" I will not allow the Intelligent Designists to contaminate our scientifically precious druids!!".
Normal people are so .... ahhhh.... rare.
Posted on 08/10/2005 3:50:53 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
President Bush last week spoke three sentences in response to a Texas reporter's question on the teaching of evolution and "intelligent design." In doing so, he lit a match under a powder keg. "Christian" conservatives rejoiced. Scientists and liberals recoiled.
"Intelligent design" suggests that creation is too complicated to have occurred through natural selection. Its advocates distance themselves from "creation science," but similarities abound.
The clash of science, belief and culture is not new. When Copernicus replaced Ptolemy's Earth-centered universe with the solar system, he dedicated De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium to Pope Paul III and made clear that his motive for developing a new cosmology was the failure of the Ptolemaic model, not blasphemy. "Mathematics," he wrote, "is written for mathematicians." From the dawn of civilization, man has sought the meaning of life and empiricism has questioned cultural assumptions.
Tennessee v. Scopes, the 1925 "Monkey Trial," was a modern articulation of the same instinct that worried Copernicus and persecuted Galileo. Through Scopes, William Jennings Bryan became the most famous advocate of fundamentalism, which advocated the literal interpretation and infallibility of the Bible. In the stage and screen version of that famous trial, "Inherit the Wind," Bryan's supporters sing the turn-of-the-century American hymn "Give Me That Old Time Religion." While that religion might have been good enough for fundamentalists, it was anything but "old time." Fundamentalism is an American creation, dating only from 1909, and it rejects "old time" Christian theology, including Augustine and Aquinas.
A literal interpretation of Genesis was not part of "old time" Christianity. As early as 400 A.D., Augustine recognized that a literal interpretation of the six-day story of creation created a theological misunderstanding: If at creation God brought time into existence, then creation must transcend time. As the act by which all moments come into existence, creation must have preceded all moments. Early biblical commentators viewed Genesis as interpretive and poetic. Modern archeologists have unearthed its antecedents on Babylonian tablets.
Mainstream Christian theology has largely accepted science. In the 1920s, the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Tielhard de Chardin pioneered what is now known as "theistic evolution." By 1950, Pope Pius XII described "evolutionism" as a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation. In 1996, Pope John Paul II observed, "New knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis." But neither John Paul nor Pius accepted evolution as an argument for atheism. They both made clear the condition on which evolution would be compatible with the Christian faith.
Fundamentalists cannot accept mankind as the product of natural selection because Scripture reveals that God created mankind in his image (Genesis 1:27). When science contradicts the Bible, they reject science. Pope John Paul took a different view, observing that "Truth cannot contradict truth."
Thomas Aquinas found the human likeness to God especially in man's speculative intellect (Summa Theologica I-II:3:5, ad 1). Pius XII noted that while the human body may originate from pre-existing living matter, God individually creates the spiritual soul. The proper Christian view rejects not evolution per se, but theories of evolution that argue that the human spirit comes from matter, not God. (Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna recently reiterated this view in The New York Times, unfortunately using terms that could easily be co-opted by intelligent design advocates.)
Darwin addressed the origin of species, not the origin of the soul. The former is science. The latter is theology. The president was correct to observe that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought and that people should understand the debate. But there is no debate among scientists about evolution as an important unifying theory in biology. Discussion of varying views of the creator, or the "intelligent designer," belongs in the humanities, not in sciences classes.
In "Creation Controversy & The Science Classroom," published by the National Science Teachers Association, James W. Skehan, a Jesuit professor at Boston College who holds both a masters of divinity in theology as well as a doctoral degree in geology from Harvard, argues that religious people who believe God is the creator of the universe should find no conflict between science and religion, but those who misrepresent the Bible as a scientific presentation are destructive of sound religion. He suggests that science teachers who are likely to come into contact with the creation science mindset might be best equipped to respond if they learn about modern biblical scholarship, the limits of scientific knowledge and the role of religious faith.
Links to information about the Scopes trial, the papal announcements, etc. can all be found at The List-O-Links.
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Why, because the cult followers can't stand the fact that their beloved TOE is not being accepted fully by those with common sense or another scientific theory?
"Why, because the cult followers can't stand the fact that their beloved TOE is not being accepted fully by those with common sense or another scientific theory?"
What are the alternative scientific theories you have in mind?
There is no real conflict to normal people, only to those who like to pick fights.
Intelligent Design- hey ID is every bit as scientific as Darwins theory of Evolution. The Reprobates may well have evolved from apes -but if so they are not human. There simply is NO scientific proof of the "transitional forms" Nebrask man is fraud perpetrated by the construct upon a single tooth. Yet such unreasonable dribble is paraded as scientific fact.Evovution ought be taught as philosophy not Science. OR as religion-not science.Buecause the origin of hte theory is philosophy -or religion -not science.NO doubt a specie may mutate to accomodate its environment and may even pass along these mutated traits Yet there simply is NO scientific evidence that humans evolved from apes nor that life was generated from lifeless matter
generated by random happenstance. without intelligent design.
It is well known that Mary Shelly was inspired by the experiemnts conducted by C. Darwin's grandfather, E. Darwin. I wonder what that family legacy had to do with what is taken by faith, within Science, today?
Erasmus Darwin (The real source of 'Frankenstein' as well as Evolution).
I'm not sure how he came to that conclusion:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
It seems obvious that the initial creation of the heavens and the earth (universe) was the beginning of time and the rest of creation occured within time.
"Intelligent Design- hey ID is every bit as scientific as Darwins theory of Evolution."
Define intelligence.
How does one test for intelligence?
How does one differentiate between those things created by an intelligent designer (human or divine) and those things that come about by other means?
" I will not allow the Intelligent Designists to contaminate our scientifically precious druids!!".
Normal people are so .... ahhhh.... rare.
The "stage and screen version" may be the greatest fraud ever published.
you reckon the other threads on this topic have grown too large and buried to be frquented by lurkers?
"Yet there simply is NO scientific evidence that humans evolved from apes nor that life was generated from lifeless matter"
Darwin doesn't address the Oragins of Life.
The topic of this thread is interesting - it presumes reason is the blind acceptance of facts, not the proper interpretation of facts. There is a huge difference between the two. There has never been a disconnect between reason as faith. Some blindly accept faith statements, but some blindly accept science statements. The behavior of the believers is no judgement on the belief.
Darwin addressed the origin of species, but he did not have experimentation and prediction to back him up, merely observation. He reasoned from his observation and drew conclusions.
Since then others have disagreed with his reasoning. They have not challenged his observations, just the conclusions he drew from them. That is not anti-science. Science produces only facts.
How we judge those facts is based on our worldview. To put it simply, believing is seeing.
Shalom.
Tell us more about this other scientific theory of which you speak.
This is an interesting question and one I wish both sides of the debate would spend more time on. For example, we KNOW that the Old Man in the Mountain of Mt. Washington, NH (may he rest in peace) was the result of forces of nature. We KNOW that Mt. Rushmore is the result of a sculpter. It is evident to us. Can't mathemeticians or scientists come up with a definition of why it is obviously so?
Until it can, this will be a judgement against science, not against ID. If we can obviously know something that science can not define, the fact that science can not define it does not make it less true.
Shalom.
I know I never even open a crevo thread if it is beyond 50 posts.
It's not worth the time. Anything I care about is buried in the "you're too stupid to know how stupid you are" posts.
Shalom.
Do you think that scientists are incapable of seeing the chisel marks?
well, the "you are so stupid" posts have begun on this thread, beginning at #3
by the way, the theory of the origin of the species DOES make testable predictions.
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