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.
Like this guy:
Dr.Francis S. Collins, physician, geneticist, and Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH (National Institutes of Health)
B.S. in chemistry at the University of Virginia
Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Yale University
Graduated from medical school at the University of North Carolina and completed his residency in internal medicine at Chapel Hill.
Later, he returned to Yale for a fellowship in human genetics and then joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1984.
His genetic research team identified the genes for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, and collaborated with others to identify the gene for Huntington's disease. In 1993, Collins became the second director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, following in the footsteps of James Watson.
In that role, Collins has overseen the successful completion of the Human Genome Project. He has been a member of ASA for over twenty years. ...."
How long did it take you to put that post together ?
Well, then I guess all that remains is to check and see how reasonable each and all of them are. Shall we start with the notion that man is the result a random combination of material and physical processes unguided by any intelligent being? Or is that too much for science to tackle?
Hey no fair. I called one a creatin the other night and got in trouble (don't you think the "a" softens the blow, Hhhmmmmm, don't you?)
In my case it was a felt-tip.
"I have a standard. I have a text by which I judge all other information that comes into my hearing. What do you have? What do you use? What guides you? Anything? Nothing? Something in between?"
I have no worries that if I am not guided by some ethos contained in the Bible I will suddenly become a serial or mass murderer. I have genetically programmed multiple choice responses tempered by the society that I live in and my ability to predict the consequences of my choices.
Definitely another part of the Uncle Fester Chuganotherbrew Tag Team.
You kept demanding Proof as if anyone on this thread claimed the theory of evolution has proof. Noone did.
What sentiment is that?
Damn it! Noone is back. There's an awful lot of people who want to know just who this Noone is.
Uh Oh! Almost Nazi Time Placemarker.
He's the lead singer for Herman's Hermits.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.