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.
You don't have the knowledge and understanding to come to the conclusion you have. You don't have the background to understand some little bit, if not any of the subject mat'l.
The "monopoly" you seek to destroy is not science, but reason and truth itself.
You can't handle the fact that there are those with superior intellect to yours (lots of those) who disagree with you on evolution and darwinism.
Keep a check on all that anger will you?
Right. I'll accept arguements from "claims of authority" as truth when all the world's beautiful women worship at my feet. I make the judgements on the evidence. I decide. If the council claiming authority nexpects me to believe what they say and conclude, they better well be speaking the truth and acknowledge error.
Concil?
That thing about my enemy's enemy, maybe?
Uh, common goal in a certain instance.
Uh, when the house is afire the McCoy's and the Hatfield's join to put it out?
More??
or something else?
Neither: it is Spirit.
"Dead" isn't necessarily the equivalent of "non-living."
yeah, cryptic works.
Are you claiming that Mustafa Akyol (of BAV/Harun Yahya fame) was not brought to Kansas by the Conservative Republican members of the board?
So we can assume that you support the hiring of Mustafa Akyol. Do you also believe that Evolutionary Theory is a Jewish Plot as his organizations claim? Perhaps you do not consider this an extremist claim.
So you claim that humans arise from non-human cells. OK.
You also claim that sperm (and ova) are living, OK.
This means that humans are just sperm and ova's method of making more sperm and ova. Sounds fine.
Had the god of the Hebrews been as numerically proficient s that of the Chinese, he could have given them 355/113 which is even more accurate; it't the best you can do with 3-digit approximations.
http://www.srf-tr.org/comments.htm
It's a lovely thought that while our marines are being butchered by Islamist nuts in Iraq, just over the border American creationists are helping said Islamists take over another country.
I suggest you take some time, visit http://www.talkorigins.org/, http://www.talkdesign.org/, http://www.pandasthumb.org/, and look at papers done by biologists, mathematicians and philosophers that work in the field every day.
When I give information on here, that information is from those three sites and from actually spending time conversing with those same scientists. I may not communicate what they are trying to teach me but I relay the information as accurately as my little brain is capable of.
You might also spend time listening to the scientists here who do know what they are talking about every bit as much as your quoted author.
"I see the 'gambit' for what it is, and 90% of it has ZERO to do with science evolution creation and argument there of. When and if I get the time I'll put the 'gambit' down step by step."
Way to go! [Thunderous applause]
John McCoy?
In that case I suggest it does not exist.
I understand that, but I'll bet there are some here who disagree.
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