Winner takes all!
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.
"Personal attacks."
"How original."
D's use of ad hom was because of frustration with your inability to differentiate between anti-God and anti-creationist assertions. If you would parse the posts you linked to a little more closely without letting your prejudice influence your view of them, you would see them for what they are.
About that CHAT you have daily:
Who you talkin' to???
The 800# gorilla is not invisible: just ignored.
John 101. "I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber.
2. The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep.
3. The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
4. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.
5. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice."
6. Jesus used this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them.
I never said I didn't accept monotheism. I just said the concept was deadly. Methinks you read far too much into what I write than is actually there.
This is simply incorrect. Dawkins is speaking science, there is no such thing as scientism. If you want to deride his journalism, do so based on his atheism. He is an atheist that approaches science on that basis. However it does not cause him to misrepresent the science he is communicating.
"The problem is that they accept they idea that the only "science" that is knowable is that contained in the categories explored by the scientific method. That is a dubious proposition.
Science is the scientific method, anything else is something other than science. If you believe otherwise, give an example.
"Huge chunks of human experience cannot be dealt with by the scientific method."
Of course. Science does not pretend to deal with many human experiences.
huh?
I agree.
Again could you point to some material evidence? If you can't provide any then please retract the claim.
Nice turn of phrase:
NIV Daniel 5:4-9
4. As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone.
5. Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote.
6. His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way.
7. The king called out for the enchanters, astrologers and diviners to be brought and said to these wise men of Babylon, "Whoever reads this writing and tells me what it means will be clothed in purple and have a gold chain placed around his neck, and he will be made the third highest ruler in the kingdom."
8. Then all the king's wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or tell the king what it meant.
9. So King Belshazzar became even more terrified and his face grew more pale. His nobles were baffled.
YOU tell Jehovah that, then!
You've no doubt come across the verses in Romans before, so I won't repeat them here.
You'd probably STILL say, "WHAT evidence?"
Guilt by association? Darwin did not endorse eugenics; neither is he responsible for what others do with his words. Do you blame the inventors of guns for the use terrorists put them to? Or explosives?
I would be interested in any quotes you may have from Darwin that shows he was promoting eugenics.
I should have said "abuse of the concept is deadly." Think for a minute -- oxygen can be dangerous, too. Monotheism reinforces a streak of xenophobia not found in polytheistic religions.
Also, it is apparent from the early books of the OT that the Hebrews considered there might actually be other gods, but that none of them measured up to their particular diety. It is quite possible this is the case even today.
And therein lies the rub. What preconceptions are we bringing to the evidence of evolution; are we construing that evidence in a vacuum or with due consideration of other known facts; and what are the reasonable alternative interpretations of the evidence?
Like this guy:
Dr.Francis S. Collins, physician, geneticist, and Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH (National Institutes of Health)
The problem is, Dr Collins has no problem with evolution. He believes that evolution and faith can be reconciled.
The summary from an interview with NPR says: A quick glance at Francis Collins' reading list reveals that the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute is fascinated by the points at which science intersects religion -- specifically, Christianity. One book examines similarities between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. Another tries to reconcile belief in God with belief in evolution.
Can a person believe equally in both? "I firmly believe you can," says this man of deep faith who also has a reputation as one of the world's top scientific minds.
Do a find on "evolution" in here and you'll find Dr. Collins referencing how "junk" DNA was treated by evolution. The inference there is that evolution is a given, and not in question.
Dr. Collins was *NOT* one of the signators to the Discovery Institute's infamous "Scientific Dissent from Darwininsm"
I would expect that any further references to Dr. Collins list him as being a firm believer in both God and Evolution. But I won't count on it.
What makes you believe that theories are only valid in the presence of, or that the scientific method exclusively relies on, observed phenomena? Science is based on our human ability to see patterns and extrapolate data as well as other deductive and inductive reasoning.
"A theory is taught as one of many interpretations. If there are no alternatives supplied within a source material, then one must conclude that the only material supplied is factual, not theoretical.
Only if considered without critical thinking skills. Further, if you make that kind of inference, it is evidence of poor understanding of science and its methodology.
You are trying to be fair. But if your opinion is based on incorrect data, your premises and conclusions may not be worth arguing with.
Excellent rebuttal. But it will have no effect on the 'noids. Nothing ever does.
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