Posted on 05/05/2007 6:10:09 AM PDT by shrinkermd
...On one level the debate can be seen as a polite discussion of political theory among the members of a small group of intellectuals. But the argument also exposes tensions within the Republicans’ “big tent,” as could be seen Thursday night when the party’s 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three — Senator Sam Brownback; Mike Huckabee; and Tom Tancredo of Colorado — indicated they did not.
...The reference to stem cells suggests just how wide the split is. “The current debate is not primarily about religious fundamentalism,” Mr. West, the author of “Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest” (2006), said at Thursday’s conference. “Nor is it simply an irrelevant rehashing...Darwinian reductionism has become culturally pervasive and inextricably intertwined with contemporary conflicts over traditional morality, personal responsibility, sex and family, and bioethics.”
The technocrats, he charged, wanted to grab control from “ordinary citizens ...so that they alone could make decisions over “controversial issues such as sex education, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and global warming.”
For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor. As an alternative to Darwin, many advocate intelligent design...
Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.
...“The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the 21st century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
...a general philosophical position, also called logical empiricism, developed by members of the Vienna Circle on the basis of traditional empirical thought and the development of modern logic. Logical positivism confined knowledge to science and used verificationism to reject metaphysics not as false but as meaningless. The importance of science led leading logical positivists to study scientific method and to explore the logic of confirmation theory. www.filosofia.net/materiales/rec/glosaen.htm
Positivism was a school of thought which originated in the 1920s and 1930s which essentially held that all propositions, whether metaphysical or physical, are meaningless unless they can be empirically verified (the verification principle ). However, the idea was a self-refuting proposition since it could not be empirically verified itself - ie logical positivism , like other propositions, could not pass the test of empirical verification. www.apologetics.org/glossary.html
The philosophy of the Vienna Circle, according to which any purported statement of fact, if not a verbal truism, is meaningless unless certain conceivable observations would serve to confirm or deny it. highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/076742011x/student_view0/chapter13/glossary.html
positivism: the form of empiricism that bases all knowledge on perceptual experience (not on intuition or revelation) wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Logical positivism (later referred to as logical empiricism) holds that philosophy should aspire to the same sort of rigor as science. Philosophy should provide strict criteria for judging sentences true, false and meaningless. en.wikipedia
Man, where are all the "DUNCAN HUNTER IS A RINO!!!!" threads then?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I don’t want to get into flame wars again, but evolution is scientifically unsound (macroevolution, not microevolution), there are many legitimate scientists that reject it, and its fruit has produced nothing but evil in our society.
you might be interested in this. I don’t know if you still have the pinglist or not
Evolution has no bearing on Constitutional governance. This is all meant cast conservative candidates under the wheels of PC denigration.
That apparently only three of the candidates apparently claimed to be creationists, and all were marginal and irrelevant figures, gives me hope for the Republican Party, actually.
For Presidential candidates, the emphasis should be that it is not the Federal government’s place to be involved in medical research of any kind. If the candidates are conservative, that is ...
And what might that hope be? that they’re looking more and more like Democraps ???
it makes me quite sad. We can agree to disagree, but evolutionism only validates our culture of death and amorality.
If we were not created, then owe nothing to a creator, and have no rules to follow. Anyone’s morals or lack thereof are equally valid, as they all evolved from the same system. Hence abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research and the like are not morally depraved choices, but just continuing evolution. This leads to moral decline and eventually the death of our society.
NO cheers, unfortunately...
Popcorn thread
Oh I can prove gravity to you real quick,my question is can you prove evolution to me !!!
It points to the dilemma all face—so much of our thoughts and actions are based on the unknowable. Nietzsche had it right when he pointed out their were two basic types of thought--things that we can verify and things that are abstractions. He also was an atheist, but when he said "God is dead" he meant God was dead in the hearts of the elites and the consequences would be a series of dictatorships and ruinous wars. He proved prescient in this respect.
Darwinism and Creationism are abstractions.
This is true. I guess enough people will think you are a kook if you believe in ID. I’m quite shocked that Romney has not rejected darwinism. Mormons are firm in the belief that life was created/designed. Also the more I read about the Universe as a whole (e.g. “Privileged Planet” by Gonzalez and Richards) the more convinced I am that the whole thing was designed.
Exactly my point.
The Theory of Evolution has many flaws, but the scientific community is unwilling to allow the consideration of other ideas. And I am not including creationism in this criticism, just alternative scientific theory.
Of course they can not. darwinism is a feeling and has nothing to do with any scientific fact.
Not a good comparison except among fanatical Darwinists. There are too many "yes-buts" in the theory of evolution. I would have said "yes, but...etc".
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