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.
Yikes!
Could I believe your's and you believe mine? Everybody knows that fb4p = wunderbar
Wow! That's good! I hope you learn a little more next year in 8th grade science.
There is extremely weak evidence in support of macro evolution. So the group think requires a strong dose of faith for its followers.
At least you admit it went over your head.
"Theories aren't proven. The only people who "demand proving of a theory" of anything are people who don't understand how science works."
Precisely. ICE-FLYER is either ignorant of the scientific definition of the word or lying to make a point.
I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and say ignorant, but willful and continued ignorance isn't much better.
Dr. Collins 'has the faith'!
"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."
not sure....look around...
You Curly Joeists never quit.
Curly Joe never happened! NEVER NEVER NEVER.
Prove 'Curly Joe' happened. You can't. All you have is old footage with him in it, which I will conceed is evidence for 'a theory of the Stooges really sucking bad' but not enough to convince me!
There was Shemp and Curly and it was good. There might have been a Joe (micro Stooges sucking) but there is no conclusive evidence of Curly Joe (macro sucking).
Nothing will convince me otherwise!!!!!! (see how many exclamation marks I use).
The point is one of you evolution nuts tried to say NO theories are provable, and that's popycock, just more psuedo scientist, lying their way to hell.
I don't think he'll figure out the problem on his own.
I'll tell you what, fly a ship to the center of the sun, tell me what you find. I'm sure we'll both be tickled pink by the results.
"From my perspective as a scientist working on the genome, the evidence in favor of evolution is overwhelming."
"Professor Darrel Falk has recently pointed out that one should not take the view that young-earth creationism is simply tinkering around the edges of science. If the tenets of young earth creationism were true, basically all of the sciences of geology, cosmology, and biology would utterly collapse. It would be the same as saying 2 plus 2 is actually 5. The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines."
"Design proponents point to the complexity of multicomponent molecular machines as unlikely products of a random evolutionary process. The argument about irreducible complexity is an interesting one. And yet I must say, the more one looks at these supposedly complex and irreducibly complex structures (whether it is the flagella, the eye, or the clotting cascade), the more one begins to see some evidence of intermediate forms that could have had some selective advantage. While not offering strong evidence against Intelligent Design, the study of genomes offers absolutely no support either. In fact, I would say— and many others have said it better—a major problem with the Intelligent Design theory is its lack of a plan for experimental verification. I view Intelligent Design ideas as an intriguing set of proposals, but I certainly do not view them as the kind of threat to evolution that its most vocal proponents imply."
It really looks as though this scientist is not one you should use to argue against evolution.
So what type of proof is being used here huh? Scientific "proof"? Ie "evidence beyond doubt"? In which case evolution common descent is scientifically proved.
Microbial theory, the notion of the existence of microbes
Wrong. The notion of the existance of something is not an explaination, and so cannot be a theory. You probably meant "Microbial theory of disease" aka "Germ theory of disease", which states that disease is caused by microbes. This was clearly not "proven when a microscope powerful enough to see them was developed and used".
Futher the theory that the sun is the center of the universe was easily evidenced when we were able to send a satilite there to send photos.
LOL was that because there is a signpost next to it saying "Center" that required a satellite to read? If you position Earth as the center of the solar system so that the Sun circles the Earth then the path of nearby planets form epicycles. How do you "prove" that is not the case?
frankly there's myriad ways Evolution could be proven if anyone was interested. For isntance a closed environment breeding apes until they all lost the tails, and started talking.
How would that prove evolution? It wouldn't. It would not prove any historical aspect of evolution. It would not prove common descent. All it would prove is that in a closed environment apes can be bred until they lose tails and talk.
Frankly if evolution can do this randomly selective breeding should be able to do it easily and quickly.
The main drawback is that to replicate 1,000 years of evolution you would need 1,000 years of lab time. We might as well sit back and wait 100 years for computer simulations of organisms to be possible and then simulate 100,000 years of evolution in a few minutes.
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