Posted on 09/17/2005 11:39:07 AM PDT by Arnhart
The continuing debate over Darwinian evolution versus "intelligent design" reminds us that many conservatives fear Charles Darwin.
That's a mistake. Conservatives should see Darwin as their friend and not their enemy. Darwin's evolutionary theory supports the conservative realist view of human nature as imperfectible, in contrast to the Left's utopian view of human nature as perfectible.
Many conservatives fear Darwinism because they think it promotes an atheistic materialism. That too is a mistake. There is no necessary conflict between Darwinian science and religious belief. And far from being morally degrading, Darwinism supports the idea of a natural moral sense as part of the evolved nature of human beings.
More specifically, Darwinism sustains the conservative belief in ordered liberty as rooted in the social order of the family, the economic order of private property, and the political order of limited government.
I have elaborated my reasoning for these conclusions in a new book--DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM.
ID vs Darwinism seems kind of irrelevant to the focus of this topic, it's a topic shift probably to stir up a meaningless flame war.
The fear of God to be replaced with the fear of humankind.
I'm not buying that one. Why are there so many socialists and big government people in the world? The Leftist subspecies should have died out long ago. Natural selection doesn't seem to have weeded them out.
Almost all of which are really assumptions
...with numerous successful predictions under its belt,
With many well published flaws that debunk evolution ...
and no significant data/evidence led dissent about its truth within the worldwide scientific community for more than a century
Now that's absolutely incorrect! You present these thesis as fact, when the reality is many of evolution's own proponents have decided that the evidence does not support evolution, and that too many assumptions and mathematical errors have been made over time to consider the theory of evolution valid.
Every time a scientist decides evolution is bunk, you in the "darwin community" turn on them, deride them, then pretend they don't exist.
Let me see, who was the prominent scientist who was for evolution until he published an article in June of 2004 that debunked Darwin?
You're free to believe what you like, however false and unproven it is. The facts are, the more science looks at the "new earth" theory, the "old earth" theory gets debunked and the Bible is proven correct.
The philosophical fears of the creationists, and how this fear drives them to self-righteously defend such bad scientific arguments, is something that many of us evolution-accepting freepers have been trying to explain to the creationist-freepers for years.
When the Discovery Institute started their crusade for ID, I was taken aback at their stated aims to defeat naturalism in favor of supernaturalism in the scientific arena - in order to save society from nihilism. Yikes!
Their fundamental premise is that the natural world gives us no objective criteria by which to decide an act is "good" or "bad". IOW, they accept large parts of the left-postmodernist view of reality, where truth is merely a social construction. In this kind of subjectivist world, the major moral struggles are between interest groups, all of whom are driven by a belief in self-serving arguments which reality will never judge to be true or false. In such a world, the victors will always be simply whichever interest group was most ruthless in pursuing its goals.
So I can understand their fears - given their premises. But in fact the world is governed by objective reality, and reality serves as the final, objective judge for which moral system is best for us to follow. (Otherwise, nobody could ever learn anything from history!)
For the first two whole years of the DI's intelligent design project, they were quite proud & upfront about their motivations. The blistering prologue to the infamous Wedge Document was lifted whole from their about page, for example.
In your article you have this exchange:
We must note that at least in the USA, there are two quite different branches of conservatism, one espousing religious fundamentalism and the other classical economic liberalism. They have almost nothing in common intellectually and are simply politically linked by historical events. Arnhart does not stress this point.So, when exactly did the traditionalist strain of the conservative movement go off the deep end into what seems like right-wing postmodernism?There surely is a tension between the libertarian conservatism that begins with Smith and the traditionalist conservatism that begins with Burke, a tension that fuels much debate among conservatives. But in my book, I argue for a fundamental agreement between libertarianism and traditionalism, which is suggested by the intellectual friendship between Smith and Burke. Libertarians and traditionalists generally agree on a realist view of human nature as imperfecti ble and on the need for the evolved, spontaneous orders of family life, private property, and limited government as the basis for ordered liberty. Darwinian science helps to explain how those spontaneous orders conform to the evolved nature of human beings.
You mean "new earth" as?
...in the seventeenth century [1644], in his great work, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that "this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning."Andrew D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (D. Appleton and Co., 1897, p. 9).
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm
The ping list needs to see this...
I didn't think so, but if you do, then I'll crank up the ping machine.
Festival of ignorance placemarker.
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"As a scientist, Darwin could not affirm the specific theological doctrines of Christianity."
Actually, Charles Darwin's college degree was in Theology, not biology as some might expect. He was more qualified to comment on theology than science.
I agree, believing in evolution and being a Conservative are not a problem.
I still disagree that one can be religious (in all senses of the word- which includes Christians with a literal interpretation of Genesis and the NT) and espouse the THEORY of evolution.
As far as what the truth is, both theories have components that are not falsifiable.
What has been falsified are things such as Piltdown man, (with the orangutangs teeth filed down) and Otto Benga, the African Pigmy who was hailed as the missing link by Darwinists and put in the New York Zoo around 1910.
Both my children's study Bible and my high school science textbook rely on cartoon drawins for evidence- what's the big deal?
At least the Bible can be verified historically through archaeology and fulfilled prophecy...
What peer-reviewed journal did this sudden revolution in science get published in?
It's a result of Nixon's "Southern Strategy." Before, almost all creationists that I knew were Democrats; they became Republicans without changing any of their attitudes (anti-science, anti-business, pro-big government....)
I would expect to know that and I don't. I give up, in fact. Who?
I'm assuming you're a True Christian™!
welcome to FR
My personal faith is inconsequential.
My point was that a Biblical literalist is inconsistent if they espouse the Theory of Macro evolution.
There are ways around the puzzle, for sure.
One could say that Jesus and Paul were on the mark regarding theology, but wrongly interpreted the Creation account as literal, and Adam as a real person when he was not. I believe that this creates greater problems than it solves. But that's my view.
Of course one can be a "True Christian" and have ideas that are inconsistent.
Still, Evolution is not compatible with all forms of religious belief, and I gave you a reason why it's not with Christians who interpret the Bible literally.
Another thought- not all Christians who interpret the Bible literally believe in a literal 6 days, or in a young earth. The Hebrew language allows for a literal interpretation of the text, and long periods of time.
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