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.
You're right, we should never change our minds based upon new evidence!
/sarcasm
Keeping with the Bacon theme, Bal :-)
Kept in a separate section under a sign reading "do not play well with others."
The list was deployed. Post 10.
Noone anne Singg?
Why don't you demand scientific proof of the Theory of Gravitation, or scientific proof of the Atomic Theory? The fact is, scientific theories can never be proven, they can only gather mountains of evidence in their favor.
Bobby Burns.
We can accept evolution without accepting it as a reason to deny or ignore God. God evidently used evolution. But, this knowledge cannot, as the atheists claim, rid us of the only answer to the ultimate fill-in-the-blank: "in the beginning _______."
If a thing is true, it is from God. Fossils are old. Fossils show a pattern. And now, we are seeing similar evidence in the genomes of those we are studying.
Unlike sin, including sexual immorality, science and history and the ways that they inform us about the nature of the universe that God made should not be made stumbling blocks or tests for fellowship.
Actually, I read a good chunk of it
Timing is everything. You gotta post these threads right after shift-change time at the ol' sawmill.
HhhMMMMMMMmmmmmm.
1D
adof - 3
Oh yeh!.
D. Adolph III. One of the Boys from Brazil crowd. Often wondered what happened to him.
"Evolution tells us that humans and mice diverged about 80 million years ago. And yet, when you line up their sequences of the same homologous gene, you see very interesting evidences of similarity. Figure 3 is a complicated diagram showing this relationship. At the bottom is a schematic of part of chromosome 7 (CFTR is, by the way, is the gene for cystic fibrosis) but 500 kilobases away from that is a gene called CAPZA2 which is chosen at random. Across the top is a schematic of part of that CAPZA2 gene in the human. Each one of those funny looking symbols is one of these repetitive sequences. You need not concern yourself much about those; they are just different types of transposable elements and other types of repeats."
And he goes on to mention the chimp, just as Ichy does:
"It is not just a human/mouse comparison one can do. Eric Green at the Genome Institute has looked at this same region in many other species and, in fact, you can find this same CAPZA2 gene in everything from chimps down to zebra fishes and a lot of things in between (see Figure 4). Notice the pattern. The chimpanzee is almost 100% identical to the human, except the chimp has a deletion just before exon 2 that we do not have. Otherwise the match-up, as in most cases of human and chimp comparison, is about 98.5% to 99%. You can see that the baboon is starting to diverge. The cat and the dog and the cow all look a lot alike, and again if you look at the CAPZA2 exons, you will see that every one of those species has a nice conserved little segment there. But as you get further away to rats, mouse, chicken, two different kinds of pufferfish and then a zebra fish, about the only thing you see is the protein encoding regions, while the rest of the scattered noise goes away. Again, this is a very compelling kind of pattern in terms of what one would expect from evolution."
"Yet for your argument you say that theory's and science are true, yet unproven.
He asked for proof, not evidence. We ask for evidence, when we ask.
"Fascinating
Please tell more, much more.
The Word(tm) is supposed to be absolute, it should be able to supply proof. Theories are not absolute and only require evidence that has passed the falsification test.
Answers: I don't know - reaction to implication?
and
yes, we do, although perhaps not any serpent that had offspring that we would recognize if it bit us today.
You sir, are either mistaken or a liar.
Creation does not need bluster bomb posts to substantiate the existence and orderly workings of the heavens and the earth. They were present and have been the object of scientific study before you and I were born. Without a Creator there would be no creation. It's that simple.
Evolutionism, OTOH, must present itself with all the ostentation of a professional whore in court, declaring in sufficient detail what is, and what is not, lawful fornication; how infinite possibilities over an indefinite period of time can, and do, explain all there is. It's that complex.
Ruby slippers and all?
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