Posted on 11/28/2005 3:40:35 AM PST by PatrickHenry
The fuel driving this science education debate is easy to understand. Scientists are suspicious that Christians are trying to insert religious beliefs into science.
They recognize that science must be free, not subject to religious veto. On the other hand, many Christians fear that science is bent on removing God from the picture altogether, beginning in the science classroom--a direction unacceptable to them.
They recognize that when scientists make definitive pronouncements regarding ultimate causes, the legitimate boundaries of science have been exceeded. For these Christians, intelligent design seems to provide protection against a perceived assault from science.
But does it really lend protection? Or does it supply yet another reason to question Christian credibility?
The science education debate need not be so contentious. If the intelligent design movement was truly about keeping the legitimate plausibility of a creator in the scientific picture, the case would seem quite strong.
Unfortunately, despite claims to the contrary, the Dover version of intelligent design has a different objective: opposition to evolution. And that opposition is becoming an increasing liability for Christians.
The reason for this liability is simple: While a growing array of fossils shows evolution occurring over several billion years, information arising from a variety of other scientific fields is confirming and extending the evolutionary record in thoroughly compelling ways.
The conclusions are crystal clear: Earth is very old. All life is connected. Evolution is a physical and biological reality.
In spite of this information, many Christians remain skeptical, seemingly mired in a naive religious bog that sees evolution as merely a personal opinion, massive scientific ruse or atheistic philosophy.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
That's right. All we know is that interest compounds at 4% APR. That's totally different from saying the bank account will double within 18 years.
Whatever.
But that requires an increase in information.
They have replaced God with a theory.
People express their faith in whatever beliefs they will.
Personally, I believe God can use any method He wants to populate a planet--who am I to argue with God?
However, I can see more balance in one who would undertake scientific investigation not to the exclusion of, but in addition to their belief in a God (or Gods, as the case may be).
So often the theory of Evolution is held up as somehow 'proving' God does not exist, that all creatures great and small are derived by chemical or biological accident.
We casually throw around vast numbers without fully comprehending their scope (for instance, how long would it take to spend a Billion dollars at one dollar per second?--just over 1900 years).
Then the argument is polarized by assuming the days of Genesis are 24 hour days, and that only one or the other is correct.
An all-powerful entity could certainly accomplish anything in so short a time, without the logistical, bureaucratic, and regulatory encumbrances of human projects, but the bottom line is that either scenario boggles the human mind, one for its sheer of duration (4.6 billion years) and the other for its vastness of accomplishment and apparent lack of duration.
I'll go with God created man after plants and animals.
Is there another way?
I was following your dialogue with elbucko.
Adam was created on the sixth day and died at 930 years old.
Yes, as the imperfect creatures of a perfect creation we all have some "bad sectors" on our biological hard drives. I know a few bytes are toast on mine. I don't think that it's the bad sectors that are the problem as much as it is a lack of any awareness of them.
"So you think if you slap on the SPF 30, you can live until you're 900?
Funny how Africans, whose skin is naturally screened against UV, don't live longer than Causcasians, huh?"
Then why all the fuss about skin cancer?
Other than his daughter?
II. Charles Darwin’s Daughter, Henrietta, Refutes The Story.-- The Lady Hope Story
A. After the story had been revived in 1922, Henrietta stated in the _Christian_ for February 23, 1922, page 12, in an article titled: "Charles Darwin’s Death-Bed: Story of Conversion Denied," by Mrs. R.B. Litchfield."I was present at his deathbed, Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. ..... The whole story has no foundation whatever."B. More details on the spread of this story and its rebuttal may be found in the book "The Survival of Charles Darwin: a Biography of a Man and an Idea" by Ronald W. Clark, published by Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1985.
Don't you find it interesting that a similar claim (deathbed rejection of his life's work and calling for Christ) was made of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, after he died in 1802?
The one fact you and he avoided was that Darwin considered himself a "Theist" even after turning away from the literal interpretation of the Bible. That he believe that God created life and was one of the first IDers.
Indeed.
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."-- Charles Darwin, selected.
"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act."
"I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion."
"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."
"A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws."
"I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture."
"I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance."
"So you think if you slap on the SPF 30, you can live until you're 900?
Funny how Africans, whose skin is naturally screened against UV, don't live longer than Causcasians, huh?"
Oh, sorry, I forgot to add (I'm on a conference call and distracted! hahah). The Bible is clear that Man now caps out at 120 years. So I don't think splashing that stuff will do anything for adding to one's life. But I'm not saying that the UV thing isn't a rational theory prior to the destruction of Man. I would say the physics of the earth would have changed given it didn't even rain prior to. So maybe there is something to the UV thing. I don't know and it's speculation at best.
"So you think if you slap on the SPF 30, you can live until you're 900?
Funny how Africans, whose skin is naturally screened against UV, don't live longer than Causcasians, huh?"
Oh, sorry, I forgot to add (I'm on a conference call and distracted! hahah). The Bible is clear that Man now caps out at 120 years. So I don't think splashing that stuff will do anything for adding to one's life. But I'm not saying that the UV thing isn't a rational theory prior to the destruction of Man. I would say the physics of the earth would have changed given it didn't even rain prior to. So maybe there is something to the UV thing. I don't know and it's speculation at best.
I fully agree. However one need not look far to find people who expound just such beliefs. I fail to understand how, in discussing their actions, I am misrepresenting the theory. I am only talking about the expression of belief of some (certainly not all) of the theory's proponents, not the theory itself.
Posters in this forum have decried the biblical account of creation, based on their belief in the theory.
Here, we see that belief transcending the boundaries of science and entering into the realm of religion.
That does not speak as to the merits or flaws of the theory, but to the behaviour of the humans involved, and the way they (mis)present the theory in particular, and science in general.
One of the most seriously flawed misrepresentations of the theory of evolution occurs when those who teach it simplistically teach that a species "wanted" some adaptation, and gained it as if by force of desire, rather than the somewhat involved processes of those not posessing specific physical attributes being eliminated from the breeding population over time (generations), simply by being less successful in adapting to changing environmental parameters.
Such misrepresentations fuel the fires of dissent and do no good either for theorists, science, or religion, as they distort any discussion.
Just as it is possible for a Christian to dispassionately study Islam without becoming a convert, it is possible for a scientist to study any aspect of the universe without discarding their belief in God, should they have one, most of us do not view God and science as mutually exclusive.
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