; and 
shall be his servant.
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 see you bailed out of school in the 6th grade.
Actually, I would prefer a genuinely Catholic hospital. I am sure that "cutting edge" medical treatment would be available, and more than that, it would be a good place to be if that is when my life goes terminal, as all life does.
Go read any other theory. They all use that language. Why you may ask? Because all theories can, have in the past, and will in the future, be modified as new information comes to light. This new information tends to focus the theory to something that approximates a local truth.
This language does not reflect the acceptance or the 'solidness' of the evidence.
Did you pay $79.95 for that DVD?
What? You can't be serious.
I don't understand. What are you trying to say?
The post in question is just a little ways up the thread.
I somehow find the explanation far from satisfactory
In what way?
The misuse of the concept of evolution is a reflection of those that use it that way, not of evolution itself. No matter what we humans do with the knowledge of evolution, those actions have no bearing on the veracity of the fact of evolution nor on the theory of evolution.
Without observing in history how and when ERV's have been introduced, how do we know they are not simply part of the plans of an intelligent designer, in the works and present from the beginning? IMO the conclusion of common ancestry is not totally unreasonable, but it is premature without a longer period of direct observation. I find it interesting that arguments from probablility are allowed when it comes to the location of ERV's as passed down through generations, but they are, in the opinion of some evolutionists, invalid for arguing self-organization as a result of intelligent design (or lack thereof). The dreaded "argument from retro astonishment," as it were.
I admit on the face of it that I understand the biblical texts to be true expositions of how the world and mankind came to be. That is my working assumption; the glasses through which I view whatever other texts and evidence may present themselves to me. May I ask if you have such a guiding set of assumptions, or do you make them up as you go along, or do you work with absolutely no set of assumptions?
; and shall be his servant.
You mean like syphilis, gonorrhea, and AIDS? All some wandering god's little plan?
Some people believe that. But it turns out badly
I believe the word "ubiquitous" was ascribed to these ERVs. Maybe you have all of the above, but I, and most folks whom I know, have none, so I guess you have no point to make other than to demonstrate your inherent bias against truth.
Please visit and let us know. The fact that you believe such books are actually in your public library prove you are quite gullible to accept someone else's myths without doing any research yourself.
You wouldn't know the truth if it bit you in the ass. And that's a fact every reader of these threads already knows.
There is a line between those that view such biblical stories as metaphores and those that view them as historical accounts.
The first thing to ask is what would happen if your program were allowed to play itself out in the genetic arena. What would you predict?
The second is to ask whether one should expect anything organized, or "clustered," where mutations are involved. I don't see anything that, at least to the eye, lends itself to an unsually consistent, let alone predictable, result in running your mutation map program (at least in the short time you let it fly), and IMO it should be that way. Mutations, ERV's etc. are noise. They are not natural. The natural, intended performance of biological entities should tend toward perfection. True to the biblical texts, we do not see this.
Lastly, even if the sequence on the surface appears to be gibberish, often what appear to be random patterns are at bottom explanatory of communication, design, intelligence, and all that pertains to an Almighy Being's involvement with the creation.
Depends upon the game, I suppose...
You are saying that God planned those DNA sequences, which have no other purpose than to created a "legend" - a false hiatory of origin to deceive anyone curious enough to investigate.
How Slytherin of Him.
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