Posted on 04/15/2006 11:44:16 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Posted: April 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
I suggested here last week that the established authorities of every age act consistently. They become vigilantly militant against non-conforming dissidents who challenge their assumptions.
Thus when the dissident Galileo challenged the assumptions of the 17th century papacy, it shut him up. Now when the advocates of "intelligent design" challenge the scientific establishment's assumptions about "natural selection," it moves aggressively to shut them up. So the I.D. people have this in common with Galileo.
I received a dozen letters on this, three in mild agreement, the rest in scorn and outrage. This calls for a response.
Where, one reader demanded, did I get the information that 10 percent of scientists accept intelligent design? I got it from a National Post (newspaper) article published two years ago, which said that 90 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science "consider themselves atheists." Since if you're not an atheist, you allow for the possibility of a Mind or Intelligence behind nature, this puts 10 percent in the I.D. camp.
I could have gone further. A survey last year by Rice University, financed by the Templeton Foundation, found that about two-thirds of scientists believed in God. A poll published by Gallup in 1997 asked: Do you believe that "man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation?" – essentially the I.D. position. Just under 40 percent of scientists said yes. So perhaps my 10 percent was far too low.
Two readers called my attention to a discovery last week on an Arctic island of something which may be the fossil remains of the mysteriously missing "transitional species." Or then maybe it isn't transitional. Maybe it's a hitherto undetected species on its own.
But the very exuberance with which such a discovery is announced argues the I.D. case. If Darwin was right, and the change from one species to another through natural selection occurred constantly in millions of instances over millions of years, then the fossil record should be teaming with transitional species. It isn't. That's why even one possibility, after many years of searching, becomes front-page news.
Another letter complains that I.D. cannot be advanced as even a theory unless evidence of the nature of this "Divine" element is presented. But the evidence is in nature itself. The single cell shows such extraordinary complexity that to suggest it came about by sheer accident taxes credulity. If you see a footprint in the sand, that surely evidences human activity. The demand – "Yes, but whose footprint is it?"– does not disqualify the contention that somebody was there. "Nope," says the establishment, "not until you can tell us who it was will we let you raise this question in schools."
Another reader argues that Galileo stood for freedom of inquiry, whereas I.D. advocates want to suppress inquiry. This writer apparently did not notice what caused me to write the column. It was the rejection by a government agency for a $40,000 grant to a McGill University anti-I.D. lobby to suppress the presentation and discussion of I.D. theory in the Canadian schools. Suppressing discussion is an odd way of encouraging "freedom of inquiry." Anyway, the I.D. movement doesn't want to suppress evolution. It merely wants it presented as a theory, alongside the I.D. theory.
Why, asked another reader, did I not identify the gutsy woman who stated the reason for the rejection, bringing upon herself the scorn of scientific authority. That's fair. Her name is Janet Halliwell, a chemist and executive vice president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She said that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and the McGill application offered no evidence to support it.
The McGill applicant was furious. Evolution, he said, needs no evidence. It's fact. Apparently Harvard University doesn't quite agree with him. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard has begun an expensive project to discover how life emerged from the chemical soup of early earth. In the 150 years since Darwin, says the Globe, "scientists cannot explain how the process began."
The most sensible letter came from a research scientist. "I think that the current paradigm of evolution by natural selection acting on random variation will change," he writes. "I think that evidence will accumulate to suggest that much of the genetic variation leading to the evolution of life on earth was not random, but was generated by biochemical processes that exhibit intelligent behavior."
Then he urges me not to disclose his identity. Saying this publicly would threaten his getting tenure, he fears. Galileo would understand.
I would have some doubts about the truth of a Stalin biography published in 1940.
The idea that Stalin got enlightened by reading Darwin has at least two big problems.
1) Where did he get the book? Remember he was in an Orthodox seminary at the time. I don't know how available a Russian or Georgian translation of Darwin would be in Russia at the time.
2) I don't think Stalin was smart enough to understand Darwin. If he did, then how could he have embraced Lysenko and sent Vavilov to the Gulag, actions which seriously hurt Soviet agriculture.
In fact, the whole thing strikes me as the Stalinist equivalent of George Washington and the cherry tree.
You are limiting God if you think He is not outside of Time, with the ability to reckon how the Word would be read, thousands of years after it was written. So, to say that the Hebrews knew nothing of apes in Africa -- God would want people to know the truth as He knew the Word would survive through time. Unfair of me to expect your metaphysical reading of the Word, yet this is the perspective of God outside of Time and of all Wisdom.
It'a an ape. All else is pure speculation.
The genus name is Homo, same as for you and I.
But then, we're apes of a kind too.
Cute picture. Show it to your kids yet?
I'm not saying ID is invalid, per se, I'm just saying it's not science.
"Infallible" is not the same thing as "falsifiable."
I think there is a word missing from the post you addressed: "If you believe in a common ancestor but say you don't for fear of some punishment, what does that make you?"
I concur with the stronger definition of liar, entailing purposeful deception. In the case of human beings the capacity for self-deception is tremendous. The capacity to avoid speaking what is true is even greater because we fear the consequences. Our "common ancestor" was a liar and a murderer, so it is no stretch in view of the ultimate destination of the flesh we currently inhabit, to consider ourselves at least similar.
Meanwhile, it would be easy for science to confuse a common Creator for a common ancestor. From a purely physical standpoint the two are not much different. The argument concerns history unvailable to any current observer, and so to a large degree the charge "it's not science" applies equally to those who assert an intelligible universe came about without the aid of intelligent design.
Hey! Welcome back ;^)
I think it's bizarre you think your deity created everything by a mechanism that was intelligible to a pastoral tribe that lived over 3000 years ago in one very small region of the middle east. Doesn't it bother you that, had you not been born in a particular part of the world at a particular time, your religion would be entirely different? How can you claim this is metaphysical, when you are arguing it purely beause of the accidental circumstances of your birth?
" Why should all supporting evidence be Biblically based?"
Because if you can't back up an argument with an unrelated Bible passage, what good is your argument?
And yet you were trying to use the "argument from authority fallacy" by claiming to be one in the first place. You can't have it both ways. (Or can we?)
The details of who a person's ancestors were does control their own amount of self-worth, doesn't it? I mean, if you discovered that one of your ancestors was an evil person, you'd find yourself drawn to evil too, wouldn't you? Because our own destiny and fundamental place in this world was determined for you long ago, by ancestors long dead. You have no power to rise above (or fall below) your ancestral history. You're trapped.
Right?
Proving authority in the Bible has nothing to do with our personal history, except it's obvious one has picked up the Book.
Your general point I can't disagree with: Philosophical foundations and beliefs have far-reaching real world consequences. But you really go off the rails when you think that accepting the Theory of Evolution as valid & generally correct is somehow inherently responsible for the evils of the world.
The belief in the theories of the properties of electromagnetism has brought us death by electrocution. The belief in the germ theory of disease has brought mankind biological weapons. The theories of quantum mechanics has brought us the transistorized computer, which has enabled the delivery of atom bombs from space. Have these theories had any good effects, too? And more to the point: Do people who study & accept the truth of these theories assign any moral value to electrons, germ theory, or quantum mechanics? Or are well-supported theories merely tools, which can be used just as easily for good as for evil?
Seriously, why is this such a difficult question for some people?
BTW, that's why Islam and modern Iran are so frightening. If we know what they believe, we can figure out what they will DO.
I too am frightened by what these doctrinaire creationists would like to do. Not sure why you'd want to bring THEM up, though. :-)
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