Posted on 11/29/2012 7:56:08 PM PST by kathsua
The new standard for teaching science in public schools should prohibit teaching religious beliefs like evolution as if they were the equivalent of scientific theories.
Science should be defined as using experimentation and observation to discover information about physical reality. Explanations of what happened in the ancient past cannot be verified using experimentation and observation.
----------advertisement-----------
Contrary to a popular myth pushed by those who want to make science a substitute for religion, science has yet to produce a new explanation for the development of life or the origin of the universe.
The idea that the universe came out of a black hole (the "Big Bang" theory) became popular in the 20th century, but it is hardly a new explanation. An account attributed to the biblical patriarch Enoch (Noah's great-grandfather) first described an event in which "all of creation" came out of an invisible object with a fiery light inside (i.e., a black hole) thousands of years ago. Many cultures use the word "egg" to describe the object the universe came out of.
The idea of one species changing to another, particularly the idea of humans being related to apes, was around long before Charles Darwin wrote his "Origin of the Species." Darwin was reluctant to say we are a monkey's grandchildren, so he just suggested that we are distant cousins. The ancient Tibetan religion had no such inhibitions and claims that we are descended from monkeys.
Evolutionists ignore the fact that humans use gradual changes to develop complex equipment. Development of biological life through gradual changes implies that an Intelligence developed life.
See, you just proved my point!
Geocentrism has nothing to do with what goes around who.
A scientist would recognize that without any struggle.
Your cognition is too limited to wrap around such issues.
That doesn't mean that by default it is correct.
Here's a more accurate statement.....
I know that Darwin’s theory of natural selection of genetic variation is the best God free explanation for how life has changed and how it continues to change.
I know that it is a useful model.
Maybe so, but it is not science.
You do know what the scientific method is and how to use it, do you not?
I’m reviewing this thread that’s pretty much over now. It is typical of the useless conversations that take place on this topic.
My comment to you is that I see no need for you to promote liberal/left propaganda.
Conservatives have been and are much more pro-science than liberals.
Don’t let the liberal propaganda onslaught shape your thinking.
Don’t buy in to cartoonish caricatures that they push.
Yeah, but the evos need government funding to keep forcing its monopoly in the public education system.
Your objection is as relevant as complaining that you cannot get a first down while playing soccer. Science doesn't include God in it's explanations.
Presupposing supernatural causation of physical phenomena is not science - it is creationism - and it is useless because it leads to no further discovery or explanation. Goddidit - no other explanation necessary, no further discovery forthcoming, no application, no use.
Thus my original point - next up - an explanation how Gravity, Physics, Geology, etc are all not science. But creationism and intelligent design ARE!/ gag!
Hmm, seems that it was Newton’s reasoning that God was a God of order and that the universe could be investigated in an orderly manner to learn more about Him.
Pinging A-G as she is much better informed on that matter.
What you fail to recognize is that when there are only two sides of a topic, there can be no neutral ground. There is either God or no-God.
So your preference is the no God one.
Why and what makes it superior to the God position, in your mind?
Knowing very well what Darwinism is, you lay claim that you do not.
Then, plying scientific political correctness you attempt some misdirection with reference to "Newtonism" and "Mendelism".
Then you reference my question as 'ignorant'...a simple yes or no would have done nicely.
Then you tell me to grow up at my age of 61 years.
You reference my quesiton as a 'game', when it is only a question.
Then you ask yourself several questions, for which you are willing to offer up an answer.
The obligatory invective about creationism, about which you seem assertive and veridical.
Then you recommend lacrimation, to what end I do not know.
But you still refuse to answer my simple, unambiguous question.I will not ask again. Anyone,....I mean anyone,....scientist or layman who reads our conversation can clearly see that you are afraid to address this simple, crystalline question. That is answer enough. Your fidelity to proclaimation of Darwinism as truth has been shown as whored and not something which offers faithfulness to your own acclaimations. You would like to answer my question in the affirmative, but you know you simply cannot do that. So you will continue to insult those who disagree with you as having a Weltanschaung different from yours, even as they are seeking answers, just like you are seeking answers to your questions.
Well, good luck to you and yours. Hope you have a nice Christmas.
To be fair to creationists and other enemies of “Darwinism”—most popularly Lockean Blank Slaters, as well as those who still blame him for the Nazis—there is such a thing as non-scientific Darwinism. And I don’t mean popular Darwinism, which is inaccurate enough. I mean the continuation of the sort of mechanistic materialism formerly associated with Descartes, Newton, Marx, etc. You know, the conception of natural history as God locked out, events being determined like dominoes tumbling in a row, things in the saddle and man as the horse, which no one really believes anymore but a century or more ago was in fashion.
There aren’t many Newtonian mechanists since Einstein and quantum mechanics, which despite bearing “mechanics” in its title has escaped being viewed as mechanistic (though still horrifying to many), and Marx has retreated back to economics, literary theory, and a smattering across the social sciences and history. But Darwin is still Hot Stuff, almost as if the Scopes trial never adjourned. So God fearing folk attach to him everything big, bad, atheistic, and red in tooth and claw implied by a scientific worldview, while popular Darwinists use legitimate and non-scientific arguments alike to browbeat the philistines.
This thread confuses non-scientific “macroevolution,” which is associated with brutal mechanistic materialism in their minds and called “Darwinism,” and proceeds to demonstrate that it isn’t scientific. Well, duh. But that’s the theory that put Darwin in the pantheon along with Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc., which is natural selection. It really isn’t fair to blame science for how Darwin has been unscientifically used, and anyway you can’t defeat it by proving one of the things most associated with Darwin isn’t scientific while leaving alone the thing we all know is science and which he is most famous for.
There is no such theory as Darwinism, no, though there might be and certainly used to be an extra-scientific Darwinian intellectual faction, or several of them. There used to be an extra-scientific Newtonianism—which really was a carryover from previous thought, most famously Descartes. In fact it may have been the most popular way to describe the scientific worldview from the outside in the 18th and 19th centuries, before it was shattered by Einstein. There absolutely was and is still an extra-scientific Einsteinism, which we call relativism—though it, too, predates Einstein, going back at least to the ancient Greeks. I doubt there’s one in ten educated people who can explain physical relativity beyond the Special Theory, but we all know what there being no absolute measure between different perspectives means in other fields.
These “isms” were and are more or less organized. For Newton and Einstein, they gave concreteness to much bigger assumptions. It would be accurate to say there were entire generations of materialists and relativists who would’ve argued on as they did with or without Newton and Einstein, though they were no doubt happy to stamp their worldview with scientific credibility. With Darwin it was different, and from the beginning there was an organized movement to defend and spread it nit just within science but in the larger “culture wars,” if such a term is appropriate. Then there were the various and now infamous factions of “social Darwinism,” which were unscientific and sometimes pulled from explicit writings if Darwin but more often only implied.
Nowadays, the fight is mainly between creationists and pop-Darwinists like Dawkins and Dennett. I can go along with creationists and say they often make totally unscientific arguments, though non-scientific might be a better term since they aren’t meant to be scientific. Anyway, they can be called Darwinists and they do overplayed their hands and steal the label of science to emblazon the non-scientific hammer with which they cave in creationist skulls.
However, it won’t do to defeat Darwin by knocking down such arguments as un- or non-scientific. First of all it goes nowhere towards proving creationism is any more scientific. More importantly, everyone who matters knows most of these arguments aren’t scientific. Darwin’s scientific claim to fame is natural selection, and it is that which evolutionary biologists spend all day confirming. That is not touched by discrediting “macroevolution.” Which is why I say this thread is going after a straw man.
When Newton was doing science his view of God informed his view of science - but he did not presume to include God as the cause of any of his observations.
I also believe that God is a God of order and that the universe can be investigated in an orderly manner to learn more about God, and make useful predictive theories about the universe.
Einstein also assumed that God was a God of order. He wasn't a member of any traditional theology - but he did believe that God made the rules that governed the universe.
The dichotomy you attempt to set up - either God or no-God - is simplistic to the point of being infantile.
Does the Pope also prefer the “no God” explanation?
As to what makes scientific explanations superior to Goddidit explanations - that speaks for itself - and I have repeated it many times. Science is of use. Creationism is useless.
Useful is superior to useless.
Scientific explanations are useful and superior to creationist explanations that are inferior and useless.
You don’t seem to realize your very question is obfuscatory. There is a massive literature of Darwinism, most of it non-scientific. There’s Darwinism at large, then there’s the science of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology has a sense of the grand sweep of life, but it does not KNOW that “Darwinism” is the true story of the development if life on this planet. It doesn’t know because there’s no experiment to run to prove it.
By demonstrating that they don’t know you have wounded non-scientific Darwinism. But you haven’t at all touched the actual science of evolution, because evolutionary biologists—who may or may not be thoroughgoing extra-scientific Darwinists—never thought they had proved it. They are perfectly happy to go on doing what they had been doing, which was not to prove how life began, nor to document how every single species ever came into being, though they have a pretty good idea.
“Darwinism” is, at best, a loaded term - like a rorshach drawing in which every observer sees what he wants to (or doesn’t want to) see.
Einstein was rather preterbed at the postmodernists glomming on to his theory or relativity as any sort of confirmation that the universe is disjointed or that reality is meaningless. He saw relativity as an essential symmetry to the universe, that the effect of acceleration caused by gravity was functionally equivalent to the acceleration caused by mechanical force.
So Einstein would not be an “Einsteinist” in the sense that the postmodernists would have it.
I do not venerate Darwin, nor draw wildly extravagent philosophical extrapolations based upon his theory. I do not accept “Darwinism” by my own, or probably most others explanation of that (loaded) term. But I do accept the theory of natural selection of genetic variation as the most useful and predictive model to explain biological evolution.
How else are we going to explain the observations? What else is there?
Which is to say that Christianity is a dead end, and useless (see the fallacy of The Smuggled Concept, or its close relation The Stolen Concept, otherwise known as the Hijacked Concept).
Since you seem to believe that you’re entitled to select what you chose to definitively call “Creationism” and what you chose to exclude, then you should have no objection if others do the same with any word of their choosing, like, oh say . . . “Evolution,” citing eminent scientists, obviously friendly to the Theory of Evolution and widely acclaimed throughout the world as unchallenged experts on science, to provide us with a definition by virtue of its “popular use”: scientists such as William B. Provine, Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University, who, in a 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address entitled Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life, declared that “Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.” He then went on to enumerate them; 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent; or Daniel Dennett, Tufts philosopher and professor of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, who has stated in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that Darwinian evolution is “a universal acid” that dissolves all traditional religious and moral beliefs.
Many prominent scientists have chosen to express similar sentiments and to declare value judgments, religious pronouncements, cultural conclusions and philosophical opinions grounded in Science generally, and Evolution specifically, among whom we can count, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Stephen J. Gould, Peter Sanger, Michael Tooley, Richard Lewontin, Steven Hawking, Carl Sagan (now consigned to a self-imposed oblivion), Marc Hauser, Victor Stenger, and Steven Weinberg, and a whole host of other Atheist, Agnostic, or Science sycophants, who, only under the most severe of intellectual stressful urgency, will admit that Science doesn’t do religion.
From just this little we can begin to construct a definition of Evolution:
Evolution, noun, a scientific theory dealing with the origin of life, which serves as a universal acid that dissolves all traditional religious and moral beliefs, and establishes that 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.
Earlier, in #129, you claim Christians believe that; “Geology isn’t science,” “Astronomy isn’t science,” “Paleontology isn’t science,” “Physics isn’t science,” “Science isn’t science,” “But Creationism and Intelligent design IS science,” and you follow up with the smirky remark “Amusing!”
To which my reply:
Astronomy isn’t religion or philosophy;
Paleontology isn’t religion or philosophy;
Physics isn’t religion or philosophy;
Science isn’t religion or philosophy;
But Creationism IS!
Amusing.
What's amusing? That “Scientists” should believe Evolution, or Science generally, can lead Mankind to the knowledge most indispensable to the continuance of Human life
And, Intelligent Design, arising out of the Judeo-Christian Creationist belief, is a theory and must be defended scientifically only to the extent that it is put forth as a scientific theory.
Beep to others, who might have an interest in the topic . . . they’re at it again.
“seems that it was Newton’s reasoning that God was a God of order and that the universe could be investigated in an orderly manner to learn more about Him”
That was his reasoning, yes, but not his scientific reasoning. God stands without His own creation. Newtonian science is concerned only with creation. You don’t read “because God said so” at the end of each law of motion, and if you did it would be scientifically superfluous.
God is metaphysical; Newtonian physics is physical, naturally.
“There is either God or no-God”
While true that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand (i.e. whether evolution is scientific). Or am I an atheist if I, for instance, discuss this week’s Sunday night football game without mentioning God?
I have told you many times before that you can feel free to add “special” to any instance where I type “creationism”. Special creationism is not synonymous with Christianity. Rejection of it is not synonymous with rejecting God. Piety is not measured on a sliding scale of just how whacked out your cosmology is, otherwise our resident geocentric creationists have you all beat!!! Lol!!!
Beeps passing in the night! (Thanks, Blue Eyes!) (grin)
Now why is it that I doubt your sincerity?
Maybe it's because you don't follow your own advice.
(And that marks you as nothing more than a hapless propagandist)
The dichotomy you attempt to set up - either God or no-God - is simplistic to the point of being infantile.
What are the other options?
As to what makes scientific explanations superior to Goddidit explanations - that speaks for itself - and I have repeated it many times.
And the problem with God doing it is what, exactly?
How is that worse than nothing did it? IOW, how is *It just happened* a better option than God doing it?
It seems Newton got his "non-scientific" reasoning from St. Thomas.
“. . . no opinion or belief is sent to man from God contrary to natural knowledge.”
. . . T. Aquinas, Of God and His Creatures , Book I, Chap. 7
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.