Posted on 09/18/2006 1:51:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. Politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry. What these figures confirm for us is that there are religious and political reasons for rejecting evolution. Can one be a conservative Christian and a Darwinian? Yes. Here's how.
1. Evolution fits well with good theology. Christians believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God. What difference does it make when God created the universe--10,000 years ago or 10,000,000,000 years ago? The glory of the creation commands reverence regardless of how many zeroes in the date. And what difference does it make how God created life--spoken word or natural forces? The grandeur of life's complexity elicits awe regardless of what creative processes were employed. Christians (indeed, all faiths) should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divine in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts.
2. Creationism is bad theology. The watchmaker God of intelligent-design creationism is delimited to being a garage tinkerer piecing together life out of available parts. This God is just a genetic engineer slightly more advanced than we are. An omniscient and omnipotent God must be above such humanlike constraints. As Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey wrote, "The Christian idea, far from merely representing a primitive anthropomorphic projection of human art upon the cosmos, systematically repudiates all direct analogy from human art." Calling God a watchmaker is belittling.
3. Evolution explains original sin and the Christian model of human nature. As a social primate, we evolved within-group amity and between-group enmity. By nature, then, we are cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes and a society based on the rule of law are necessary to accentuate the positive and attenuate the negative sides of our evolved nature.
4. Evolution explains family values. The following characteristics are the foundation of families and societies and are shared by humans and other social mammals: attachment and bonding, cooperation and reciprocity, sympathy and empathy, conflict resolution, community concern and reputation anxiety, and response to group social norms. As a social primate species, we evolved morality to enhance the survival of both family and community. Subsequently, religions designed moral codes based on our evolved moral natures.
5. Evolution accounts for specific Christian moral precepts. Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and marital fidelity, because the violation of these principles causes a severe breakdown in trust, which is the foundation of family and community. Evolution describes how we developed into pair-bonded primates and how adultery violates trust. Likewise, truth telling is vital for trust in our society, so lying is a sin.
6. Evolution explains conservative free-market economics. Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is precisely parallel to Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of competition among individual organisms. Smith showed how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of competition among individual people. Nature's economy mirrors society's economy. Both are designed from the bottom up, not the top down.
Because the theory of evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, it should be embraced. The senseless conflict between science and religion must end now, or else, as the Book of Proverbs (11:29) warned: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."
I do not despise anyone.
What I despise is the bull-baiting that goes one, this post here being a characteristic example.
We know no such thing. There is scientific thinking and the objects that scientists choose to study. That together forms science, a field of study that cannot escape historical contingency.
Misanthropy is a disease that must be fought like a cancer.
V-A: I don't know of any reliable way of distinguishing madness or epilepsy from "divine revelation"
I dunno. Mohammed? LIke it or not, I'd say the Dar al Islam is a civilization. I'd also say that Mo was epileptic.
Joseph Smith? Mormonism isn't exactly a civilization, but I'd say he built some happy families. Dunno the diagnosis, whether he was mad or simply a con artist who fooled himself.
And on the other hand, there've been quite a few civilizations with divine rulers: Mesoppotamia, Egypt, Japan, the Aztecs, the Inca.
But there have also been plenty without them: Rome, Athens, our own US.
This is all very interesting, but doesn't get to the question AG and I were discussing: she has had experiences that she attributes to the Spirit giving her a glimpse of the Divine (if I understand correctly). I'm saying if such a thing happened to me, I'd treat it as a symptom and see a doctor (and hope friends and family would, if I were too caught up in the experience). How do you tell the illusions from the real thing, in the case of yourself, and in the case of a loved one?
I'd say apoplectic.
*rimshot*
You get some yourself?
I know a fellow who was seriously considering joning an Orthodox monastery (he's Catholic) partially because he hated the side effects of the anti-psychotics so much, and partially because he liked the voice he was "hearing"; his "symptom" is hearing the BVM speak to him.
He's switched drugs now, is doing OK.
I assume that since the medication stops it, he's not "really" hearing the BVM.
No, I've never had any such experience.
Christianity does recognize that there are imposters and substitutions. It may be difficult in some cases to distinguish the two. But the diffulty (or your example) merely illustrates that there are two causes. In this case it's easy to see one significant difference: one requires medication.
IMHO, it is important to keep great insights where others are more likely to read them. The Smokey Backroom is after all, notorious for being harsh and unwelcoming.
Besides I have the selfish motive of wanting to bookmark them altogether as a collection. LOL!:
ID gets a bad rap because people have been misled as to what it signifies. It does not propose any particular intelligent agent or phenomenon, and does not seem to be an argument for "special creation," of a God constantly intervening in the physical universe. Plus it has no eschatology, no holy writ, no dogmas, no hierarchical authority -- in short it bears no signs that we associate with religion or religious practice.
Personally I doubt evolutionary theory has much to fear from the disciplines of ID, and perhaps has much to gain from them. For instance, the mathematical physicist Hubert Yockey, who's evidently a great admirer of Charles Darwin, taking a page from physics, wants to place the theory on a more rigorous, mathematical basis. I don't know why anyone would object to that.
Maybe this is some kind of turf war between the life scientists on the one side, and the physicists and mathematicians on the other, with the former regarding the latter as illegitimately poaching on their territory? The late, great Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, for instance, suggested that perhaps biology should be an independent discipline from the rest of science, to be regarded as sovereign in its own way as physics is in its. But to me this wouldn't be a very good idea, for without doubt living systems have a material basis in physics and chemistry, notwithstanding they are more than what that material basis can describe....
Darwin said that "life can only come from life." He never said where life came from. Neils Bohr agreed, saying the origin of life is simply unknowable -- not just "unknown," but "unknowable" on principle -- and thus could never be a proper subject for scientific investigation. And Hubert Yockey agrees with both men that the origin of life is "unknowable." And yet: There Life is!
All this really boils down to for me is that the origin of life is "unknowable" on the basis of reason alone, thus scientific methodology cannot give an account for it. To get the "full picture," Spirit, faith is required: Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive, but equally necessary complementarities for a proper understanding of man and the universe.
Yockey is really interesting -- I'd love to see him taken up in the public schools. He suggests that living systems do not "bottom out" in physics and chemistry, but have a deeper cause, which is essentially mathematical or geometrical in form.
But to me the main point is that for neither the case of an origin in geometry nor an origin in physics/chemistry, no one knows what the origin of the geometry or the physics/chemistry is. THIS is the PRIME "unknowable." Science must remain silent with respect to it, for its method cannot reach to it.
And so we are left in a situation where there is no evident "objective standard" by which either theory (chemistry vs. geometry) can be falsified.... (Might this be a tip-off that they may actually be "complementary," in Bohr's meaning of that word?)
Hitler's racialist policies were undoubtedly justified on "survival of the fittest" grounds, that entailed that people considered to be "less fit" could be expunged. Peter Singer continues to make that argument today, from the hallowed halls of Princeton. You don't think he got that idea from the Gospel of Saint John, do you?
Jeepers, I've heard Richard Dawkins wax poetic over the splendors of the ant heap via-a-vis the sort of social order that Western man has historically considered natural and normative. There are individuals in an ant heap too, ya know. But they are not "individuals" in the way we usually think of human beings.
Science believes all the time: It believes in the importance of the questions it is asking, it believes that the design of the experiment to test the proposition is suitable, it believes that the evidence it gathers and qualifies in the prosecution of finding the answer to the question is appropriate.... It believes in the power of reason and logic. It believes in "objective" physical laws that can be faithfully applied to problems to get valid answers. Science believes all the time, at every step; and so, I imagine, do you -- though you apparently do not recognize it....
I'd only wish to add that it was exclusively within the Western civilizational orbit -- which is traditionally classical and JudeoChristian in belief -- that systematic science even got started in the first place. And nowhere else. I'll leave it up to you to discover why that is. It really is an "interesting problem!"
All speculation on the origin of life on Earth by chance cannot survive the first criterion of life: proteins are left-handed, sugars in DNA and RNA are right-handed. Omne vivum ex vivo [which I translated as "life comes only from life" -- this being my translation from Yockey's book; and so I put it in quotes].... Of Darwin's view of the matter, Yockey writes: "[Darwin] believed that life appeared by some wholly unknown process, and therefore [its origin] is undecideable."
Yockey writes: "Niels Bohr (1933) proposed that life is consistent with but undecideable or unknowable by human reasoning from physics or chemistry.... Darwin did not believe that life emerged in a 'warm little pond.' Darwin believed that the origin of life is unknowable or undecideable."
Yockey devotes most of chapter 8 of his book Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life to show how Darwin did not hold with Haeckel's Urschlein of a prebiotic Earth, "where chemical evolution and its putative consequence, life, arose spontaneously in flagrante delicto from this non-living matter...."
As Darwin wrote,
I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal ... term of creation, by which I merely meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.... [Darwin, 1898, Yockey's emphasis]
...It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction.... [Origin of Species; Yockey does not give the page reference, but does add the italics.]
Darwin essentially takes the "origin" or "essence" of life for granted. He is saying his scientific theory is independent of it; which is a very good thing, because it is "undecideable" or "unknowable" anyway.
Neils Bohr gets the last word here [from his "Light and Life" lecture of 1933]:
So, life being something that is not directly investigatable, arising from that which is unknowable, our default position must seem to be: Omne vivum ex vivo.
Gosh, that oughta settle it for all time!
But perhaps the evidence you are seeking is sensory - but that kind of evidence is available to only a few.
Then again, doubting Thomas was an apostle, too.
Beyond that, I wait anxiously to hear your reply to cornelis' post at 1402.
Cheeky!
Shame on you. You ought not be encouraging someone who is claiming that one group of freepers despises another.
all I'm saying is that we have really different ways of looking at things.
In the meantime, you might find this Freeper Research project illuminating:
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