Posted on 01/25/2005 6:15:41 PM PST by gobucks
Ken Miller is an interesting guy. He is co-author of the nation's best-selling biology textbook. It was on his book, "Biology," that schools in Cobb County, Ga., slapped a sticker casting doubt on its discussion of evolution theory. And it was this sticker that a federal judge recently ordered removed because it endorsed religion. Miller, who testified against the label, gets a lot of hate mail these days.
But Miller is also a practicing Roman Catholic. "I attend Mass every Sunday morning," he said, "and I'm tired of being called an atheist."
A professor of biology at Brown University, Miller does not believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution contradicts the creation passages in the Bible. And he will argue the point till dawn.
"None of the six creative verses (in Genesis) describe an out-of-nothing, puff-of-smoke creation," he says. "All of them amount to a command by the creator for the earth, the soil and the water of this planet to bring forth life. And that's exactly what natural history tells us happened." (Miller has written a book on the subject: "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution.")
Still, today's emotional conflicts over teaching this science in public schools leave the impression that Christianity and evolution cannot be reconciled. This is not so.
In 1996, Pope John II wrote a strong letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences supporting the scientific understanding of evolution. That's one reason why students in Catholic parochial schools get a more clearheaded education in evolution science than do children at many public schools racked by the evolution debate.
American parents who want Darwin's name erased from the textbooks might be surprised at the father of evolution's burial spot. Darwin was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, an Anglican church and England's national shrine.
Not every illustrious Englishman gains admission to an abbey burial site. Darwin died in 1882. Two years before, friends of George Eliot wanted the famous (female) writer laid to rest at the abbey. Eliot had lived immorally, according to the church fathers, and was denied a place. (She is buried at London's Highgate Cemetery, not far from Karl Marx.)
But Darwin had been an upright man. The clergy were proud both of Darwin's accomplishments and of their own comfort with modern science.
In 1882, during the memorial service for the great evolutionist, one church leader after the other rose to praise Charles Darwin. Canon Alfred Barry, for one, had recently delivered a sermon declaring that Darwin's theory was "by no means alien to the Christian religion."
Nowadays, Catholics and old-line Protestants have largely made peace with evolution theory. Most objections come from evangelicals — and not all of them.
Francis S. Collins is head of the National Genome Project and a born-again Christian. He belongs to the American Scientific Affiliation — a self-described fellowship of scientists "who share a common fidelity to the word of God and a commitment to integrity in the practice of science." Its Web address is www.asa3.org.
But back in Cobb County, the debate rages. The sticker taken off Miller's textbook read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."
Why should Miller care that the Cobb County School Board — having bought his book in great quantity — pastes those words on the cover?
First off, he says, "It implies that facts are things we are certain of and theories are things that are shaky." In science, theory is a higher level of understanding than facts, he notes. "Theories don't grow up to become facts. Rather, theories explain facts."
Then, he questions why, of all the material in his book, only evolution is singled out for special consideration. Miller says that if he could write the sticker, it would say, "Everything in this book should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."
Clearly, many religious people regard evolution theory with sincere and heartfelt concern. But theirs is not a mainstream view — even among practicing Christians. Most theologians these days will argue that the biology book and the Good Book are reading from the same page.
Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com
Actually, if you go back to earlier periods, such as the time of the Roman empire, Numidians and other Africans were thought of as basically equal. The Romans used Numidian and Gaullic cavalry in similar ways, and showed no signs of thinking that the Gauls were superior to the Numidians.
In earlier times, too, the worst barbarians came from the North--first the Germans who invaded and destroyed the empire, then the Vikings who attacked the coasts of Ireland, England, France, and other civilized countries.
It was a common theory that civilization belonged to the south, and that the further north you got the stupider and more barbaric people were.
Nor did the ancients ever think of the Chinese as a lesser race. It was during the time when Chinese coolies worked on the western railroads that you began to hear that kind of nonsense, about yellow hordes and the like.
Darwin was not singlehandedly responsible for the rise of racism, but Social Darwinism played an important part in it. "Race" was an essentially scientific idea--bogus science from some points of view, although I won't argue that.
The racist version of slavery was likewise a fairly modern invention. In the ancient world, slavery was universal, but they didn't pick on a particular race to enslave. It was just the unlucky losers.
No argument from me there. Has anything other than reasonable conjecture ever shown it to be natural that one species, in time, became another? How much of the "amoeba to man" story has been confirmed by science?
Theories can be a higher level of understanding, and they can explain facts. BUT several different theories can explain most of the same set of facts (few explain all the facts), so a theory is always shaky. Newton's laws were 'gospel' for centuries but are now seen to be only a low-velocity approximation to relativistic mechanics.
That was the BEST post I have seen on the "Fact-Evidence-Hypothesis-Theory" fog. Thank you! I hope you intend to stay around and help enforce those rules (and maybe enlighten us some more). Are you a tecaher? That was an excellent description of the issue.
Evangelicals claim to be a sliver between old line protestants and fundamentalists. They say old line protestants belevie less in God than them but that is not really true.
There was a article on FR in the last two weeks written by half a dozen evangelicals. (You can find it by typing in rocketman and seaching my posts if you are interested) In the article these evangelical leaders claim they belevie in the bible as the word of God. They claim they are the defenders of the faith but they tell us that they beleive that Genesis and other passages are myth and based on legend that may have some seed of truth mixed in. These people say (Though not in the article) that the miracles occurred by natual means example: The manna in the wilderness was ant or termite eggs. The red sea parting was a lunar tidal event with lots of wind, etc. They tell us that God is a mindless vapour -- a cosmic conciousness. He has no hands feet voice -- that scripture mentioning these atributes is false and they are actually anthropormorphisms written only so we can thing we can relate with God (Omiting the words in genesis that we are created in the image and likeness of God That we look outwardly and think somewhat like God.)
These same people tell us that other tahn Jesus and the Apsotles that the early christians were barbaric pagans and that men over time were able to build christainity into the great moral religion that it is today.
Or we can say that they belevie that God in the bible is the creation of man.
Now, no self respecting Roman Catholic No believeing Jew, No Demoninational Protestant, no fundamentalist pentecostal or charismatic could ever with conciousence say any of these things, either about the bible, God, or their faith in God. The only people that are close to this are humanists and so while evangelicals call themselves less legalistic fundamentalists -- We have to say they are humanists and that they like the New Testament and a few select passages as moral humanist literature.
"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grownups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless." Prof. Louis Bounoure (Former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research), as quoted in The Advocate, Thursday 8 March 1984, p. 17
"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has." Malcolm Muggeridge (world famous journalist and philosopher), Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
No, the moon may still be made of green cheese -- the Appollo folks may have just landed on the outer covering of the cheese. All you can say is that your hypothesis is neither confirmed nor rejected by the facts currently available. Newtonian mechanics was not rejected by facts until the motion of objects at close to the speed of light was examined.
Oh, well, that proves it. I'm going to ignore all those other people out there.....
I must have missed that in Sunday School. Where does it say that the animals were immortal before Adam sinned?
He was.
However, randomly generated mutations do act like diffusion. There are no "charastics" for diffusion equations. Things happen at all scales.
The article is correct, but incomplete. Theories explain a set of obsrevations or facts. What a theory may eventually graduate to, after extensive testing and firm belief in its correctness, is a Law. Like Newton's Laws of Motion, The Laws of Thermodynamics, or the Universal Law of Gravitation.
Not quite. Example:
An apple falls to the ground (fact)
( Next day ) An apple falls to the ground (fact)
There is an attractive force between the ground and the apple, causing it to fall ( hypothesis. OK, not quite. Sue me )
This attractive force can be explained by this relation.....(theory)
Good post. What test shows that an oak and a coyote have a common ancestor?
You are correct. I should try harder to be polite.</sarcasm>
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