Posted on 07/23/2006 8:49:26 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
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"There is no reason why God could not have used natural evolution as the way to work out his design for the universe."
That's how I've always thought about it.
God gave us 'freewill' and in so doing has allowed us to shape out destiny.
Natural evolution would seem to be just another form of it.
That does NOT imply that these attacks are necessarily "intrinsic" to Darwinism, nor that these folks are representative.
The risk exists but it is not certain.
He's correct that Ann is attacking a dumbed-down/strawman version of Darwin: and it is an interesting approach to claim Darwinism refutes leftism. Will digest this over time before making up my mind.
Cheers!
The problem that I perceive is that people have been viewing what is nothing more than an objective attempt to see nature as it actually is, and turning it into a political and moral philosophy to be propounded by one side or another through the powers of the State. You might just as well try to codify the laws of gravity.
Funny how this got lumped in with the biological evolution we usually discuss.
Double talk!
Recently a liberal pseudo male psychologist tried to feed me a line of bull puckey that "Women don't like conservative men". He couldn't explain why approximately half the country was conservative. By his explanation conservatives should have died out long ago.
It didn't take long for him to get his education when even liberal women chimed in and said that it wasn't really true because the things that attracted them to men weren't usually found in very liberal men. The only women that really agreed with him were the far left code pink types who weren't "breeders" anyway.
So much for the PHD.
Please explain what you believe is "double talk" and how it is double-talk.
Possibly true.
However, "Darwinism" today means much more than what was written by Darwin, just as Marxism today incorporates a lot of ideas never propounded by Marx.
For instance, Darwin himself carefully avoided any attempt to explain how life came into being, as opposed to the differention of species in existing life forms. However, Darwinists today try to explain not only the emergence of life from non-living matter, but some even try to use the theory to deny the possibility of God being involved in the creation of the Universe.
The Nazis saw history as a struggle between "races," in much the same way Marxists see in it a struggle between "classes."
Nazis are much more Darwinist insofar as they view the issue as one of survival of the fittest race, with little or no morality involved.
Marxists, OTOH, base their appeal largely on moral grounds of fairness, equality, etc.
In a very real sense, Marxist ideology is a Christian heresy whereas Nazism is an attempt to revive pre-Christian and anti-Christian ideologies.
In power, of course, the two ideologies function very similarly.
There is nothing in Darwin to justify deliberate extermination, and Hitler never claimed any such justification. (Hitler studied art and architecture, not biology.) Actually, eliminating genetic diversity is almost a guarantee of eventual extinction. Not very Darwinian at all. And attempting to have government actually manage the process is far more like Intelligent Design than Darwin's unguided process of evolution.
The Creationists/ID-iots are an embarrassment - and a clear, present danger - to the Conservative Cause. The primary difference between knowledge and ignorance is that knowledge has limits.
Actually it means much less. "Darwinism" is just a code word used by Creationists for whatever they don't like.
Just read in Friday's local paper on an article that there are 35 million reasons why humanity didn't evolve from chimps and that scientists have turned elsewhere to explain humanity's evolution. But for those who believe they evolved from apelike creatures, Darwin's evolution theory will still be taught in schools.
Of course, Darwin would have been appalled at such misuse of his ideas. But it is perfectly obvious that Nazism is in many ways a descendant of the Social Darwinism of the later 19th century, in which nations were generally referred to as "races," as in "the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race."
All Hitler did was add a veneer of (inaccurate) biology to this previously more cultural concept.
If various modern concepts regarding the origin of life and the universe can be referred to as Darwinian, as they often are, despite Darwin's never discussing such issues, then on what basis can similar extrapolations on his work to the "racial struggle" be refused status as Darwinian in type simply because you disagree with their conclusions?
Okly dokly. As long as you've got a reliable scientific source.
But it's right. Chimps are a current species. The time contraint means we couldn't be descended from them
Its use as a code wode by Creationists is limited pretty much to the US.
The ideas of natural selection and "survival of the fittest" were originated by Darwin. Even misapplications of these ideas are therefore Darwinian in some sense.
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