Ya craaaaaaazy!
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.
Wrong one: Jesus said that.
Perhaps Paul wrote...
Romans 1: 20
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
C folks look and say,"Wow! God did this!"
E folks look and say,"HOW! did god do this?"
A broad brush.
You are wrong.
Ya craaaaaaazy!
| Main Entry: evo·lu·tion Pronunciation: "e-v&-'lü-sh&n, "E-v&- Function: noun Etymology: Latin evolution-, evolutio unrolling, from evolvere 1 : one of a set of prescribed movements 2 a : a process of change in a certain direction : UNFOLDING b : the action or an instance of forming and giving something off : EMISSION c (1) : a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state : GROWTH (2) : a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political, and economic advance d : something evolved 3 : the process of working out or developing 4 a : the historical development of a biological group (as a race or species) : PHYLOGENY b : a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations 5 : the extraction of a mathematical root 6 : a process in which the whole universe is a progression of interrelated phenomena - evo·lu·tion·ari·ly /-sh&-"ner-&-lE/ adverb - evo·lu·tion·ary /-sh&-"ner-E/ adjective - evo·lu·tion·ism /-sh&-"ni-z&m/ noun -<---------- Oops! - evo·lu·tion·ist /-sh(&-)nist/ noun or adjective |
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Very perspicacious. My hats off to you for your fine post.
After my SECOND ex-wife ran off with someone, I started to church!
The Lord has been showing me for a long time the problems I had, and with His Grace and help, I hope I'm a different person today.
A lying crevo is outted!
Then why are you on this thread??
It's already a given that you E folk will not change our hardened little minds, so why bother?
Do you need confirmation from fellow E believers that your position is right?
SYVT bump!
The same can be said of faith.
The great question of human life is what happens when we die? In the end, that is answerable in life only through faith and reason, but not the pure reason of science.
I'd say it is unanswerable at all, for those of us on this side of death. We may have faith or belief about what happens, but no knowledge.
Look!
Science in the Bible!
Job 36
26. How great is God--beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out.
27. "He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams ;
28. the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind.
29. Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds, how he thunders from his pavilion?
Are you related, in any way, to Dementio?
Slavery:
What explains it in Africa TODAY???
You've been listening to them JW's again; hVEN'T YOU!?
Uh.... You just SHOWED him!
They share a common ancestor.
Translation: Someone's LYING here!
I want to support Bush's conservatism, but to disavow his ID ideas...
My position is that Bush is pandering to religious conservatives on a matter where, given that he's clearly not a scientist, he should remain silent or at least be consulting actual scientists who are knowledgeable in the subject (and given the statement he made, he clearly did not).
HMmmm....
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