Posted on 08/01/2005 10:58:13 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
The half-century campaign to eradicate any vestige of religion from public life has run its course. The backlash from a nation fed up with the A.C.L.U. kicking crèches out of municipal Christmas displays has created a new balance. State-supported universities may subsidize the activities of student religious groups. Monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments are permitted on government grounds. The Federal Government is engaged in a major antipoverty initiative that gives money to churches. Religion is back out of the closet.
But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."
Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. Schönborn's proclamation that it cannot exist unguided--that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way--is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.
In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, Schönborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.
This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.
How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.
To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.
Which is exactly what the evolutionists have been doing for the last 150 years.
And I'm sure that you can demonstrate that little assertion, right?
I have a question --
All science is open for debate. I'll even agree that the theory of evolution is open for debate. That's how science makes progress. Nothing in science is sacred.
My question is: By entering the realm of science with a belief system -- and let's not fool ourselves, because that's what ID is -- you leave that belief system open for debate. Do you want this debate to take place and do you want it to take place in public schools?
I think you've mistaken me for someone who does not realise that ID is religious conjecture trying to masquerade (poorly) as science.
It was an open question -- addressed to everyone -- since I assume everyone has some belief system in place.
I may be alone on this -- but I think it would be a hoot if ID got into the science curriculum. You'd have parents going crazy all over the place that their beliefs were being treated with the same challenges as science. School boards would start to look like professional wrestling, all those friendly little towns polarized beyond recognition, villagers storming university biology departments with torches...anarchy!
Okay, maybe it wouldn't be a hoot.
Feel free to post this "mathematical model" you claim you have which completely models the combined probabilities of every conceivable pathway by which "inanimate objects" might "combine". This should be highly amusing.
Hint: It would take complete omniscience in order to derive such a calculation in a manner that would produce an accurate result. I know the ID'ers like to claim to be able to "prove" God, but now they've gone completely around the bend and are claiming to BE God!
Hint#2: Probability of Abiogenesis FAQs
Because evolution is taught as "theory" and ID is based on belief.
Theories advance, progress and are refined. Beliefs tend to be static. They don't react well to challenge. People rely on them as a bedrock for their lives.
Why not just get rid of all science completely? And most people won't use calculus in their adult life. Let's toss that from public high school education. And all foreign language education, how many people really need to know two languages? And do we need to study literature at all?
Okay, I can convince you:
There is a statistical probability that if this debate boils over then the two hottest women on the school board will get into a cat fight over evolution versus ID and accidentally fall into a small wading pool of either mud or oil in the course of settling their differences.
Now that's obervations and testimony. The same stuff that creationists insit is the only valid evidence about the past, and lack of preventa calling it science. "Human wasn't there to see the evolution or the Big Bang. then there is no proof"
Whoops. That would be my position on Bush's statement. I got confused because that's being discussed elsewhere on FR. My position on this matter is that ID is not science, and should not be taught as "equal" to science.
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