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.
I will go even farther than that, even though evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis, the probability of life appearing from prebiotic molecules is exactly one. We are evidence of that.
Marx said in a letter to his colleague Engels,
"Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a natural scientific basis for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course."
Both Marx and Darwin were creatures confined by their hatred of God, their arrogance, and their misanthropy.
Lots of connections between these dastardly two if one is so inclined to find out.
If all ID can do is postulate a poor probability for abiogenesis then what is its value?
It makes this probability calculation using incorrect initial conditions and poor assumptions. The probability calculation for abiogenesis can not be done because we do not yet know what the initial conditions were. Without those initial conditions the calculation has an extremely low probability of being correct. I calculate the probability of the probability calculation you cleave to being accurate to be 10^-100.
So you cannot handle one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century who speak for creationism...can you handle a list of scientists who do?
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=443
So you 1. insult me, 2. misqoute Scripture to defend your insult 3. Attack my character using vulgar language and personal attacks to somehow demonstrate that you were not insulting me (did I miss anything?) And instead of acknowledging that most Christians would be insulted by having their faith equated to a religion that inspires its young to murder the innocent (was this that great civilized religion you were referring to?) you merely repeat steps 1-3. Here's some more rope.
Creationist talking point #69. And false, like all the others.
Actually, there is virtually no connection between the two, other than that they were contemporaries. They never met. In fact, Marx was an active socialist agitator, who had written and published virtually all of his work, before 1859, when Darwin first published Origin of Species. The only work Marx published after that was Das Capital, which makes no mention of Darwin or evolution. Nor did Darwin's work make any mention of Marx, or his works. So there is no intellectual connection between the two.
Although Marx had never met Darwin, he know that Darwin was one of the most famous scientists of the time, so Marx sent him a copy of Das Capital, and requested permission to dedicate it to him. Darwin declined, and appears never to have read the book.
A source that you might accept, the Institute for Creation Research, has this article posted at their website:
Darwin's Influence on Ruthless Laissez Faire Capitalism. Yes, ICR links Darwin to good ol' capitalism.
You keep mentioning "good faith." I think you need an independent observer to read your posts before you push the "post" button. Whatever it is that you use to measure what is and is not asked in "good faith" needs to be seriously re-evaluated. I think I've caught on to your tactic: Insult a fellow FReeper and when he calls you on it--insult him some more. Now that I'm a pathetic little Islamic man, where do I go for support?
Yeah, I missed that. So what does it mean? I said it wasn't a scientific term. Notice Webster's doesn't define it. The suffix ism is either theory, doctrine or cult. Webster's uses the word theory loosely. The word is by Webster's, so nebulous it is useless. The word evolution suffices just fine as it has precise, scientific meaning.
Creationism does appear in Webster's with it's own definition. It stems from 1880. It is doctrine and disproven hypothesis that the world came into existence literally as per Gen. Creation science is also defined there. It stems from 1979. It is Creationism supported with refuted fact and hypothesis.
The word Creationism does not stem from the word creation. Creation means action causing the world's existence.
Great find Ichy. Still using that stinger to great advantage. Let's hope this little egg does its work.
All too often men create gods in their own image.
Yes, but atheists like Dawkins--and Robert Ingersoll in Darwin's time--have always extropolated back in time, contending that the beginning of life came about in much the same manner as the generation of species. This owes more to Lucretius than to Darwin.
It is moe like Tradition including interpretation of the Word.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!
Then again, to the blind, a one-eyed man is probably assumed to be incredibly bright and hyper-motivated.
Creation also implies Providence. It is this which doctrinaire Darwinists reject.
He has more hair than I do.
YOU SAID {"Marx said in a letter to his colleague Engels,
"Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a natural scientific basis for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course."
Both Marx and Darwin were creatures confined by their hatred of God, their arrogance, and their misanthropy."}
So let me get this straight, by your logic ( the original statement was that you didn't expect to find Marxists here at Freep), then Since Hitler embraced Christianity and used it to support NAZIism, then all Christians are followers of Hitler and NAZIism.
WOW! What a brilliant bit of logic!
Placeholder. To read later.
Apparently none of them travel. :>)
Guess that's what's impossible.
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