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.
There's also lots of 'sheep' references in the Bible.
For good reason. Like sheep, keep your head down and don't ask too many questions!!
There are a well respected scientists who disagree with the assumptions made about this "transitional fossil"...Martin, Feduccia, and etc.
" God could have easily created the universe and then just stood by and done nothing for 20 billion years."
Not if you place any validity in the Bible
yeah
"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." I Cor. xiii. 11
It is not new...you just keep repeating that inaccuracy post after post.
If that is what you want to believe, go for it.
But if anyone in this pile of posts has crack damage, it's you.
"earth popped up in the solar system just a thousand years ago"
History tells us it's older than that.
I attended the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity annual National Convention on Bioethics last month. 4 members of the President's Bioethics Council spoke to us, including Robert P. George, Leon Kass, Gilbert Meilander, and Francis Collins. (I am *not* a groupee!)
Dr. Collins spoke about his conversion after med school and then about the work on the Human Genome Project, which he led. He showed us specific similarities in the mouse and human genomes and explained the significance in light of a common ancestor. He then explained that the current explanation of Intelligent Design is falling apart, even the "irreducible complexity."
Now, my own gut feeling is that, just as Genesis depicts, man was a special creation. It's not surprising that the Architect's work shows similarity at the basic blueprint. But, I just don't believe that this Architect built in false clues to fool us. It's a lot easier for me to believe that we misunderstand the clues (and are encouraged to misunderstand them and divide over this lack of understanding by the deceiver).
Just as we learned that the Sun doesn't move around the earth, but can understand that the ancients saw it be still in the sky and we know that "four corners" of the earth is figurative in a spherical planet, somehow we may - as the evidence builds - have to accept the age of the earth and of the species of life on it. My understanding of God can't contain an earth built to deceive us more and more as we use our God-given minds to study science with finer and finer tools.
(Or to put it another way: While Adam may or may not have had a navel at his creation, I don't believe that he had scars and wrinkles until he had wounds and age.)
We must not allow *anyone* to teach our children that God did not work to create us all. That has no place in science class, anymore than it does in math class. Math is another great example of the orderliness of our Creator, but we don't need to discuss that while we learn about prime numbers, pi, or the universal constants.
We are called to teach the Gospel and to be all things to all people. We must begin with, "Let me tell you about the Creator Who did these things you've discovered," rather than "Don't report what you see."
IMO, the advancement of science and our understanding of the universe has been primarily achieved by people who place a higher value on reason than on traditional belief accepted on authority. Some of these people are atheists, and some are not. Those who are not atheists nevertheless evince a willingness to reinterpret traditional beliefs in light of evidence gleaned via the scientific method. I'd suggest that such an application of reason does have an evolutionary "survival value".
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
Guess I should have pinged you to 868 too.
Was he a cultist?
We don't need no stinkin' carts nor no Mahlers neither. We use mules and the General Store.
Is this the Sanity Claus?
This is all irrelevant anyway. That some who accept the theory of evolution are atheists does not imply that the ToS is an "anti-God" theory. The extraneous beliefs of those who accept it has no bearing on the truth of the theory.
Ywh, but the gentle(wo)men's rule is if you're going to accuse somebody you tell it to their face.
A "theory" and a "law" are two different animals. A 'theory' does not, ever, become a 'law'.
Your theory is not as valid because it does not offer testable predictions to support or refute it.
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