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.
Is this breath of yours something tangable like some gas that is ~20%O2, ~79% N and ~1% other elements?
Or is it something like the Laws of Thermodynamics?
Right, but the existence of the Higgs boson is, in principle, testable, and it's existence is expected to be confirmed or disproved when the Large Hadron Accelerator comes on line.
The mainstream of physics is looking to dimensionality (geometry) for explanations of matter.
As I said, induction and deduction can lead to the development of testable hypotheses. But the scientific method ultimately depends upon empiricism. Otherwise, we'd have nothing in the 'real world' to confirm or disprove hypotheses, and science would once again be nothing more than a branch of philosophy. The standard model is powerful precisely because it made testable hypotheses which have to this point been experimentally confirmed. Is it the last word on fundamental particles? Probably not; I fully expect a more simplified theory, which better explains the evidence, to emerge eventually.
It would look like Shannon's mathematical theory of communications, Einstein's special and general relativity models, Hilbert space, Godel's incompleteness theorem and so on.
Insofar as they present testable hypotheses, they are not "non-physical". Insofar as they are non-physical, they do not present testable hypotheses. You are talking about the borderline between mathematics and science. It may be a short step across, but there remains a distinction between scientific and mathematical knowledge.
In short, science cannot be rid of methodological naturalism, because that is what science is. When you begin seeking non-physical or supernatural explanations, you have entered the realm of mathematics or philosophy, and are no longer doing science.
What is your basis for asserting that the ToE is not true?
For some reason that is a frequent reaction to Compaq and HP machines.
First off, take a look at the instructions here.
If that fails, we could arrange to connect via msn messenger and I could step through it.
"You KNOW how nasty THOSE get!!
Talk about defending a religion. ;)
Nope, it will still be theory.
That's the problem with evolutionists - you really do sound cultish. The 'My way or the highway" approach to science will get you nothing but trouble...and question and argument. Evolutionists can't seem to handle argument and quesitioning - very absolute.
I concur with Popper (from the same link):
"Karl Popper suggested that all scientific theories should be falsifiable otherwise they could not be tested by experiment. Anything that cannot be shown by experiment to be false would therefore be an axiom and have an absolute status, beyond any confirmation or refutation."
I posted the link in "1628" wiseguy.
You really need to focus on others' posts besides just mine.
If there was anything to that, you would have addressed my comments regarding the councils. You ran right past those, because intent is not to promote the truth.
What is your basis for asserting that the ToE is not true?
"What are the odds that E. Biarnosuchus eyehole will reduce into D. Spheracodon's small one?
"What are the odds that D. Spheracodon's eyehole will enlarge (again) into C. Haptodus' HUGE one?
You don't seem to understand my response to the previous post. Evolution does not require any particular change to happen, just that any change that does occur not restrict the recipient's relative ability to reproduce. You are asking for a specific mutation to arise. That is not what evolution expects. You are putting your lizard behind the cart.
What is the probability that an organisms eye size will change? One. We see it happen in extant species.
What is the probability that the increased eye size will fix in the population? Unknowable in this specific case, one if we look at extant species.
What is the probability that the environment will change drastically enough to affect survival rates? One. We see it happening.
What is the probability that the decreased eye size will fix in the population? Unknowable, for a specific species but again one if we examine extant species.
A better question to ask is, What is the probability of three or more organisms, temporally sequential, environmentally sequential and have the centre species sharing multiple features including diagnostic features of either or both of its two neighbour species being related.
That, you will have to request from a biologist who has actually performed that calculation.
I am disinterested in theological or scientific councils. They have their place - confused or exalted as the case may be - in their time.
What I am interested in is freedom - freedom for educators to teach science as theory not fact. Freedom for students of science to pursue research outside the box...outside the scientific establishment.
Students should be presented with all sides of the argument, not just the one approved by the National Science Teachers Association or the NSF.
The reason I respond to yours more than others in this thread, at this time, is your posts show the least knowledge of evolution, science and science education.
Naturally you would claim this, but it's not true in the least bit. You are here, in fact arguing that the scientific councils are dens of iniquity and the source for the streams of lies you attribute to them.
"What I am interested in is freedom - freedom for educators to teach science as theory not fact. Freedom for students of science to pursue research outside the box...outside the scientific establishment."
The truth is singular and unique. Freedom is unhindered sovereignty of individual will. I only want the truth taught, not hte BS. Teaching BS is a rights violation. In particular you are ignorant of and have ignored attempting to learn the science you claim is simply a collectiomn of false claims. In addition you fail to even address the nature of the 2 councils, which I have. You did that, because you know very well yours is pure doctrine w/o logical foundation.
Thanks for the great article and your great posts. I hadn't heard of this "mathematical" issue with the number of combinations of codons.
Let me ask you this question. Is it true that all living organisms use the same form of DNA comprised of the same bases and encoding the same 20 amino acids?
If that is the case, it seems odd to me that after billions of years of evolution, some species would not use a DNA mechanism which would have evolved to be different than all the others. After all there are species which are said to have evolved little in the last few hundred million years (aligators, and those turtles whose fossiles were found recently)
So why then have dinosaurs in the span of 400M years evolved into humans and at the same time DNA has not changed at all?
You are debunked...defrocked, and deceived. Those far better than your arrogant self say:
"The fossil record is considered to be the primary evidence for evolution, yet it does not demonstrate a complete chain of life from simple forms to complex."
Larry Vardiman, Professor from the Department of Astro-Geophysics for Creation Research, USA.
Larry holds a PhD in Atmosperic Science from Colorado State University.
From everything I have read here from those who support evolution I have concluded that they are a dangerous autocratic bunch with a grasping hold on science and the way science is done and understood. This monopoly needs to be broken up.
In the meantime - Batten says
"So life did not arise by natural processes, nor could the grand diversity of life have arisen through no-intelligent natural processes (evolution). Living things were created by God, as the Bible says."
Don Batten, a research scientist for Answer in Genesis in Australia. Dr Batten holds a PhD in Plant Physiology from the University of Sydney and worked for 18 years as a research scientist with the New South Wales Department of Agriculture.
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