He asks scientific skeptics to investigate God with the same open-minded zeal they apply to the natural world, assuring them there's no incompatibility between belief and scientific rigor.Apparently, the good Doctor, who, of course, is a believer, feels confident that an open-minded investigation into God conducted with scientific rigor will lead to belief. But it probably won't be the Genesis Chapter 1 type of belief. And that brings in the issue of the Creationists and fundamentalist evangelicals. They argue from a pre-conceived conclusion and usually a pretty ridiculous one at that. IMO, Dr. Collins doesn't feel faith and evolution are incompatible. It is the "created in 6 24-hour days and rested on the 7th" and the "simultaneous creation of all forms" claims that are untenable. Further, he rightly notes that Creationism is built upon gaps in evidence that scientists are very likely to fill in the future. I'm not sure if there would ever be enough transitional forms discovered to "prove" the theory of evolution to the satisfaction of the Creationists is possible. But their absence (which was the main thrust of original article) after 150 years of increasingly intense searching is notable. Finally, he also notes "For a scientist, it's uncomfortable to admit there are questions that your scientific method isn't going to be able to address, ..." And that is a caution against inventing information to fill in gaps, which is something evolutionary science has done since the beginning and continues to do now.
"Surveys have indicated 40 percent of scientists are religious, Dr. Collins remarked in an interview before the conference, but "if 40 percent of my own scientific colleagues are believers in a personal God, they're keeping pretty quiet about it."Now, why would that be? Could it be because of having to endure abusive language like this and worse from evolutionists whenever the slightest hint of disagreement with their theory is raised:
Creationist propaganda is a melange of willful ignorance and untruth instantly detectable as such. The endless dance of "You can't make me see" which its purveyors engage in amounts to adults misbehaving in public.or this:
Such people are obviously not interested in learning anything. This is not hard to detect. You read a thread like this one and it's out there plain as day.or this???
It's all trumped up by charlatans to fool credulous people who would have been more at home scientifically in the Bronze Age.Why does the level of discourse always come do to this on the evolutionist side? Normally, name calling and casting personal aspersions on the opposition is considered the last and worst tactic of the losing side during debate. If you are so confident of your position, why not state it clearly and unemotionally?
I did six years of grad school, half of it in evolution and closely related subjects.
If there was some grand conspiracy, nobody invited me.
I had (I think) three seminars in "Problems in Evolution." All dealt with the fine details of interpretation of the various finds. There was a lot of change going on in classification in those years, as new finds were made and argued.
There was no campaign that I saw to suppress any views. Rather, there was a detailed study of the evidence. And that means detailed; hours in the bone lab with the actual specimens (casts of course), and lots of quizzes on the fine details.
That is one thing that is often missing in the debates on these threads, on both sides but mostly on the side of the creationists. They generally have not studied the evidence very closely. I have seen more cases where they have reverted to Biblical quotations to prove a point than to relying on the fine details of morphology or DNA.
So, to answer your question: there is a lot of controversy in evolution, but it is over interpretation of the evidence. It is not between evolution and particular religious views.
Dissenting views in evolution or any other science have only to bring scientific evidence to the argument and they will be listened to. But the claims we hear almost daily on these threads will not do it: "Its just a theory" & "Where you there?" & "There's no evidence" are just a few of the highlights.
An aside, to all: Much of this thread was devoted to picking on Darwin and a few of his comments. You want to battle evolution? Better start reading Johanson and White and the geneticists. Brush up on geology and radiometric dating too. Darwin hasn't had a new idea in a century, so if you are battling his comments you are a century behind.
Now, back to work again.
And yet it's a rare thread where a Creationist doesn't do it in the first two dozen posts. Guess anti-Darwinism really has nothing to back it up, after all.
The main article of this thread is the usual creationist hodgepodge of distractions, quote mines, fallacies, misstatements, and evasions concerning the fossil record evidence. It is a web article authored by "Various" from a creationist web site. It is not a serious report of an ongoing controversy within mainstream science. It's what I told you before, "the controversy" is not in science but in school board rooms, manufactured and sold to ignorant yahoos by charlatans.
Here are real articles on the fossil record by real scientists:
The Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation".
Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record.
Apparently, the good Doctor, who, of course, is a believer, feels confident that an open-minded investigation into God conducted with scientific rigor will lead to belief.
No one has actually identified a test for God and the good Doctor has not proposed one. For all that, he's still saying what I pointed out he said and it's clear what it means. He accepts evolution and is sharply critical of creationists who feel entitled to sabotage science and science education because they do not.
As for the pressure to conform ...
Your good Doctor would seem to be part of this. Read your own link. He decries that some 40 percent of scientists who believe as he does are not as he did writing articles about it. That is not the same as decrying oppression by atheists. There are probably innocent explanations for the silence of the many, not the least of which is that "the many" are practically always going to be silent about anything and let "the few" write the articles. Not everybody who believes a thing is awash in the glow of the discovery, etc.
Could it be because of having to endure abusive language like this...
You wimpy little crybaby!
There is nothing abusive about accurately describing a situation. Absolutely none of your quotes is anything but an accurate and objective description, with the possible exception of saying "Bronze Age" when "Dark Ages" would have sufficed.
Pay attention to the text of what I'm telling you and dont' just catalog it as "Here's another thing that sounds mean! Evo brutaaaaaaliteeee!!!" While you're at it, stop trying to shuck and jive me. When you want to show me evidence for something, have the evidence or admit you don't have it. Don't fill up my screen with a bunch of stupid blah blah. I can read, I can parse, I can see where's the beef.
Didn't mean to leave this STILL unanswered. You can't use the absence of dissenting views (my point) to prove a massive conspiracy to suppress all the dissenting views (your point).
You don't have dissenting views within science. You just have an excuse, the massive conspiracy, to explain why you don't have the controversy in the scientific literature where it should be if the main article of this thread were accurate. But you have no evidence for your massive conspiracy, either, only the lack of dissenting views.
Pathetic. The lack of dissenting views is evidence for the lack of dissenting views. It's what I said. The controversy is not in science. If forty percent of scientists were being suppressed, they would not passively suffer this. Another thirty percent would protest even if the suppression was not targeted at them. That leaves only about 30 percent to suppress seventy, in my model.
Pathetic.