Posted on 01/22/2004 11:10:22 PM PST by Destro
Settling the dispute between Darwinism and Christianity
It seems that you don't have to be an atheist to believe in Darwinism. Just make sure you don't get religion and science confused
By Michael Ruse
Saturday, Jan 10, 2004,Page 9
Are science and religion fated to mutual enmity? Every schoolchild learns how Galileo was forced to his knees to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, or how the Church was up in arms again in 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, arguing that all living organisms, including humans, result from a long, slow process of evolution. Today, especially in America, many Christians, so-called Creationists, still argue that mankind's origins are to be found in the early chapters of Genesis, not in any scientific discovery.
But the interplay of evolution and religion is more complex than opposition and conflict. Evolutionary ideas are born of religion. The ancient Greeks had no idea of progress, directional time, and linear history, culminating in humankind. This concept is a legacy of Judeo-Christianity, and in the 18th century the earliest evolutionists -- people like Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus -- framed their ideas within the context of this religious account of origins.
Darwin himself was much influenced by Christian ideas, especially where we least expect it: in his belief in natural selection -- the bane of the Church -- as evolution's motive force. Darwin argued that more organisms are born than can survive and reproduce; that this leads to a struggle for existence; and that success in this struggle partly reflects the physical and behavioral differences between the winners and the losers. The winners are those that are well adapted to their environment -- that is, they develop features that help them to survive and reproduce.
Behind Darwin's emphasis on adaptation lay his Christian upbringing. One traditional argument for the existence of God, the so-called "argument from design," stresses that organic parts are adapted, and argues that the only way they could have come into being is through the workings of some kind of intelligence. The eye, for example, is like a telescope. Since telescopes have telescope makers, the eye must have an eye maker -- the Great Optician in the Sky. Darwin accepted the design-like nature of organisms and their parts. But rather than the Christian God, he appealed to the scientific concept of natural selection.
Science and religion still wrestle over the legacy of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. As the well-known Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins notoriously remarked, "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Without natural selection, the appeal to God made sense. But after Darwin and natural selection, we have a non-God-driven explanation for adaptation, making it possible to be a non-believer, even in the face of design-like organisms and their parts.
But Dawkins goes further and argues that if one is a follower of Darwin, then sensibly one ought to be an atheist. Dawkins agrees with the Creationists on one thing: the incompatibility of Darwinism and Christianity. In his book River out of Eden he writes: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
Elsewhere he attacks religion directly: "The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited."
Now, I, for one, am not quite sure how poky the medieval universe actually was. Most thinkers back then accepted the Arab estimates that the universe was 320 million kilometers across, which is enough room to swing quite a few cats -- or Oxford atheists!
But obviously, whether or not you do believe in the existence of the Christian God (or any other kind of god), Dawkins's gloomy conclusions do not follow. You may not have to be a Christian in the light of Darwinism, but this does not mean that you cannot be one.
In fact, Pope John Paul II, a man not usually described as soft in his religious commitments, has openly endorsed evolution, even Darwinism. True, he demands a special intervention for the arrival of human souls, but souls (if such there be) are hardly scientific concepts anyway.
People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions.
There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs -- and stays within these boundaries.
Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy at Florida State University, and author, most recently, of Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?
Copyright: Project Syndicate, January 2004.
I apologize. I thought this had some ‘bearing’ in relationship to your arguments.
Carry on…
I thought the genome project found "of mice or men" to be more appropriate.
Whatever the relationship between men and mice, it has no bearing on the relationship between any two people as compared to the relationship between two chimps from the same troop.
And National Geo found the human/chimp relationship to be not as close as first thought…
Again, the relationship between humans and chimpanzees has no bearing on the relationship between any two people as compared to the relationship between two chimps from the same troop.
Anyway, I don’t think a troop of chimps will be sending anything to Mars soon regardless... .
Which has no bearing on the relationship between any two people as compared to the relationship between two chimps from the same troop.
Your answer was sort of a "sour grapes" thing. You couldn't actually address the points in question so you attempted to re-direct the argument into totally irrelevant directions (answers 1 and 2) and to basically pooh-pooh what I said (answer 3) without having to address the argument.
Your technique befits a Democratic presidential candidate, but not a Freeper.
You made a statement in your opening argument and I did address it… Why so blue?
What I said about the genetic relationship between any two humans as compared to the genetic relationship between two chimps of the same troop is correct.
Source?… BBC?
Couldn't get passed the Title.
Is it settled by the time you read all the way through to the end?
I disagree. It certainly could be the result of a statistical anomaly, but that is far from being actual evidence of such. More likely, it is suggestive of a near extinction event for the human race.
If you have interbreeding lines, some lines die out, others continue.
The former case is not a requirement unless an actual bottleneck (i.e., a reduction in population) does occur.
A similar artifact happens with family names.
This is true; but that is an artifact of patriarchical naming (where half of the family name "dies out" in each mating, something that doesn't happen on the genetic side of the analogy).
How? For example, in the case of mithochondrial lines (the "eve" issue), all it takes is for each female to have at least one female offspring (and in principle, even less than that, since a sister who has chilren could "cover" for another sister that does not). Having mithochondrial lines die out in small populations isn't too difficult to presume, but to assert that it is "probability one" seems self-evidently false (since the very fact that there are humans around suggests that at least one line survived).
Please provide for me the computations (and your assumptions for those computations), since for any population with a reasonable birthrate (for example, more than 2.1) I can't see it happening at any high rate at all, let alone happening 100% of the time. Clearly, you have some additional factor that I have missed that allows you to support the "probability one" assertion, but you haven't provided what that factor could be.
There are known cases of (even large) families dying out.
That is anecdotal; there are also known cases of small families not dying out, thus once again suggesting that the "probability one" idea is a mistaken one. I'm not discounting that you might indeed be correct, but I simply can't see how your assertion can be even theoretically barely possible, let alone a statistical certainty.
Of course, each new ancestor starts a new tree.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. In the case of mitochondrial DNA, everyone is getting a copy from their mother; the only dieouts happen when the mother has no daughters. Of course, there are going to be mothers who only have sons, but statistically there are more females than males born to humans, so such cases are going to be very short undetectable "twigs" (one or two generations with a mitochondrial dead-end that probably doesn't have any significant genetic drift in any case) in any branching tree, whose destruction is irrelevant to the line (which would be preserved by the daughters of sisters or female cousins, etc.)
A better indication for bottlenecks would be the variance (or variation or other measure of spread) of various genes
Unless you do a full genetic mapping and comparison of the members of a very large sample, that approach doesn't seem to be "a better indicator" at all. Instead, by choosing "various genes" it would seem that you might easily derive terribly inaccurate estimates, something that wouldn't be the case with mitochondrial sampling.
Several such narrow spreads could be used to date such an event. (The Toba hypothesis comes to mind here.)
Exactly. I think the Toba hypothesis is wrong for just this reason (ignoring the other issues, the environmental effects of the eruption are probably overstated and anything that might have caused a bottleneck for the reasonably adaptable and mobile humans should have caused an even more significant decline in various animal species, which should be (but is not) indicated in their genome (a variation of the same problem with the animals for those that believe in the "global" version of the flood myth, except far more specific and damning of the hypothesis in this case).
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