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To: shrinkermd
Re 203: Some prominent scientists who were believers: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Farraday, Mendel, Pasteur, kelvin, Maxwell,Planck, Einstein and Pauli. I appreciated finding this short list in Coulter's recent book.

This is a total strawman. The question is not whether some scientists were theists (of course, many scientists, like other humans, have religious beliefs), the issue is whether they believed in the pseudo-science of ID or were evolution-deniers. Of course, half your list lived before the Theory of Evolution was proposed. So they don't count.

It's very funny that you mention Pasteur--his idea of the Germ Theory of Disease was fiercely attacked by priests and preachers who claimed that there could not be "invisible entities that were usurping the hand of God." Pasteur and his successors firmly rebuted the "demon possession theory of disease." Ministers don't preach much about this nowadays--religion, it seems, evolves!

If their theories were so convincing why did they feel impelled to lie?

In my Post 179, I showed how prominent IDists have lied repeatedly about what their objectives and motivations truly are, not to do good science, but to promote a sectarian faith.

The Piltdown man was a fraud perpetrated on science NOT by science. The fraud was unmasked by scientists--ID and anti-evolutionists contributed not a single iota of evidence to discovering it. The same with "Archaeoraptor". Haekel's drawings were inaccurate, but there is no evidence that he consciously initiated a fraud. They are NOT in modern textbooks, except as an illustration of earlier ideas.

But the amusing thing is that many of the ideas of his time have been verified--mammalian fetuses do undergo a series of developmental stages in which earlier evolutionary features are present--not quite the same way that Haekel presented them, but it is still true that human fetuses do develop phyrangal arches and proto-tails.

218 posted on 07/23/2006 9:02:04 PM PDT by thomaswest (On ID: "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.")
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To: thomaswest
I thought you might be interested in an excerpt from a book on Darwin. Don't worry not by A Christian or any kind of believer insofar as I can tell.

"Surprising as it may seem, there was little sustained opposition to Darwin's book on the grounds that it directly challenged the account of creation in Genesis. Learned biblical study since the Enlightenment had encouraged Christians increasingly to regard the early stories as potent metaphors rather than literal accounts.

"The real challenge of Darwinism for Victorians was that it turned life into an amoral chaos displaying no evidence of a divine authority or any sense of purpose or design.

"One of the most well-known aspects of the Origin of Species controversy is that Darwin kept out of the limelight. He never enjoyed public debate, hated confrontations in which his honour or honesty might be called into question, preferred to stay quietly at home in the background, and was content to let others wave the flag more vigorously than he felt able to do himself. Privately, he believed that disagreements between scientists were generally fruitless. The underlying story is more complex. Darwin kept in close touch. Even though he stayed put at Down House, a barrage of correspondence was despatched and received daily. He used letters to persuade and to influence. He used them to get favourable reviews, correct mistakes, arrange translations and produce revised editions. Without this extraordinary correspondence, rising to a peak of some 500 letters a year after Origin of Species was published, his theory would have sunk. He was helped by the rapid development of the Victorian postal system and the expanding infrastructure of empire..."

url for Janet Browne's book: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,1826019,00.html

239 posted on 07/24/2006 5:02:23 AM PDT by shrinkermd
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