OR the observer is being directly manipulated by said higher being so that they are unable to measure the real tweaking that is going on. Either your assertion is false, or the observer is being grossly manipulated in order to believe your assertion is false when true measures indicate otherwise. A simple logical analysis.
Note that rational option is that your assertion is false, since that eliminates a null prior. If your assertion was true, it would be trivially detectable in machine collected data and so one must hypothesize how it could be that we would not notice such things.
at the very least, belief in a "managing Creator" has had (and is still exerting) a profound influence -- at least on human history.
No disagreement with that.
ah.
What would God(a real one) even need a religion for?...
Amazing that in the new testament it implies and actually says that Jesus came to make ALL religion obsolete.. yours, mine, everybodys.. God is not about religion, God seems to be about family... Religion is a club, simply put.. even the best religion..
In my experience most never get beyond/past/thru the various dogmas they have been anodized with.. to see God..
Hey, Gumlegs. You ignored my plea not to post a rebuttal. Since you did, I have to break my pledge, made on the grave of dear dead Darwin, with my hands on a pile of bones from Missing Links, and coupled with a plea that a mounted skeleton of T. rex might fall and crush me if I broke the pledge. It didn't, so I get to reply.
It's not just my opinion about Jim Jones. His conduct of the People's Temple wouldn't meet the standards of any Christian denomination I know of. I don't care what J.J. might say. Haven't you ever heard of people on the Left lying? Besides, J.J. when eventually set up his cult, HE became the source of authority (like all cult leaders), not the Bible. As I said about Hitler, these leaders will use bits of rhetoric from orthodox sources, but they are, to say the least, not consistent.
If the Discovery Institute is "injecting religious interpretations," just what religion are we talking about? There is no deity named, no creed of beliefs, no prayers, liturgy, or other features of a recognizable religion. In fact, the D.I. denies that the intelligence they allude to is divine. You could claim that they are being sneaky and disingenuous in doing so, but it's your word or opinion against theirs. (Which is what you said about me vs. the people I say are not really Christian.)
"Well, that’s what you say. There are other people who appear to believe themselves devout Christians who claim differently... But let’s look at churches: some say the Bible forbids intoxicating drink. Others say this isn’t true. Some mainstream Protestant churches in this country won’t let their members drink coffee or dance...You may well say they’re wrong. They say they’re right. You both use the same Bible."
There is a difference between fundamental doctrine, which is explicitly stated in the N. Testament, and secondary things which various churches derive by their own logic from things they think they see in the NT. St. Paul specifically endorses drinking of wine, so obviously the Bible doesn't forbid intoxicating drink, but it does disapprove of drunkenness. If some churches choose to ban drinking among their members, that's their right, but it's not based directly on the Bible. It's somewhat like strict construction of the Constitution, vs. filling in the gaps with one's imagination. Religious liberals turn the Bible into a meaningless "living, breathing document," just as they do with the Constitution. Anyway, there is nothing in the text of the NT which bans lightning rods, vaccination, etc. You make it seem that the acts of anyone who claims to be a Christian can be used to discredit the generally very benign influence of Christianity in the West. The fact is that there is an objective standard for what is Christian (the NT), just as there is an objective standard for how the U.S. govt. is supposed to operate (the Constitution). You can judge these individuals by that standard.
"The attacks are not on Christianity in general (although they can be mistaken for that)."
There are plenty of attacks on Christianity in this thread which are very vicious and insulting. Furthermore, some of the attacks on the Old Testament are actually implicit attacks on the basis of Judaism.
"“I don't seek to challenge the scientific validity of the TofE.” In the 21st century, it’s basic science and it needs to be covered in science class."
Well, that depends on the definition of "basic science." I follow Richard Feynman in thinking that physics is THE basic science, chemistry next, and the other sciences secondary derivations. If students haven't reached the point where they really know how science works, and all the ideas which go into such a complex theory (e.g. age of Earth from isotopic decay), then what they basically get is just arbitrary, rote information, rather than science. In chem. or physics, you go into the lab and play with stuff, learn how science is done, partially recapitulate the ontogeny of theories. You can't do that with evolution. Another theory now being fed to kids at a very young age is plate tectonics. Again, not what I consider basic science. It's hard to do chem. lab safely at home, or to afford the equipment, so it pretty much has to be done in school, but anyone who wants to read about evolution or plate tectonics can easily do so on his own.
"Of course science education at the secondary level is cursory and oversimplified. If it weren’t the kids wouldn’t be able to grasp it. It would be nice if the schools taught the scientific method."
The science education I got at the secondary level was not cursory, because it was what I consider truly fundamental--chem. and physics. You can do, in secondary school, all sorts of experiments which nail down fundamental truths about matter, and are very exciting to boot. I built a couple of cloud chambers in H.S., and watched the particle tracks for hours. Seeing evidence of actual subatomic particles was stunning. There are experiments in mechanics and optics which are simple but hardly cursory.
"You’re still playing the religion song. Religion doesn’t belong in science class. "
True, it doesn't. But no one can convince me that what was at issue in the PA case was "introducing religion into science class." You could argue that it was a foot in the door, but honestly I don't see a vast army of fundamentalists waiting to demolish science education. That has about as much credibility as Hillary Clinton's "vast right wing conspiracy." Christianity is actually on the run, driven out of schools and public life.
"I disagree that biology is somehow not as basic as chemistry or physics. In my high school, for instance, biology was taught in freshman year, chemistry is sophomore year, and physics in junior year. Biology and chemistry were required; physics was an elective."
Again I would refer you to Feynman. Physics was not my favorite subject, although I appreciate it more now. It really is the most basic science, and should not have been an elective. I would guess physics was put last in your school because it can be quite difficult, and requires attainment of a certain level of math. Furthermore, there is a great deal you can learn and do in biology without any reference to evolution. You can learn some of the stuff Darwin had to know before he came up with his theory, for example. Going immediately to the theory is bass-ackwards.
"So if one can be a Pope and accept the TOE, doesn’t that mean that anyone objecting on religious grounds is, in fact, “forcing a specific religion on others”?"
Plenty of people don't agree with the Pope on this, so they could just as well say that the Pope, or atheists, secular humanists, etc. are forcing THEIR religion on the fundamentalists.
"When Dawkins rants about atheism, he’s not ranting as a scientist. His scientific work doesn’t filter down as far as high school anyway. And when Dawkins is carrying on about something other than science, he’s irrelevant. Some of Einstein’s … extracurricular activities have just come to light. Do we need to stop teaching relativity because he chased skirts?"
I don't really agree about Dawkins. All that's necessary to get to his position is to dismiss anything supernatural, moral, or non-mechanistic from your thinking, where is pretty much exactly where we are in the public schools today. As I keep trying to get across, you can't look at the teaching of evolution on a mass scale in a vacuum. You have to consider the context, which is a school system devoid of any moral content. As for Einstein, his animal activities have no relevance to the intellecual climate, but Dawkins' mental processes certainly do.
Free will vs. determinism has concerned theologians longer than a few centuries. It's regarded as a mystery, somewhat like the parts of quantum theory which boggle the human mind (e.g. wave-particle duality). The way I think of it is that what would seem predetermined from a divine perspective seems like free will from ours, so there is no contradiction.
"Now who’s using hyperbole and insults?"
What hyperbole and insults? All the terms I cite were used by pro-evolution posters against anti-evolution posters in this thread. Of course, not by you personally.
"You’re confusing the fact of gravity with the Theory of Gravity"
No I'm not. You can do classroom experiments which bear directly on Newton's theory, and you can easily describe how Einstein's theory was experimentally verified. There simply are no experiments you can perform for the kids which can directly prove that (e.g.) dinosaurs or trilobites arose by natural selection.
"And you appear to have the idea that science should be nothing more than stamp collecting. As in, “Here’s this fact, and this fact over here, and that fact over there, and we have no idea how they link up or what they might mean.” How would that help students recognize the vacuity of say Al Gore?"
That's just my point. Since evolution is too complex to be taught or confirmed by experiments in secondary school (let alone middle school), kids get the idea that science is a story which some authority figure narrates while they sit passively in a chair. That sets them up to swallow garbage from other authority figures, like Algore. If they spent their class and lab time doing experiments, seeing how quantitative data are generated, recorded, analyzed, and interpreted, they would be less gullible.
"Theories of gravity imply nothing about the nature of man. Evolution does."
You question this. However, the publication of Darwin's theory sent ripples through Western culture. The intellectual class quickly moved away from traditional religion, as have many of the pro-evo posters on these threads. Many of them made statements not much different from Dawkins'. No such effects followed Germ Theory of Disease, Gravitation, or other theories. You can say Darwin and his TofE are technically innocent, but it's empirical fact that the effects of the TofE on Western culture have been profound. If we're here by a series of accidents (as the theory says), how can we be special? How can human life be sacred?
As I keep saying, it can't be unimportant that the left generally feels no problems with evolution. The nihilistic implications of evolution are just fine with them. In fact, they welcome them.
I might ask you: Why do YOU think so many pro-evo posters gleefully trash religion, why are some of their posts identical to ones you might find on leftist venues, and why is there this association (not without exceptions, but still generally valid) between traditional religious belief and conservative values? Why did the Founding Fathers explicitly attribute their thinking to Christian influences, and predict that the Republic would founder, as it is doing, if those influences were weakened?
I contend that dispersing evolution among young people who really do not need it, together with surgical removal of traditional values from the culture, are destroying the foundations of our free nation, and neither should be encouraged by conservatives.
What a lovely essay/post, Coyoteman!
Of course we must have people who can "hold the skulls in their hands" and examine them, so to study the changing morphology of living beings through time. Philosophers don't do this sort of thing; but science is an indispensable human endeavor whose pursuit has served the human race to its immense benefit in uncountable ways throughout evolutionary (or historical) time.
Yet science is not geared to dealing with other vitally indispensable aspects of human life that are necessary to the "good order" of the person, and the "good order" of human societies.
By good order I mean the optimal state of existence for human beings -- This is the province of philosophy. If I might boil it all down to its essence, the problem that philosophy engages -- at least the non-school, non-academic brand of philosophy that flourished in classical Greece -- is essentially the fundamental problems of human existence. Plato (and Aristotle) would perhaps say that true philosophy deals with the right order, and right orientation, of the soul.
To the extent that certain influential branches of modern science regard the soul as a fiction, obviously philosophy would lose its millennial appeal to the human mind. But that does not signify that human souls, and human problems, are obviated by this "closure" to the human condition. Human problems -- the problems of existence, of birth and death, of the universal sense that humans participate in both time and timelessness, of justice and injustice, of good and evil, in war and peace, in suffering and joy, in health and decrepitude, as actors, creators in their own right, and "patients" of adversity, etc., etc. -- cannot be a problem for science at all. It has no method to deal with such issues.
But just because science cannot engage such problems given its methodology (which is perfectly well-suited to the investigation of the phenomena of the natural world), does not mean that such human problems "go away." Thoughful men down the millennia have insisted on an understanding of their place in the natural order. And here's a millennial theme that has engaged the human mind through all of recorded history: Man wants to know to what extent human life has a supernatural extension. Which of course I am convinced it does, as did some of the greatest thinkers of mankind down the ages, from both sides of the "epistemic divide" that separates science and philosophy.
So philosophy is radically different than science. I think both are absolutely necessary for the full expression of human genius. I think they are "complementarities" in Niels Bohr's sense of the term: Though seemingly mutually exclusive, it requires both to give a complete description of what it means to be human.
In short, man has an "exterior life" in his relations to his natural environment; he also has an interior life -- also in relation to his environment, but one that is "more than natural."
I won't say "supernatural"; I suspect you might find that word "off-putting." But think of it: even such concepts as "nation" or "society" (even such constructs as phyla and species) refer to something that is "supernatural" in the sense I intend in the present writing.
FWIW Coyoteman. Thank you so much for writing!
But no one can convince me that what was at issue in the PA case was "introducing religion into science class." You could argue that it was a foot in the door, but honestly I don't see a vast army of fundamentalists waiting to demolish science education.
Passages from The Wedge Strategy.
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.Hellbender, the Wedge Document, which was leaked from the Discovery Institute, lays out a plan which it appears they have been trying to follow. Dover was a serious setback to that plan.Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.
We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
Governing Goals: To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies. To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
Given what this internal document stated, how can you still believe that their plan is something other than a PR effort to replace science, which studies the natural world, with a "Christian and theistic" version of science (in other words, something other than real science)?
Ah, he seems to have fallen into a pitfall one might expect of a mathematician. He is thinking of the genetic code as an abstract string of bits, whereas first and foremost it is a class of chemical structures. The mathematics cannot reveal the origin of the code, but the chemistry can. Nothing in the mathematical mapping of a triplet of two-bit characters onto a collection of twenty-odd amino acids contains the essential experimental result that the amino acids also bind chemically to their cognate triplets.
Very amusing, and a salutary lesson to mathematicians everywhere, that when one throws out the physical details, one should be careful that there isn't a second baby remaining in the bathwater!
bathwater placemarker
dirty bathwater placemarker
Oh. Then please explain to me how the chemistry itself manages to be ordered into a systematic body. Which it must be, in order to be chemistry. According to what principle does this occur???
Speaking for myself, I have no desire to "defeat" Darwinism; I just want to place it into the larger context it needs in order to be "true."
Thank you for your splendid, brilliant recent posts, TXnMA. "Keep up the good fight!" If you ever need any help, just give me a yell, and I'll do what I can.
I find it doubtful that this is the province of philosophy, as it has neither the tools nor terminology to usefully address the issues you raise. The problem with philosophy is that, as with all fields of endeavour, its constructions are only as solid as its foundations. If you have a problem that can be described in terms of "optimal state", "indispensable aspects", and "good order", it suggests a foundational level of strictness and rigor generally not found in philosophy. Philosophy is what the politicians do while waiting for the engineers show up.
Philosophy should be reserved for those aspects of human endeavour for which it is best suited, such as platitudes.
You responded: Speaking for myself, I have no desire to "defeat" Darwinism; I just want to place it into the larger context it needs in order to be "true."
First, I assume by "Darwinism" you mean the theory of evolution. Darwin has been dead for a long time, and the theory he proposed (and which was largely based on contemporary scientific thought) has advanced a great deal since then. The huge number of fossil finds and the development of genetics are but two examples. As such, "Darwinism" is not an appropriate term; it is largely used only by opponents of the theory of evolution. Those who practice the various fields that make up the study of evolution generally prefer something a little more neutral, like "scientists."
What puzzles me is your need to "place [the theory of evolution] into the larger context it needs in order to be 'true.'"
Is this the same as the Discovery Institute's goal: "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions"? [The Wedge Strategy]
From my viewpoint, you are not advocating science, you are advocating religion. You keep going off on these obtuse "philosophical" journeys, which, when they finally come to ground, always end up supporting a particular brand of theology.
You have suggested that this is the "larger context" for understanding everything. Can you support this notion without resorting to religious belief?
As things stand, I am not convinced that what you are doing is science, nor am I convinced that what you are advocating supersedes science.
Astronomy and astrology share mathematics but are separated by science.
How about this for a platitude: science converges on solutions; religion and philosophy diverge and scatter.
I certain that your characterization of my post is unfounded.
it doesn't matter how many times you try and express that there is no debate concerning toe. You simply saying that doesn't make it true as many, not just a few, bright scientists see the falicy of toe and are very much in the debate. It would be good for you to at least acknowledge that. It's the "there's no debate" kind of dark thinking that is responsible for a big lack of academic freedom in science classes in public schools.
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