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 have never experienced trouble in that area.
Or maybe She was drunk at the time.
The problem is fundamental misunderstanding
in each religion.
How to explain what I mean?
the word, God.
Think of any word as a symbol, representation, an icon, a means of exchange. A way for us to point to the same thing.
"tree" is not literally a tree.
It is a symbol of "tree".
It is a means for me to share the idea of tree with you.
The word points the direction.
It is not the destination.
not the object.
The finger pointing to God is not God.
Words themselves in religious texts are symbols, signposts,fingers pointing to God.
The meaning is intuited from the sum of the words.
The truth is beyond the capacity of the words, and our understanding. We must go beyond the words, to the meaning.
the finger pointing to God is not God.
So, you and me and Gummy form our own 3 Stooges?
Your question was "When does evolution begin?? how does it begin??"
I felt I could answer that question and did. Evolution is a process not constrained to biology. Evolution will emerge with any imperfectly replicating system. The hypothesised danger with replicating nanobots for example is that if they replicate imperfectly they will evolve, which would be very very dangerous.
I don't feel your question had anything to do with "amibas [sic] to dinosaurs to man and all in between." and there is no use for you to get angry about it.
You are presenting a fallacy that we must know every organism throughout history in order to conclude that evolution of life is the best explaination. This is slightly similar to claiming that unless we know every planet and star that has ever existed, we cannot conclude gravity acts on all planets and stars.
"THEORY is not evidence"
How wonderfully random and meaningless.
"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!"
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/print/2655
An Examination of Noah’s Ark and the Global Flood
by Brad Harrub, Ph.D. and Bert Thompson, Ph.D.
Ah but did they factor in the carnivorous catapillars?
The prior assumption that multiple lines of evidence from multiple disciplines of science are a better foundation for my personal belief system than a single book that has been shown to be progressively more scientifically errant as time goes by. Science findings fit in with my rational self much better than does anything else. I am skeptical of anything that sounds too irrational.
God showed Moses all of this and Moses reported it from the top of Mt. Sinai. But, there are several other places where we have had to come to understand that the language of those who wrote the Bible was not our own. We can observe phenomena better with our more finely focused clocks, scales, cameras, microscopes, and telescopes. The fact that the earth rotates on its axis does not make it untrue that the light of the sun was altered for Joshua and Israel at Gibeon:
Jos 10:12 At that time Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, "Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon."
Jos 10:13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.
Jos 10:14 There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD obeyed the voice of a man, for the LORD fought for Israel.
You have to read it to find out! :)
How about walking fish and flying mammals? Do I need to see PH about them too?
Do the same with your own life. DO not miss any time period larger than 5 minutes.
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