Posted on 12/13/2005 8:47:24 AM PST by Dichroic
Evangelical Christians aren't the only ones making evolution and intelligent design a cause célèbre: Leading Orthodox Jews have the topic in their sights as well -- some of them gathering for a three-day conference this week in South Florida.
At least two area Jewish groups have booked heavy hitters to discuss the issues this month. And, they say, Jews have a stake in the outcome.
Intelligent design holds that some structures of life -- such as blood clotting or the flagella of some microbes -- are so complex, they could not have developed without a purposeful designer.
"This is one of the cutting-edge issues of the culture wars," said religion professor Nathan Katz of Florida International University, a co-organizer of the conference. "The basic question is: Is God there?"
......... Starting Tuesday at FIU's North Miami campus, the International Conference on Torah & Science will muster 30 experts from the United States, Israel, Canada and South Africa. Their specialties are as varied as Kabbalah and solar research. They'll cover topics as diverse as food production and religious law.
.......
Ask Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, one of the conference organizers, about the topic, and he sounds much like a conservative Christian.
"The moral and ethical morass today -- hate among nations, juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, family breakdown -- comes from people not believing there is a higher authority that owns and directs the world," said Lipskar, of The Shul of Bal Harbour. "But when we look to purpose and meaning, a superior authority, things fall into place, socially and spiritually."
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
Religious people think science somehow destroys their faith... doesn't sound like they have faith to begin with.
Perhaps there was a slight bit of revision, embellishing, misinterpretation, misremembering, misunderstanding, manipulation, folding, spindling, mutilating, etc., between circa 2000-1500 B.C. and the late 8th century B.C., when the creation story that became Genesis was finally captured as written word thanks to the development of the Hebrew alphabet.
Not to mention that even as late as that the Israelites still maintained a pantheon of deities led by El-ohim, the god of gods.
And that doesn't even get into its tumultuous journey from then until it was revised, refined, edited, and selected to be included in the newly conceptualized idea of a bible by Bishop Eusebius of Caesaria during the 4th century A.D., and then compiled and translated by Bishop Jerome of Dalmatia about a decade later into the finished product: A political tool for the Roman Emperor Constantine.
But from that point on, I'll grant you that we can be assured that the creation story in Genesis has maintained its monotheist storyline.
Your attempt at ridicule is weak, as are the arguments for evolution.
Given your lack of documentation, this is all a stretch. Why not just say that the Israelites reinterpreted the story in the light of a new insight or, if you will concede, the revelation of a creator God who cares for his people. If there is any consistent story line in the Bible it is that of a people whose identity is establisheded by disentangling themselves from the mythology of the other peoples of the religion. Only the religion of the Persians follows such a progressive path , unless we include the theology of the Greek Philosophers, so we find them converging and conflicting by the time of Christ.
later pingout.
Maybe you're right. Maybe this is all a stretch. Of course if you want to know for sure, you could spend a handful of years studying the subject from a historical and archaeological viewpoint.
Some religious people surely feel that way, but only one religious person I know feels threatened by science.
My friends on the other hand, they're either Catholic or Episcopalian or Buddhist or Reformed Jewish and have no problem with science.
And see no conflict betwixt the two.
whereas Smugness, Conceit, Deceit, and Ineducable Obstinance are not the battle-colors of the ardent Creo side?
ID is a result of hucksters pushing quasi-religious lab-coated babble on the ignorant.
your grasp of causality seems tenuous.
"your grasp of causality seems tenuous."
I have no self imposed walls around my grasp. The "HOW" of things is not outside the realm of the "WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE and the WHY" of things. Evolutionists seek to set supreme the "HOW" of things and are BLIND regarding anything outside that parameter.
no. those who study evolution, its record, and its mechanisms seek to comprehend speciation of living things on Earth. studying the "how" of things is the core of all empirical science, by definition. If you believe scientists do not consider the why of things, beyond the scope of science, simply because they don't call non-science "science", you are blind to a greater number of things than I have time to point out.
pure bovine excrement - typical of your posts on the topic.
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