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'm sure that eleni121 will be coming in with an apology for presenting that out-of-context quote in a dishonest fashion any day now...
Your mission - as well as all so-called evolutionists - is to start reading/viewing these and start thinking outside that box you have walled yourself into:
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds by Phillip E. Johnson
Icons Of Evolution DVD ~ Brian Boorujy
Darwin Retried (1971), Macbeth;
The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (1982), Hitching;
The Great Evolution Mystery (1983), Taylor;
The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution (1984), Fix;
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities (1984), Cohen;
Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (1987), Lovtrup; and
Adam and Evolution (1984), Pitman.
DARWINS BLACK BOX: THE BIOCHEMICAL CHALLENGE TO EVOLUTION by Michael J. Behe
A load of 20+ year old books? Like nothing has happened in biology in the last 20 years! I think most evolutionists are well aware of the contents of these books.
aaargh....
....9
(he asked the audience what was known about evolution and after a long silence Patteson supplied convergence)
"Well, I'll come to convergence later but it does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow. We know it ought not to be taught in high school and that's all we know about it."
They must, otherwise the model and calculation are wrong, or you accept that the calculation gives a reasonable answer. Those are the only possibilities. It's in the logic.
The model is a function of the laws of physics and gives a T/F answer(zero, or not zero). The model asks if the following statement is true:
Is this model, which I claim to be precise and acurate and based on the laws of physics, sufficient to explain the observation of this paticular phenominon.
The equivalent statement is, because the modeler is honest:
Are the laws of physics sufficient to explain this phemnominon.
Now if the answer is no, then either the model is wrong, or the laws of physics are not sufficient to describe the observed phenominon.
That's why choosing the equivalence point of almost zero and zero is critical.
Darwin is about 150 years old. Marx is about 140 some years old.
Still believed and still defended.
Where is your sense of scientific curiosity? Why not allow ID in schools where they want it? Let's see what happens, besides it'll probably be funny. So, you have the entertainment value as well.
What the hell does your dishonestly taken out of context patterson quote have to do with your previous pathetic attempts to wrongly claim that Darwin was a Marxist? Are you so incapable of admitting a mistake that you have to resort to attempting to smear evolution through a different dishonest tactics rather than admit that you were mistaken about Darwin's alleged "love" for Marx?
Jumping to conclusions again - just like evolutionists do.
Marx has had his day - his influence lives on in Darwinists. It will take some time and thinking outside the box - a willingness to be creative and to follow a different path to the truth - but Darwinism too shall be confined to the dustbin of science.
Thanks.
C'mon, just give in to the ID guys. It'll be interesting. All kinds of entertainment value!
Now that you mention it ...
Simply amazing! The "creative" and "diferent psth" I mean.
Darwinism too shall be confined to the dustbin of science
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