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 did a Google on "The Plan of Evolution," and all I came up with are religious/spiritualist links. As for "Miracle of Evolution," I found only one reference, a BBC "basic English" pop science paragraph on brain evolution. From M-W.com:
Main Entry: mir·a·cle
Pronunciation: 'mir-i-k&l
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin miraculum, from Latin, a wonder, marvel, from mirari to wonder at
1 : an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2 : an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
3 Christian Science : a divinely natural phenomenon experienced humanly as the fulfillment of spiritual law
Clearly any such usage of "miracle" is in the sense of definition #2.
If there are usages similar to the others you describe, they are no doubt mostly in popularizations, I don't think I've seen any of them in scientific papers, and would be metaphors; a "clever strategy" might be a more colorful way of describing a useful adaption. They are not teleological admissions.
Universe
Population: None.
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a population of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination.
Your comment immediately brought this to mind. Sorry.
Some if not most religious people are threatened by all of science. That's why the creationists and the postmodernists work so hard to discredit science. (I would add that in Kansas, the creationists also hired Islamists to help in their endeavor, but we're not in Kansas anymore.)
When? How about every day. Ever hear of "weather"? The simple act of the Sun's energy heating the atmosphere and surface of the earth, for instance, creates convection cells, and from thence stem unequivocally complex and negentropic phenomena like hurricanes and other storms, for instance.
I'm assuming this is one of those 1=2, 2=3 "proofs"?
Some if not most religious people are threatened by all of science.
I'll say:
Evo-scientists feel threatened in believing in God.
Are they both right? or wrong?
Afraid? Doubtful. I read fiction all the time. I just take it for what it's worth.
Does that mean that there was original energy and some of it became matter? Or, was there some sort of non-energy, non-matter that became a combination of energy and matter? If neither of those holds water, what was the original state? Was it nothingness?
How about if it's just playing?
First, creationists claim there is no evidence for the TOE. Then, when confronted with mountains of evidence, they go on to claim that there is too much evidence for the TOE to be true.
Damned if you do....
I do not have access to the primary literature, but I found a source you may trust. A Christian Perspective on 2LoT
Have you ever seen anyone do that? I haven't. Never once have I seen anyone teach science as anything other than a discipline based on empirical observation and research.
Nice little back-handed slap.
As for the article, interesting, but not very elaborate
Howdy! It came from:
Jonathan Marks, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
I did no such thing. And if you infered that from what I wrote, either your reading skills are broken, or my writing skills.
Pay no attention to the clown.
I looked up the Three Stooges on Wikipedia. I never knew they were so prolific.Sure, compared to actors today, who do maybe on movie every two years. Look at John Wayne. He was in some ridiculous number of movies. In the 90s if I remember correctly.
But what happens when one is taught things as empiracle observations that haven't been?
No single thing opened my eyes about the fantasy I believed. But you helped.
I'm sure you help others find flaws in their faith in the same manner. Is that your goal?
Your blind faith, combined with millions of others taught the same thing, does have the threat of bringing down western civilization to another dark ages. My history isn't great, but looking from here it wouldn't surprise me that Christianity "helped" the Roman civilization in the same way.
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