Replies

Darwin’s Theory of Common Descent (in a nutshell):

RM&NS is all that is required for the diversity of life we now see and logically comprehend. There is no target for evolution and we are just lucky to realize our own luck. We are just the byproducts of a blind, mindless, and unguided process that never had us in mind. The proof for this? All the biological diversity in this robust ecosystem can be traced back to a single organism that fortunately 'appeared'.

Darwin claims (again, in a nutshell) that life's purpose is the four F's: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and… Reproducing. This is natural selection. But here is the rub; life has purpose but nothing else does? We don't attribute 'purpose' to anything outside of life do we? Someone can give a rock 'a purpose' but the 'rock' (atoms, etc.) has no purpose - does it? Where does life's purpose come from?

Is it truly, “he who dies with the most offspring wins?”

Anyway, Darwin observed some bird beaks, took the current naturalistic scientific theories of his day, and tried to unify them with blind and undirected chance to rid science of the theistic stranglehold that he (and others) loathed. The Universities were founded on Christian principles and naturalists were not paid well or considered prestigious. (How the times have changed)

Did he accomplish his goal? Did people really start to believe that life’s origin leading to mankind was mindless, unguided, and without purpose or goal? Let’s look:

The National Association of Biology Teachers [NABT] in their 1995 Official Statement on Teaching Evolution stated the following:

"The diversity of life [all life] on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments."

It took seven years of prodding from conservative groups before they revised the statement. According to the NABT's executive director, the change was made ``to avoid taking a religious position'' that might offend believers. The two words that were removed from their statement were; 'unsupervised' and 'impersonal'. These two words made the NABT's statement religious and faith-based. To illustrate, change the words to 'supervised' and 'personal'. Either way, both statements would be outside the purely 'material constraints' that science now (ironically thanks in part to Darwin) currently imposes. Their statement boldly claimed that there was no intelligent cause (force, etc.) behind mankind and all existence.

Anyway, let's look at a college textbook and see what it has to say on the subject:

According to Douglas Futuyama’s widely used college textbook Evolutionary Biology(1998), Darwin’s “theory of random, purposeless variations acted on by blind, purposeless natural selection provided a revolutionary new answer to almost all questions that begin with ‘Why?’” Darwin “made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous,” and thereby “provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism” that is now “the stage of most Western thought.”

Well, we can't use this because it is a religious statement. I guess we should look at a required/recommended reading book for college biology:

"Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between . . . watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in the mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (p. 5)
-Richard Dawkins

Another religious statement? Hmmm… The National Association of Biology Teacher's, college textbooks, and required/recommended reading material.

Maybe it's just 'human' nature...
If things that people detest exist in religion i.e. dogmatism, conceit, mockery, intolerance, and power-obsession, why would we not expect to see it in science as well? Especially when science becomes religion.