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.
you know that a human had to make the computer code on your computer...it's the same thing for our dna code which is even more complex. To say natural selection is like saying the air and a random paint brush and paint made the mona lisa by themselves.
I'm trying to understand this common creationist horror at the thought of our distant ancestors having been something other than ourselves. When you distill such statements down to their essentials, it's some kind of fear that your own sense of self-worth will be destroyed if it turns out your ancestors were humble. But I was always taught that the beauty of America and the American psyche was that you can be a "self made" person. That your humble beginnings - your own humble beginnings, let alone your ancestors! - erects absolutely no impediment to your being able to rise or fall on your own merits.
Your answer above sounds like you actually agree with my characterization of your beliefs. You actually think that if I discovered one day that an ancestor was an evil criminal, that I would mysteriously become drawn to a life of crime myself... unless I happened to be born again when I received the news.
That is soooooo strange.
Understanding the Bible requires no degrees or lofty titles. That would undermine its true purpose. It simply does not authorize any understanding of Evolution, anywhere. Any Sunday schooler could tell you that. And the people you cited probably know that, too.
You need to contact as many of that list of 10,000 clergy who have no problem with evolution as you can and the religious organizations that have officially stated they have no problem with evolution and explain to them how wrong they are.
Hidden among the faculty were a couple of misfits -- an experimental psychologist who beat experimental design into my resisting head. The other guy, in the economics department, assigned Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom as our first assignment. I was instantly corrupted.
Because Darwin infers that we do not have an immortal soul.
That's the crux of it.
So you're saying that if we don't have a supernatural soul-organ-thingy that survives after we die, then evolution could not happen? That a person who didn't have a soul would be at a reproductive disadvantage to one who did?
This makes no sense. Once an organism dies, any supernatural something-or-other that releases itself from the body and flies away to heaven or hell isn't going to have any effect that I can think of on whether that organism's genetic offspring go on thriving or not.
And that's the problem with its fallout on society.Ah, so it is purely an argument from the social consequences. OK, then let's do a little thought-experiment here: Tell me, do you agree that the best way to profit (in the immediate short-term at least) is to buy low and sell high? And do you agree that the best way to profit in the long run is to trade value-for-value honestly, with a slight tendency toward benevolence and forgiveness (to avoid endless feuds caused by miscommunication if nothing else)?
If we have no immortal soul, it's just fetal tissue.
Euthanasia's okay. Even murder, incest, rape, theft, adultery, etc.
There are moral implications to Darwin and that is and has always been the problem.
As a good capitalist, I do, and have internalized these principles in my professional & financial life.
Now, assume that we do not have an immortal soul, and the universe we know & love did not come about because of an all-loving creator-God.
What's the best way to profit in the immediate short term? What's the best way to profit in the long term?
The answers are exactly the same! Being good, self-interested human beings, we act according to those principles that will most surely bring us wealth, security, love, etc. But since we are human beings, we can see the long-term consequences to our actions. So we end up building moral systems based on enlightened self-interest, and these kinds of systems include a lot of what we would at first glance think of as altruism & self-sacrifice. But anyone with any wisdom about the world understands the concept of a long-term investment, and the concept of not polluting the environment. The same concepts apply in the purely moral sphere.
(I hope that's not somewhat clear. Gotta run for now. But do you begin to see a glimmer of why us evos can be such good, committed, passionate conservatives & anti-Communists?)
Great post!
ToE infers neither that we have an immortal soul or the obverse. It doesn't enter into it.
And that's the problem with its fallout on society.
Euthanasia's okay. Even murder, incest, rape, theft, adultery, etc.
There are moral implications to Darwin and that is and has always been the problem.
Wrong. All social groups, even of soulless animals, have rules of society to live by. To disobey them means death or exile in the animal kingdom. Societal law has nothing to do with whether we believe we have souls or not.
Yes, they are. They're talking about everything.
ID'ers do posit an omnipotent supernatural being to explain the Origin of Life, i.e. Creation, and the Laws of Nature, which can easily encompass Evolution.
Given that no one knows for sure, including self-absorbed pompous scientists who profess knowledge of that which may never be known, I prefer instead to err on the side that has the humility to submit to something far more powerful than themselves, still believes in miracles, and are humbled and live in awe and wonder of our magnificent universe.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
- Albert Einstein
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
- Albert Einstein
"What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world."
- Albert Einstein
You are a fool if you think ideas don't matter.
Would you have any doubt that Stalin endorsed what was in a biography published in 1940 in Moscow?
Not news.
In my opinion, it's closer to 90%.
So why is Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate and how did Bill Clinton get elected president?
Creationists are never hostile. What seems like hostility is in fact amusement on their part. At least, that's what they say...
Wrong. Even critics of ID can't keep their facts straight as they sneer and spit their wild accusations...(pretty dramatic writing, huh?)
'The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that intelligent design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions and propose no new hypotheses of their own.'
Of course not.
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