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.
Stephen Jay Gould, I believe, but it has been too long for me to be sure of it. Since I go through about a half dozen scientific magazines a month, it is hard for me to recall for sure. First Things has had articles or columns that go into the evolution controversy in detail, and that could also be where I picked that up.
Although I'm a Christian who reads the Bible fairly literally, I don't see evolution, or the teaching of evolution, to be an affront to my religious beliefs.
You see, in my conversations with God over the course of twenty years, He has explained it all very clearly.
When creating this world, God created great wonders, as well as great mysteries. He put in the land clues to a past which He created--great beasts of the land, air and sea which never actually existed, at least not in the flesh. He made subtle differences in the design of various animals to give the sense that the world itself is a living thing, always changing, when in fact it is a very deliberate design.
He doesn't mind that scientists try to unravel these ancient mysteries. He marvels at our ingenuity.
What laws of physics were reversed? Oh wait. Let me guess. Even after half a dozen posts on this thread alone explaining why the contention is flat out wrong, even after it has been explained time and time again how local entropy in one part of a system can decrease at the expense of an increase in total entropy of the rest of the system, you will say, "The Second Law of Thermodynamics".
As for the "It takes more faith to believe in evolution than creationism"? How about I take a few phrases out:
every once in a while
By chance this sometimes happens to
And once in a blue moon such a sperm or egg is lucky
by luck of the draw
It all depends on a roll of the genetic dice.
Enough said. Takes a tremendous leap of faith to imagine that such a process ever happens.
Due to the hurdles, "fossil" retroviral DNA strings (known by the technical name of "endogenous retroviruses") don't end up ubiquitous in a species very often
The understatment of the century. And after all that he says it "probably happens"
Not quite the rock-solid evidence it is portrayed to be
I have. For once we will be talking about something other than football, and for once it looks like we will disagree.
Perhaps we can agree to disagree
/cliche
"And all of it by a roll of a mind shattering complex set of dice.
How are physical laws, chemical interactions and selection 'a roll of the dice'?
"There is nothing like telling the simple minds of the world that all of what we have an know cam from reversing the laws of physics and saying that from the simple has come the complex, because by yours and other evolutionists accounts...thats exactly what has happened.
Which laws of physics have been reversed? Be specific.
Festival of unenlightenment placemarker.
I think you missed the point. The fact that such situations are so rare SUPPORTS common descent - the odds of a retrovirus causing a DNA are very rare so it doesn't happen very often at all.
That is why the fact that humans and apes sharing common DNA fossils is such strong evidence.
"are very rare"
Mind-bogglingly rare. Assuming that it "probably" happenes" as the poster said.
"That is why the fact that humans and apes sharing common DNA fossils is such strong evidence."
That's where you lose me
I had a feeling that you would be the first. I have to give you credit there - seems like no once else wanted to be exposed to any evidence that Answers In Genesis doesn't have a ready make retort to.
Read my follow up to your post - I have feeling that we disagree less than you think.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Observation proves you correct.
Jeffy, you need to rread-up. The Bible talks all about retroviruses...
I have feeling that we disagree less than you think.
I've heard that one too many times.
God did that. And yet Satan gets branded with the tag of "The Deceiver". Go figure.
Ahh. I read those books a while ago. Do you know if the movies are any good?
No. Just that the total matter+energy=0.
Hitler's executioners were anything but "natural". They were attempting to be Intellegent Designers.
And yet another creationist, who doesn't understand, but thinks he does.
Nothing like jumping into a thread without reading the posts. Teachers teach the theory as theory and the fact as fact. The fact of evolution is the observation of the variation of allele frequency within a population through differential replication. The Theory of Evolution is the set of testable and falsifiable hypotheses that explain the fact of evolution and have been tested and not falsified. The theory make predictions, the fact is an observation.
Get with the program.
"Many FACTS in science are known and provable, and they lend credibility to arguments "suggesting" a path to exactness, but "evidence to suggest" is NOT evidence of fact.
Why are you changing the thrust of your argument from the concept of theory to the observations of science taken to be fact? The fact is not the theory in any science. Furthermore the evidence that backs up evolution comes from more disciplines than just biology, such as geology, geophysics, radiometrics, astronomy, chemistry, physics and probably a number I've missed.
Questions aren't being suppressed but we it would be nice if the creos asked intelligent questions instead of positing the ridiculous.
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