Science and Christianity

Internet Archive ^ | 1905 | Ernst Haeckel

[STD]

Thanks, I'll try to work my way through this massive text, Osgoode.

But frankly, I grow tired and weary of this material. I know some version that includes the Holy Bible's account is the truth. Why do we think our primary mission here on Earth includes "proving" articles of faith. It's impossible! Anyone who has not made the "leap of faith" after studying the beautiful symmetry and complexity of life is ignoring the obvious. Nothing I can do brings home the truth found in the fossil record or, the amazing results of the Human Genome Project, even they won't sway a scientific mind or open up for reconsideration the cause of a Creator God. They won't read long posts like yours anyway. We need to back off our rants, IMHO. Save your witness for a time when people are broken down by this difficult life and seeking a new foundation to rebuild upon.

I once spammed these kinds of articles to all my atheist and pagan friends. The result, they won't read my e-mails anymore. They have been totally turned off to anything I might post. How can that be what God expects from me?

I was delighted to realize recently that it has never been our job to build an earthly "shinning city on the hill" and it's not our priority to bring new souls into the kingdom of God. Please don't mistake what I'm saying; we do need to be ready with our witness and we do need to be ready to lead people in the Sinners Prayer, but God does all of the preparatory work necessary for salvation. Our current mission in this New Testament era is encouragement of other believers and glorifying God. Remember, God the Father causes mens hearts to grow hungry for truth, only then do sinners begin looking for eternity. That conviction leads them to seek out Jesus Christ the Son. Jesus the Son makes it possible for reconciliation between a holy, righteous God and a totally broken and sinful man.

Maybe knowing this will help you handle your frustration with the fallen scientific community Osgoode? I know it has helped me back off and let God work His Will on family members and other people I love.

In Christ,

DrMike

[STD]

Closed minds, closed hearts. They won’t reconsider or take the trouble to investigate creationist materials anyway.

[CottShop]

It’s funny watchign ‘scientists’ like Dawkins try to explain away people’s belief in God by claiming the belief is brought on by nothign but a virus that can be spread by sneezing and caughing- Dawkins tried to claim that only ignorant, less evolved people were susceptible to htis virus caused belief in God.

With statements liek that, me thinks it’s not the religious folks who are ignroant ‘less evovled’

[CottShop]

[[For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”]]

Here’s a prime example of just exactly what that verse is talking about:

“The betrayal that most bothers him comes from religion. Dawkins is an atheist, and indeed a strenuous, militant atheist. He is proud of being an atheist. He thinks religious belief is a dangerous virus, and that it is a crime to infect the mind of a child with it. He thinks religions are sinks of falsehood (most of them have to be, since at most one could be true), and especially he regrets their public influence. He is made apoplectic by, for instance, the pontifications of religious “leaders” on whether human clones would be truly human, made in blissful ignorance of the fact that identical twins are clones of each other.”

http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Dawkins.htm

[Heartlander]

Improvement of Man. - If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.

Eugenics. - When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, that dread white plague which is still responsible for almost one seventh of all deaths, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science is of being well born is called eugenics.
- Hunter’s Civic Biology (the textbook at the centre of the Scopes Trial)

[metmom]

They won’t be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

It’s not for lack of evidence, that’s for sure.

They won’t believe until they want to.

[Citizen Blade]

or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

Races=species. Darwin wasn't talking about human races here, but rather the struggle among various species.

Oh yeah, Hitler l-o-v-e-d the idea of evolution.

Not really. Hitler believed that the Aryan race was created perfect by God, but that the untermensch were threatening that perfection through interbreeding.

Bunch of racist claptrap.

By modern standards, Darwin would be considered racist (as would pretty much anyone of his era). However, he was also an ardent abolitionist.

[chuck_the_tv_out]

"Darwin wasn't talking about human races"

That's really good to know you have a direct line to Darwin's brain! Can you ask him why he was infatuated with worms, and if his primary inspiration was indeed his morbidly obese Christian-hating grandfather, as many believe?

Words mean what they mean. "Races" was about people back then just like now. When an author uses a word, we must assume they are aware of its implications. Otherwise the author is an incompetant.

Darwin was a total racist. It is a primary subtext of his book. The early 20th-century racist/eugenics movement came directly from his inspiration.

[MrB]

The book in question in the Scopes trial, “A Civic Biology”, was very racist, as is evolutionary theory.

Instead of all “races” of humans being descended from the same created humans, some races are more evolved than others, and conversely, some races are more closely related to animals.

<<<<<<
of the “five races or varieties of men” found today, some are clearly more evolved than others. There are, Hunter claimed, the four lower types of humans, including the “Ethiopian or negro type,” “the Malay or brown race,” “the American Indian,” and the “Mongolian or yellow race.” “Finally,” Hunter concluded, there is “the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”
<<<<<<<

[Citizen Blade]

Words mean what they mean. "Races" was about people back then just like now.

It's true that the word race had both meanings in Darwin's time. But, in the context of his book, race referred to species.

Darwin was a total racist.

So were George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and pretty much any person in history, judged by today's standards.

The early 20th-century racist/eugenics movement came directly from his inspiration.

And the Nazi death camps were only possible because of railroads and chemistry. All Darwin did was describe a natural process (evolution). Others decided to use his discovery for their own political or social ends. But, that misuse in no way discredits the science behind the TOE.

[chuck_the_tv_out]

So true. Objective science throws out evolution. The best thing to do is find out for yourself. There is a lot of good information out there, creation TV is quite a good place to start: http://www.thestreamtv1.com/welcome_016.htm

[jimt]

The current vehemence of the opposition between science and Christianity is unnatural and contrived.

Bingo !

[Heartlander]

Now consider this... If Darwin is correct, science was not misused. The science of eugenics is sound, and the technology of eugenics was used as intended. The Nazi understood that it was just animal husbandry - objectively tried and true, scientifically testable and falsifiable. It works.

Darwin opened the door to animal husbandry on humans (Darwin's big revelation was that we’re all just different animals from the same tree, right?) and the subjective element was unleashed like Pandora's Box. An animal breeder can subjectively pick and choose whichever traits are desirable or undesirable. Runts can be eliminated as "unfit" or "burdensome" like pigs, or they can be kept and bred further for "cuteness", like dogs. Once humans are determined to be just animals, there is no objective reason to value one trait over another and it should not be surprising then that different breeders have different goals in mind for their livestock.

If the purpose of life really is just survival and producing fit offspring, then science should simply observe only that the fit survived and the unfit died. Nope science was not being misused... the only thing that was misused was the term "Human". Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game, and the scientific data is well supported. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.

Here is more from Hunter’s Civic Biology:

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. - Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.

Above was taught as fact in schools and the perversion was not of animal husbandry or of Darwin's theory. The perversion was not even of science. The perversion was the definition of what it meant to be human. When man became a mere animal, it was only a matter of time till he was treated like one.

[Citizen Blade]

Now consider this... If Darwin is correct

You're arguing from consequences. Has the TOE been used as justification for certain atrocities? Of course. But that's not an argument against whether the TOE is correct.

[Heartlander]

If the TOE is correct? Darwin directed his one long argument in the The Origin of Species against design and purpose (Paley) and the logical consequences followed. The ‘current’ TOE stipulates; no design, no purpose, no goal, and humans are just animals continuing to evolve.

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
---Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[tacticalogic]

"By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous."

You really think that's a good argument? Theology is so tenuous that's all it takes to make it irrelevant? Who is this guy, and why should I listen to him?

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

Darwin opened the door to animal husbandry on humans

Yes, it became backed by so-called science:

The influence primarily responsible for the modern eugenics movement was the establishment of the doctrine of organic evolution following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.

—Samuel J. Holmes, Human Genetics, ch.25 (1936).

Here is more from Hunter’s Civic Biology:

That book got a lot of milage out of the Jukes and Kallikaks and Davenport. Hunter's civic biology and loads more stuff like it can be found here (along with William Jennings Bryan's essays) Inbred Science.

I like this one by Karl Pearson, addressed to an audience of surgeons:

Let me, even at the risk of talking about the familiar, sketch for you the broad outlines of Darwin's theory of evolutionary progress. The individual better fitted to its environment lived longer than its fellows, had more offspring, and these, inheriting its better fitness, raised the type of the race. The environment against which the individual had to struggle here was not only formed by the other members of its species, not only by its physical surroundings, but by the germs of disease of all types. According to Darwin -- and some of us still believe him to be right -- the ascent of man, physical and mental, was brought about by this survival of the fitter. Now, if you are going lo take Darwinism as your theory of life and apply it to human problems, you must not only believe it to be true, but you must set to, and demonstrate that it actually applies.

Darwin's theory means this, that if individuals are reared under a constant environment, and a larger percentage of them are killed off in the first year of life, then a smaller percentage of those remaining will die in the later years of life, because more of the weaklings have been killed off... Now if there be -- and I, for one, think that two independent lines of inquiry demonstrate that there is -- a fairly stringent selection of the weaker individuals by the mortality of infancy and childhood, what will happen, if by increased medical skill and by increased state support and private charity, we enable the weaklings to survive and to propagate their kind? Why, undoubtedly we shall have a weaker race... Surely here is an antinomy -- a fundamental opposition between medical progress and the science of national eugenics, of race efficiency. Gentlemen, I venture to think it is an antinomy, and will remain one until the nation at large recognises as a fundamental doctrine the principle that everyone, being born, has the right to live, but the right to live does not in itself convey the right to everyone to reproduce their kind... Our social instincts, our common humanity enforce upon us the conception that each person born has the right to live, yet this right essentially connotes a suspension of the full intensity of natural selection. Darwinism and medical progress are opposed forces, and we shall gain nothing by screening that fact, or, in opposition to ample evidence, asserting that Darwinism has no application to civilised man... I say that only a very thorough eugenic policy can possibly save our race from the evils which must flow from the antagonism between natural selection and medical progress.

The arrogance of evolutionists is striking. Imagine it, telling an audience of surgeons that the medical profession is in conflict with Darwinism, and they have to do something about it.

Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game, and the scientific data is well supported. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.

Yes, good point. That's the reason why some of Haeckel's nonsense theories were put into textbooks, even though everyone knew they were false. If you can get the public to believe men have no souls and human embryos are just fish or chickens, then abortion, euthanasia and all that becomes easier to sell.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game, and the scientific data is well supported. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.

There was a thread with comments pertaining to what you just said. I had no luck convincing someone that humans are not dogs.

[STD]

Right on Brother! That’s already happened.