Posted on 02/12/2009 7:07:25 AM PST by Ed Hudgins
by Edward Hudgins
February 12, 2009 -- Of the two famous men born on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln is the one known as a political liberator.
But the other man, Charles Darwin, also deserves recognition on the bicentennial of his birth for his own form of Emancipation Proclamation.
Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859 and set forth the thesis that the various kinds of living organisms were not fixed and eternal but, rather, evolved from other, often less complex organisms over millions of years. In the century and a half that followed, this discovery has had a truly liberating effect on humanity.
We Want to Know
Understanding evolution has helped us satisfy that quintessential human longing expressed by Aristotle: “All men, by nature, desire to know.” As self-conscious beings, we have a thirst to know the deepest truths about the world around us, its origin and ours, and our place in it. We are pattern-seeking animals who delight in discovery. Such understanding and, indeed, our very survival require us to exercise our rational capacity, the attribute that most distinguishes us from the lower life forms from which we evolved.
Observations, conceptual thinking and critical analysis have, over the centuries, allowed us to replace primitive superstitions with knowledge of objective reality. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein have helped us understand the physical realm: that it operates with regularity in accordance with causal laws; that it is composed of infinitesimal atoms; that it is vast and includes planets, stars and galaxies; that it is billions of years old. And, of course, knowledge gained through this rational approach allows us to create all of the technologies needed for our survival and flourishing.
Darwin helped us understand the biological realm. He showed how small variations that naturally occur in living ...
(Excerpt) Read more at atlassociety.org ...
However, I can only be proven wrong, by divine intervention. For now.
That's a fair statement & if you'd led with it instead of what you did, I wouldn't have taken the time to kick the soap box that you'd climbed onto from under your feet.
:^)
(Hunt & peck sux)
Life, even its most simple form, hands off life to non-living matter. I find that to be evidence of something unseen. It, whatever it is could dwell beyond the universe that we can detect. Therefore, belief that there's more to this existence than that which can be quantified is a rational belief. For me, *it* is of God. For an agnostic, it could be something extra-natural. My way or the agnostics way would leave inquiry open to possibilities, making way for each thinking of ways to detect it.
Today, for example, in light of new fossil evidence and discoveries, new questions and debates concerning evolution have arisen. In recent decades Stephen J. Gould postulated what is described as a “punctuated equilibrium” view that holds that evolution is not a smooth process but proceeds in fits and starts. This view is opposed by anthropologist Richard Dawkins and others. It is still an open question concerning which view is correct or whether both views contain elements of truth.
But if you mean by “plugging into the current paradigm” that folks in the biological sciences don't take seriously those who are pushing a religion agenda, cherry-picking evidence, etc. then they have good reason for their attitudes since, by definition, ultimate religious beliefs are not based on reason and a critical approach to knowledge but, rather, on faith.
Neither is really gonna do ya any good.
So, in that sense, you're kidding yourself by making a distinction.
Well, your superstition is only going to give false meaning to your entire life.
I'd rather err with reason, than blunder with falsehood.
As I suggest in my piece, when I witness this sort of irrationality, it strikes me as a tragic and terrible waste of human ability and human minds.
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