Churches to mark Darwin's birthday (Tomorrow is 'Darwin Day'!)

Chicago Tribune ^ | 11 Feb 2006

[gobucks]

NEW YORK -- Nearly 450 Christian churches around the country plan to celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin on Sunday with programs and sermons intended to emphasize that his theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science. "It's to demonstrate, by Christian leaders and members of the clergy, that you don't have to make that choice. You can have both," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of College of Letters and Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who organized the event.

(snip) "Evolution Sunday" has drawn participation from a variety of denominational and non-denominational churches, including Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Congregationalist, United Church of Christ, Baptist and a host of community churches, including at least 16 congregations in Illinois.

The event grew out of Zimmerman's The Clergy Letter Project, another effort to dispel the perception among many Christians that faith and evolution are mutually exclusive.

..the project has drawn 10,000 Christian clerics to sign a letter that concludes, "We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth."

Zimmerman said the letter project and the Sunday event were designed to educate Americans about two things. "The first part was to demonstrate to the American public that the shrill fundamentalist voices that were demanding that people had to choose between religion and science were simply wrong," he said.

"The second part was to demonstrate that those fundamentalist leaders that keep standing up and shouting that you can't accept modern science were not speaking for the majority of Christian leaders in this country."

[RunningWolf]

Isa 48:3 ...

// Don't care what 10,000 preachers say tomorrow, that's His story and I'm stickin' to it//

I hear you bump.

Wolf

[LiteKeeper]

Actually I have, and in fact use it frequently in my teaching.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long−continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or degree, tends to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alteration, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

[LiteKeeper]

I am very familiar with this passage, and cite it often. What's your point?

[higgmeister]

You need to include "or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" is far too often left off the title. But that is the one that it was originally published with.

Who were the "not-favored" races...the Zulus that the British were fighting with, along with all of the other African tribes, and, of course, the Aborigines of Australia.

This isn't magic! If you understood Darwin the only conclusion
you could come to is that the existing Races were Favored and
therefore were Preserved as evidenced by the fact that they
still existed up to that moment.

Your effort to twist the observation of natural selection into some
filthy Nazi plot is disgusting!

[metmom]

So when do they start exchanging gifts on it?

mm

[LiteKeeper]

You people keep putting words in my mouth which I have not spoken, or written. Can't you do any better than that?

[LiteKeeper]

"'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.'

Guess who said this?

[TheClintons-STILLAnti-American]

"Guess who said this?"

Ummmm...Charlie?

[taxesareforever]

Sorry. We are talking about truth.

[taxesareforever]

Wow! Mention the word "truth" and venomus untruths suddenly come to life.

[taxesareforever]

You and me both. I would be hot footing it out of that church if this rhetoric was being cast as truth.

[higgmeister]

Yes it starts a good passage I think.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859, p. 133:

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."

Sir, your parochial thinking prevents you from seeing anything
but what you think you should. Open your heart and your mind,
and you may see that Darwin gleaned a tiny bit of God's Plan.
It doesn't have to harm anyone's faith at all. I've seen much
more in the Bible to make me doubt it than anything in Darwin
that would make me doubt natural selection. When Preachers
keep up these absurd Taliban like positions they drive people
away from Churches in flocks

[LiteKeeper]

More rock throwing.

When Preachers keep up these absurd Taliban like positions they drive people away from Churches in flocks

What is the point of this statement? For what it is worth, those people you refer to are abandoning churches - like the Episcopal Church because they refuse to teach the Bible, and have compromised with the Naturalistic community. Those people are responding very positively to scientific evidence presented by Creationist Scientists, and to biblical teaching which you apparently seek to denigrate.

[LiteKeeper]

I've seen much more in the Bible to make me doubt it than anything in Darwin that would make me doubt natural selection.

Such as...?

Flash - creationists believe in Natural Selection also. We see it as the mechanism for speciation.

[higgmeister]

You people keep putting words in my mouth which I have not spoken, or written. Can't you do any better than that?

Who were the "not-favored" races...the Zulus that the British were fighting with, along with all of the other African tribes, and, of course, the Aborigines of Australia.?

How could your words mean anything but a Racial attack
against those that accept Evolution?

[LiteKeeper]

Early Evolutionists were indeed racists. Witness the activities of early "anthropologists" in Australia who sent aborigines back to the London zoo as evidence of evolution, and the lower races.

Doesn't necessarily mean evolutionary biologists today, but the roots are there.

[Cinnamon Girl]

"Inherit the Wind" = Inherit the Crap.

I just saw it a few nights ago and it was an angry leftist screed on par with something George Clooney would have produced. All the religious people are either hate-filled zealots or self-aggrandizing lunatics. Rather than making a case for Darwin's theory, the writer took a sledgehammer to religious people. Not very persuasive.

[higgmeister]

Such as...?

Start with Genesis: The Sons of God saw the Daughters of
Man and saw that they were fair and took them for their wives.
Don't try to explain it. Nothing you could say would give any
enlightenment. It is a sordid situation no matter how you might
parse it.

The whole book of Ezekiel starting with his precise description
of how he is lifted up continuing through his seeing the Living
Wheels and the visit to the Temple. His subsequent visitations
that he relates in great detail.

One can read parable-after-parable which are only allegorically
applied yet other passages must be accepted literally with no
room for earthly interpretation.

You may be able to explain away anything I present you but at
least 20 major Christian Religions say that you'll get it wrong
whatever you say.

All Darwin said was creatures adapt to their circumstances
and those that adapt in a positive way will continue to exist.

If you want to climb back in the trees and deny your existence
then go right ahead but don't insist I climb up there with you
and don't insist I let my grandchildren be taught that "ID" or
"Creationism" in Science Class.

[higgmeister]

Early Evolutionists were indeed racists. Witness the activities of early "anthropologists" in Australia who sent aborigines back to the London zoo as evidence of evolution, and the lower races.

That's a non sequiter, Churches at that time were racist too.
[Many still are.]

What has largely driven most Creationist's rhetoric is an effort
to prevent racial mixing.

Natural Selection shows us that black-haired, brown-eyed,
dark-skinned persons are racially superior (dominant) to the
typical fair-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned person (recessive).
If the two mate, the offspring will have (dominant) traits.
Darwin is to be hated because he implied that racial mixing
can be a natural thing.