Settling the dispute between Darwinism and Christianity

taipeitimes.com ^ | Saturday, Jan 10, 2004 | Michael Ruse

[John Locke]

Most thinkers back then accepted the Arab estimates that the universe was 320 million kilometers across...

Wow! That one came out of left field. Even a professor of phiclosophy should know that the original source of this estimate is Archimedes' The Sand Reckoner.

[Destro]

Like most classical Arab achievements-they were copies and ruminations on classical Greek works.

[Technogeeb]

If the probability of survival is 1-k (where k > 0 is a small number and may vary from step to step), the survival after N generations is (1-k)**N. Having several offspring makes k smaller but doesn't affect the exponential decay to zero.

There seem to be two problems with that model. The first is that the probability only approaches zero as N approaches infinitity (i.e., an infinite number of generations; although of course it can get quite small depending upon the value of k). The second is the assumption that the model provided actually fits the probability of survival, which it doesn't in the case of more than one offspring carrying the mitochondrial line (unless you're taking this into account with the k that "may vary from step to step", in which case the expression doesn't really have a discrete meaning).

For example, take the potential real-world model of a tribe where women traditionally have two female children, and whose chance of those children dying (their "k" in your model) before they have two female children is 25%. The probability of survival of the mitochondrial line in one generation is two 75% chances, or about 93%. However, the probability of survival in the next generation, assuming that 1 of the four offspring died (that 25% factor) is 98%, and we now have a function with a growing population and with a probability of survival that is approaching (but never quite reaching, of course) 1, rather than zero.

I understand how you came to your conclusion now, however.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

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."

More ammo for the crevos. Dawkins is just plain wrong.

[Destro]

He was mostly right, IMHO. What part was wrong?

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The parts I copied from the article in italics.

There's no contradiction between the Bible and science. Evolutionary biology does not enable atheism.

[Destro]

Oh you were talking about the atheist part.