King James Version of the Bible
Book of Genesis
Chapter 9* * *
9:26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
Wasn't Shem the Stooge that replaced Curley???
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 understand your point, but your example does compare apples to oranges. Would I seek help in a tony, evolution-friendly urban neighborhood or a creationist-friendly urban neighborhood? (Hmmm... Are there such places? And if not, why not? :-)
Anyway, rural communities tend to be much more cohesive, regardless of the dominant religion. I can appreciate the fact that a person who loses their faith finds themselves alone - but we do eventually find each other and build our own relationships.
Now, do we build explicitly atheist (or Objectivist in my case) communities? I.e., support networks that are built around our atheism? No, usually not. Whenever I've asked my fellow athiest friends why there aren't more Fellowships of Reason, or why there aren't more door-to-door evangelical Objectivists, they tend to scoff at the very idea of joining a group for fellowship. Very much like Libertarians, in fact.
Fortunately not all of science is concerned with 'unlikely phenomena".
Evolution is seen as part of an undeniable general assault on religion by religious people whether Krauthammer spells it out or not.
King James Version of the Bible
Book of Genesis
Chapter 9* * *
9:26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
Wasn't Shem the Stooge that replaced Curley???
Oh wow. You have convinced me...
...that you have a commanding knowledge of HTML. That really is impressive
The only question asked by creationists is "Why can't we dispense with science and substitute religion"?
stop trolling ;P
They understand it far better than you, I'm afraid. First off, you've mistated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which actually states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.
Note the term "isolated." The Earth's biosphere is not isolated. There is a constant infusion of energy from the Sun.
discussing faith:
the faith I have in God is stronger and deeper than the faith you have in no god.
Links are so much easier. Like this one:
If you read it you will find substantial evidence and critical thought as well.
The Sun is part of the closed system. When did the Sun ever cause an increase in complexity, without intellegent guidance or intervention?
" ... science is built on faith in the observations of others."
Actually, science is built on *skepticism* about the ability to replicate the observations of others. It is this healthy skepticism that accounts for progress in refining, and occasionally overturning, scientific theories of the past.
Ah, I see. We should only scientifically study "likely" phenomena. We should attribute everything else to miracles wrought by God.
The earth does experience massive external inputs of energy on a continuing basis, mainly from that big yellow thing in the sky. Moreover there are huge amounts of primordial energy still available to do work (and still doing work) such as the heat and other energy forms generated by the decay of radio isotopes in the earth's rocks, mantle and core. Finally, evolution occurs among living organisms, and presupposes the existence of living organisms. Living organisms are negative entropy concentrating machines (they literally couldn't be "living" otherwise) and therefore the processes that concern them occur in an environment of reduced entropy. If their evolution contradicts the second law, then so does their very existence!
Thus, on multiple grounds, the contradiction you invoke simply doesn't exist. Also, btw, evolution is not a "spontaneous" occurrence. It's an ongoing process that results because of specific characteristics of living things, e.g. reproduction, copying errors, superfecundity, reliance on limited environmental resources, and etc.
if you were in a desperate way and going door to door among strangers for help, would you rather try it among Christian fundamentalists in evolution hostile rural America, or would you prefer to seek help in a tony, faith hostile, evolution friendly urban neighborhood in Blue state America? Ideas have consequences....and if you needed cutting-edge medical treatment, would you rather go to faith-friendly Guatemala or evolution-friendly Johns Hopkins University???
Nice to see that creationists are maintaining their strategy of attacking style while ignoring substance.
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