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.
It states the same thing it just suggest it had lots of time and random changes to accomplish it. Cold fusion with no evidence tried to make the same claim that something spontaneously changed. But you don't see that held up as an example of stunning science. The fact is all evolution has ever been is a rationalization for athiests to ignore God. Now, like homosexuals, they feel the need to enforce their 'theory' on schoolchildren and insist religious folk accept it.
You know Howard Dean is a MD too. Whats your point?
He also hated "The Passion of the Christ"
Complete nonsense. Ask all the questions you want. What people rightly object to, however, is spreading misinformation and pseudoscience in the guise of "challenging" evolution. False propaganda deserves to be barred from classrooms, just as Michael Moore movies have no place in the classroom -- except to serve as a bad example.
Nuff said.
I'm glad to hear that you're finished stating your misconceptions.
Humor requires an element of "truth" to be funny. Or at least what the listener understands as "truth".
For such a statement (about the spontaneously morphed ape) to be funny, the listener would have to have a very inaccurate understanding of what evolution is.
Unfortunatly, there may be a great number of those kinds of people. Our science education has been about as bad as it can get.
Actually I never said anything about being confused, so you'd have to suggest I was confused before suggesting why. Silly evolutionists mixing up how to prove a point again.
Actually, he's not. He has an M.D. from Harvard. It doesn't make him right, though.
He hits the nail on the head, however, about how evolution is seen as part of a general, and undeniable, assault on religion.
Further, it wasn't until after the turn of the 20th Century when scientific authorities changed their template for the worse from "how did God do it" to "if God did it."
One of the polite fictions of American life is the idea that science can be studied in isolation from history, theology, philosophy, ethics, and so on. Tearing away such a mask threatens our modus vivendi of mental compartmentalization. That's one reason this controversy is so protracted.
Yes evolutionists insist you have to 'understand' their theory. It wasn't spontaenous because it took a very very very long time and lots of really really wacky random situations. One day ape. One day latter cave man. There's not much more to understand than that evolutionists have observed similarities in man and similarities in ape and ASSUMED they must have once been the same thing.
why can't "creationists" (especially the earth is only several thousand years old kind) accept that evolution was allowed by whatever God they worship? Do they think there was really a talking serpent?
And I suppose you'll now jump to the conlcusion that everyone who understands evolution is now anti-Christian?
It's amazing the links one can find if you're looking for them.
Did you know that John Kennedy's secretaries name was Lincoln, and President Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy!?!?
"Anyway i'm off to chase a guy that spontanously morphed from an ape."
Good luck. I keep trying to fend off the advances of a naked, apple-eating woman who was spontaneously created from one of my ribs and some mud. Lemme tell ya, if she's been made "in God's image", that is one UGLY God.
Did you know that John Kennedy's secretaries name was Lincoln, and President Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy!?!?
__________
Bush's fault?
Oh, yes. And Noah really got all those animals onto the ark. Even the one's that would not survive in the location from where it was launched. And the ark was large enough, and had food enough for all of them. Even though wooden ships of that size have never successfully been constructed.
Every word in the Bible is sacred. And true.
"Do they think there was really a talking serpent?"
Yes. They also believe that it was possible to stick 2 of every single, solitary species on an Ark whose measurements have been mathematically proven to NOT have space to do so. Of course, it's also been mathematically proven that there isn't enough water on the planet to flood the entire planet but no sense in letting evil, godless science spoil a good fairy tale!
No everyone who 'unserstands' evolution ha thrown scientific analysis to the 4 winds, in a leap of faith, the sad thing is they faithfully insists it's scientific to do so.
Here's a little exercise.
Visit the public library. Check out a few books on evolutionary biology. Issues of "National Geographic" are good too.
Open one of the books or magazines and start reading. Keep reading. Yes, I know that it is boring as all get out, but soldier on.
Eventually, you will come to a phrase like "The Plan of Evolution," or "Nature's Grand Design" or "Nature's Creation" or "Evolution's Clever Strategy" or even "THE MIRACLE OF EVOLUTION!!!!"
Now, if Evolution (or "Nature", the terms are used interchangeably) is nothing but random accidents, how can random accident have a "Plan" or a "Grand Design" or a "Clever Strategy"? That would imply (gasp!) a HIGHER INTELLIGENCE.
Yet the Evolution writers use this terminology all the time. That is very religionist for supposedly "pure scientists."
Whoa. Your post 34 beat me by milliseconds!
If that's the level of your understanding of the TOE, then I can certainly understand your confusion.
You can't beleive that? Why not? No fossil evidence for it? Seems right up the alley of an evolutionists.
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