Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light, Lord of Heck
Posted on 02/20/2006 5:33:50 AM PST by ToryHeartland
Churches urged to back evolution By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter, St Louis
US scientists have called on mainstream religious communities to help them fight policies that undermine the teaching of evolution.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) hit out at the "intelligent design" movement at its annual meeting in Missouri.
Teaching the idea threatens scientific literacy among schoolchildren, it said.
Its proponents argue life on Earth is too complex to have evolved on its own.
As the name suggests, intelligent design is a concept invoking the hand of a designer in nature.
It's time to recognise that science and religion should never be pitted against each other Gilbert Omenn AAAS president
There have been several attempts across the US by anti-evolutionists to get intelligent design taught in school science lessons.
At the meeting in St Louis, the AAAS issued a statement strongly condemning the moves.
"Such veiled attempts to wedge religion - actually just one kind of religion - into science classrooms is a disservice to students, parents, teachers and tax payers," said AAAS president Gilbert Omenn.
"It's time to recognise that science and religion should never be pitted against each other.
"They can and do co-exist in the context of most people's lives. Just not in science classrooms, lest we confuse our children."
'Who's kidding whom?'
Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which campaigns to keep evolution in public schools, said those in mainstream religious communities needed to "step up to the plate" in order to prevent the issue being viewed as a battle between science and religion.
Some have already heeded the warning.
"The intelligent design movement belittles evolution. It makes God a designer - an engineer," said George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory.
"Intelligent design concentrates on a designer who they do not really identify - but who's kidding whom?"
Last year, a federal judge ruled in favour of 11 parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, who argued that Darwinian evolution must be taught as fact.
Dover school administrators had pushed for intelligent design to be inserted into science teaching. But the judge ruled this violated the constitution, which sets out a clear separation between religion and state.
Despite the ruling, more challenges are on the way.
Fourteen US states are considering bills that scientists say would restrict the teaching of evolution.
These include a legislative bill in Missouri which seeks to ensure that only science which can be proven by experiment is taught in schools.
I think if we look at where the empirical scientific evidence leads us, it leads us towards intelligent design Teacher Mark Gihring "The new strategy is to teach intelligent design without calling it intelligent design," biologist Kenneth Miller, of Brown University in Rhode Island, told the BBC News website.
Dr Miller, an expert witness in the Dover School case, added: "The advocates of intelligent design and creationism have tried to repackage their criticisms, saying they want to teach the evidence for evolution and the evidence against evolution."
However, Mark Gihring, a teacher from Missouri sympathetic to intelligent design, told the BBC: "I think if we look at where the empirical scientific evidence leads us, it leads us towards intelligent design.
"[Intelligent design] ultimately takes us back to why we're here and the value of life... if an individual doesn't have a reason for being, they might carry themselves in a way that is ultimately destructive for society."
Economic risk
The decentralised US education system ensures that intelligent design will remain an issue in the classroom regardless of the decision in the Dover case.
"I think as a legal strategy, intelligent design is dead. That does not mean intelligent design as a social movement is dead," said Ms Scott.
"This is an idea that has real legs and it's going to be around for a long time. It will, however, evolve."
Among the most high-profile champions of intelligent design is US President George W Bush, who has said schools should make students aware of the concept.
But Mr Omenn warned that teaching intelligent design will deprive students of a proper education, ultimately harming the US economy.
"At a time when fewer US students are heading into science, baby boomer scientists are retiring in growing numbers and international students are returning home to work, America can ill afford the time and tax-payer dollars debating the facts of evolution," he said. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4731360.stm
Published: 2006/02/20 10:54:16 GMT
© BBC MMVI
If you'll excuse me. I have better things to do.
Lest anyone think I am being harsh, I've seen at least two Freepers have in the past advocating that the OT laws like this *ought* to be observed. Perhaps Elsie agrees with them. It certainly seems odd to me that people take their science and history from the OT, but not their law and morality.
Obviously not searching for truth. You are absolutely clear that you have already found it. Perhaps a more appropriate handle is needed.
You seem to have a morbid imagination when it comes to picturing the deaths (and subsequent sufferings) of many on these threads.
Return of Fester placemarker
Absent that your posturings are so much empty smoke. Whether or not great scientists of the past believed that the regularity of nature was sustained by a creator is completely irrelevant to the fact that science's assumption of empirical regularity is what has allowed the startling progress of the last 300 years to be achieved. The assumption of the sustaining deity plays no part in the work or its results.
The "interior/exterior" gambit is simply an attempt to dodge an otherwise embarrasing error.
Certainly, I agree that God sustains the universe and its laws every instant of every day, and that in and of itself is miraculous.
Thus, when I say natural processes, I mean processes governed chemistry and phyiscs, and that involve no violation of their laws.
*Counting only those killed by God in the Bible. If you include "acts of God" as defined by insurance companies, the numbers done in by the Almighty would dwarf anything mere mortals could hope to achieve.
THAT IS NOT THE POINT! Sorry to shout, but I do get tired of people waving this point about as though I just emerged from my monastic cloister and upon cognition of this fact, I will be struck with its profundity and slink back to my bible study.
The point is that science by definition cannot comment on what type of universe is assumed by science itself. Because science is concerned with empiricism and empirical observations, that in no way allows one to say, "this domain must operate as though the only order of reality is empirical." When confronted by claims of a "miracle" a scientist has two options: S/he can say "this does not belong to my field of study. If it is true, it will have to be verified by some other means than that of my domain." That is a TRUE scientist, who may or may not accept the validity of the miraculous, but is not stupid enough to think that he can define the nature of the universe by his field of study. The charlatan and poseur says that since it cannot be reproduced in a laboratory, then no meaningful statements can be made about it, and we must assume -at least in the lab - that the universe is non-supernatural and that an explanation must be sought for all data which excludes anything extramaterial.
Again, this is not "science" at all but a philosophy posing as scientific endeavor. It might be the prevalent philosophy of science today, but it is philosophy, nevertheless.
It is also pretentious nonsense.
I object to scientists attempting to do a bait and switch and talk about issues outside their domeain and call it "science."
Please see my response to Thatcherite for a slightly more treanchant statement of that point.
It isn't a matter of 'guilt'...
The word you used was "innocent". So how is it not a matter of guilt?
NIV Psalms 79:8
Do not hold against us the sins of the fathers; may your mercy come quickly to meet us, for we are in desperate need.
NIV Jeremiah 31:29-30 29. "In those days people will no longer say, `The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.'
30. Instead, everyone will die for his own sin; whoever eats sour grapes--his own teeth will be set on edge.
So...are you supporting my argument or opposing it? Or is it, as I have suspected for some time, that you don't really give a rip whether a biblical quote supports an argument you are making, as long as you can dilute a thread with biblical diarrhea
You CANNOT be unaware of the fact that nits grow up to be lice.
This phrase is credited to Col. John M. Chivington, of the Colorado Volunteers, in order to encourage one of his men to put a bullet thru a non-christian infant's head, as ordered. I have to agree with you that this certainly sounds like a creationist sentiment to me.
It was COMMON practice in those days to eliminate the 'children' of whoever you conquered, lest they bitterly mature and rise up against you.
I don't much care what common practice was, this discussion is about what the infallible moral and scientific guide: the bible, said.
Notice the termoil in the MiddleEast today because the Israelites of old did NOT finish off the 'sinners' of their day!
As I remember, Islam is a younger religion than christianity. Which sinners would it be that God wanted the israelites to mass murder the children of? All of them?
"But be careful with terminology. The words 'intelligent design' are not used to describe your outlook. It's prepostrous, but they have come to mean the garbage coming out the the Discovery Institute, the notion that some things are simply too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner. What you are describing, which I to some extent agree with, would be better termed 'providential design.'"
I like the term "providential design".
I think I will use it henceforth.
Well, no. Actually, I will just state the truth: I believe in Darwinian evolution, but that random chance that causes mutations, and the physical laws that cause things to operate, that's all God making decisions.
Darwinism, updated to reflect all of the intervening discoveries since 1859, does a good job of what happens when looking at life from WITHIN the system, which is where we live. It describes the WHAT and the HOW. Catholicism describes the WHY and the WHO, which is inherently outside of the system. Short of a direct theophany, when standing inside the system as we do, we can only directly see the WHAT and the HOW, and that's the appropriate sphere of natural science. The WHY and the WHO that make the WHAT and the HOW happen - that's religion. And I happen to believe that the Catholic religion gets it right.
Which is why I am both a committed natural science, and a Roman Catholic, and I do not feel the slightest twinge of conflict at all between the two. When I look at a tree, or the periodic table, or the harmony of the astronomical spheres, I see at once natural laws at work, describable by mathematics, and historically describable in their path by evolution (I am using the term "evolution" here to refer to both biological, Darwinian evolution, but also uniformitarian geological and chemical shifts over the ages). The only real article of FAITH, as such, in my naturalistic world view is uniformitarianism: that the constants of our equations have not changed at all, or if they have, have precessed only slowly over eons and eons. But when I look at that tree and those stars, and those laws and that entropic element of chance that keeps scrambling the pot and makes true belief in determinism quite unsustainable as an empirical matter, I see the will of God working it all out. I see in the remarkable fact of my own intelligence and consciousness something that is not explicable by a combination of determinism and chance.
But all of this is high philosophy and theology.
As a practical matter, I don't think that there should be anger over theoretical and observational science. Applied science? Sure. We can use the scientific method to clone humans and perfect methods of torture that would make the medievals look like amateurs. We can use science to mass execute the crippled. Applied science can be positively demonic. But looking out with the eyeballs God gave us, seeing what they see, carefully recording it and trying to figure Him out by figuring out his great masterpiece called the universe? I think that this is, rather, piety.
Lucretius, a non-Christian Roman of the 1st Century BC (and a philosophic forebear of Thomas Acquinas) wrote thus (in translation): "For true piety does not consist of bowing a veiled head before a graven image; this bustling to every altar; this bowing and prostration on the ground with palms outspread before the shrines of the gods, this deluging of altars with the blood of beasts; this heaping of vow on vow. True piety lies rather in the contemplation of the universe with a tranquil mind."
I agree.
The entire human race is under the cosmic sentence of death. It is bizarre that men who claim to be looking forward only to the worms resist death so vigorously, for death is the only logic in life, in their world. Finally, the illusion that your life has some meaning, that morality is real and not an absurd cerebral secretion, and that love means something more than two dogs fucking..... we can breathe a sigh of relief to have all that nonsense behind us as we slip into nothingness. It is only during life that we kid ourselves that it matters. Logically in that world, death should be yearned for and not run from. I don't understand why one would shirk it.
Pot, kettle, black. Where are these masses of scientists who DON'T say, "inexplicable miracles are not my business"? We sure get a lot of stinkin' creationist fellow travelers around here who think scientists are mis-behaving three-year olds who need an epistimological spanking, and arrogate that responsibility to themselves, on the basis of their profound understanding of scientific attitudes obtained from comic books.
What the frack is the difference between:
The charlatan and poseur says that since it cannot be reproduced in a laboratory, then no meaningful statements can be made about it, and we must assume -at least in the lab - that the universe is non-supernatural and that an explanation must be sought for all data which excludes anything extramaterial.
and
When confronted by claims of a "miracle" a scientist has two options: S/he can say "this does not belong to my field of study. If it is true, it will have to be verified by some other means than that of my domain." That is a TRUE scientist,
Maybe there is a difference, on the other hand, maybe this is just a dispeptic bag of wind, and you would, in fact, be making more sense in a cloister than you seem to be managing here.
I heartily agree.
The DIFFERENCE between the two statements you quoted above is that one of the two will admit that the naturalistic presuppositions of many scientists are not demanded by science itself. There is NO scientific reason why the world cannot be explored from a presupposition that the supernatural is reldolent in it, and sometimes has broken forth into it. Within that viewpoint, there would not be the kind of mocking sneering caustic assumptions about, for example....., sweet little me.
If you want to follow us by pointing out that if Christians really beleived what they teach they would be honest and humble and gracious in discussions like this, I would probably get a bit red in the face and admit you are right.
However, when we get thru the ad hominems, it is all about whether science demands naturalistic presuppositions in its attempt to define the world, life, origins, etc. I say "NO" it does not. And to insist that it does is not "science" at all.
That's because natural sciences are willing to look at historical evidence, and exptrapolate backwards in time. We call this process induction, and it is fundamental to all natural sciences, and almost all practical reasoning. Are you also down on astronomy and geology? What sciences ARE you going to allow us to keep? Crystal healing theory and crop circle theory?
All one has to do is listen to the stuff coming from Dawkins and some of the Dawkins type wannabees here or in any internet discussion to see this is so.
Dawkins, or anyone's, opinions on the subject of metaphysics are not part of the curriculum vitae of science.
The DIFFERENCE between the two statements you quoted above is that one of the two will admit that the naturalistic presuppositions...................
You should re-read what you wrote a little more critically--neither of the scientists you are invisioning have made intrasigent naturalistic shutout claims, just as would be the case with about 99+% of any scientists you might actually query. Scientists you might actually query, would point out that science makes no assumptions, good, bad or ugly, about indetectable metaphysical explanations. Science does claim that it is only about proximate physical causes for events, because that's all science is capable of, since science can only operate on detectable evidence, not indetectable evidence. Whatever the means by which you might investigate indetectable evidence, science does not have a negative, or positive opinion about it, science only knows that it isn't within science's sphere of competence.
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