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."
IIRC, this occurs in a private letter and not in his published work. This would very strongly indicate that he did not feel the subject important to his theory.
I've read On the Origin of Species (6th edition, the one included in the Great Books of the Western World collection) and The Descent of Man (which happens to be bound with it). His style is intellectual honesty to the core--and the very opposite of that of his critics. He tells you what he thinks and why he thinks so. He retraces every bit of his own self-checking, anticipating as many objections as possible to his own ideas and then answering them. He's sharing the adventure of how he arrived at his theory. He's really laying out that he's tried to make sure of his result. "I thought of THIS, but it's not a problem for this reason. I thought of THAT, but it's not a problem because ..."
If it needed to be addressed, if it were important to anything, some discussion of abiogenesis would be in there and it isn't.
Darwin's prose is exquisite.
This appears to be a variation of Occam's razor. It is also the first of Newton's rules for conducting research.
I take it to mean only this: "We always observe regularities in nature, i.e., the operation of general laws, and not chaos." (Note: those are my words, not Darwin's or Newton's.)
Almost. It was Darwin who suggested something "having been breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."
Thanks for yoinking #1553. I do mean to point out the difference between two theoretically possible kinds of causative agents in the transition from life to nonlife. The breath thingy would fall under heterogeneity.
Sorry, that'd be nonlife to life.
Darwin's point was that knowing the origin of life was not necessary to the study of how it works.
Just as we can study physics and cosmology without knowing whether the big bang was a natural event or something cooked up by a deity.
Without being personal, I'm detecting something in your posts that suggests you believe science is missing important things by limiting itself to empiricism.
That is why I brought up the two slit experiment. I think this is the moment in time in which empiricism proved it had the imagination and creativity to discover something contrary to intuition at the deepest level.
Science is different from its parent philosophies because it invents new kinds of knowledge. The inventing process involves imagining new ideas and testing them. It is recursive and progressive. Over time, science achieves consensus -- something entirely new in the history of thought.
Of course. But that isn't happening.
Indeed you can be in a club but also in "the" family.. (point taken).. Exclusive clubs, however, tend to water down family relationships.. i.e. promote division.. Excellent take on the Mary/Martha thing.. I never saw it that way before.. Clubs can be practical but can easily overlook the obvious..
When younger I was very anti Roman Catholic but have learned that although wearing "the jacket(coat)" of some club "Martha's" can be still in "the family".. I still have a minor problem with "clubs"(all of them) not just certain ones.. But no doubt about it.. Martha's efforts were NEEDED... not by Jesus, but by other family members.. You have taken me "deeper", thanks..
Obviously I do not regard God "zapping" anything physical (matter, energy or geometry, information) - to give rise to life from non-life - a case of abiogenesis, i.e. life from non-life. God is alive by any rational definition of life.
We also have an utter failure to communicate on cause. cornelis is doing a great job of explicating the point with the distinction between heterogeneity and homogeneity.
All I would add is the Aristotlean concept of cause:
2. Material cause is the stuff from which it comes to be and persists - such as the lumber and nails for a home.
3. Essential cause is the source of the thing - such as the carpenters building the home.
4. Final cause is that for the sake of which it is - such as to shelter a family.
Heterogeneity considers both the material and essential cause.
Finally, concerning Yockey - in his own words as posted in the Chowder Society:
"Your book gets discussed here every now and then. I am hoping that people will take this opportunity to pose their questions to the author himself, rather than get second-hand interpretations. I will list below what I feel are some of your more controversial views that should be of interest to this group. Please feel free to modify these if I mis-represent your views in any way ;-)"
You asked three questions:
a) the primeval soup probably never existed
b) even if it did, the various self-organizational schemes proposed to "explain" the origin of life still don't
work c) life must be accepted as an axiom
You get an A!
Response to a) The correct way to pose that statement is: There is no evidence that a primeval soup ever existed. If one looks for geological evidence that a primeval soup existed one comes up empty. See discussion in Information in Bits and Bytes in BioEssays v17 85-88 1995.
There is a more thorough discussion in Information Theory and Molecular Biology. Dialectical materialists are atheists. Their belief in a primeval soup without evidence puts them in bed with theologians. In science the "Absence of evidence IS evidence of absence." One does not believe unless and until one has overwhelming evidence. You will note of course that this is a twist from the usual declaration of faith by SETI disciples. Forgive me if I think this incongruous situation is very funny.
Response to b) All dialectical materialist origin of life scenarios require in extremis a primeval soup. There is no path from this mythical soup to the generation of a genome and a genetic code. John von Neumann showed that fact in his Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata U of Ill. Press 1966. One must begin with a genetic message of a rather large information content. Manfred Eigen and his disciples argue that all it takes is one self-catalytic molecule to generate a genome. This self-catalytic molecule must have a very small information content. By that token, there must be very few of them [Section 2.4.1] As they self-reproduce and evolve the descendants get lost in the enormous number of possible sequences in which the specific messages of biological are buried. From the Shannon-McMillan theorem I have shown that a small protein, cytochrome c is only 2 x 10^-44 of the possible sequences. It takes religious faith to believe that would happen. Of course the minimum information content of the simplest organism is much larger than the information content of cytochrome c.
c) Niels Bohr in his Light and Life [Nature 1933 v131 p421-423; 457-459] lecture is the author of the suggestion that life must be taken as an axiom inasmuch as we take the quantum of action in quantum theory as an axiom. There are many other examples in relativity and quantum mechanics. Prominent among these is the wave-particle dualism. How can an electron, clearly a matter particle, be at once a wave and a particle?
Pose this proposition to your enemies (not your friends): Given any two theories, an experiment will decide between them and prove one true and one false. This is the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper. When a physicist does an experiment to prove that an electron is a particle, it behaves as a particle. When another physicist does an experiment to show an electron is a wave, it behaves as a wave. In some diffraction experiments ray tracing shows the electron or neutron was in two places at once. Thus these experiments prove the wave-particle dualism. Einstein was extremely annoyed by this and suggested experiments to explain what he regarded as a dilemma. He exclaimed: Der lieber Gott wuerfelt nicht mit der Welt! Bohr's reply was: "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!"
Faced with what physicstis and chemists have had to accept from relativity and quantum mechanics, taking the origin of life as an axiom seems rather tame.
In the book I discussed other mathematically deeper questions, for example undecidability. Until the work of Goedel and Turing it was assummed that a mathematical proposition was either true of false. They proved that some questions are undecidable. For example, given any computer program it is undecidable whether it will ever stop. One can check it empirically. But suppose it doesn't stop in one year, no one can be sure it wouldn't stop in another five minutes. So it is with the origin of life.
The dialectical materialist lumpen-intelligentsia are extremely annoyed that God didn't take their advice when He made the universe.
Incidentially my suggestion that biologists follow particle physicsts in doing enormously expensive experiments was intended as a joke.
This is enough for now. Refer to what I have posted on other newsgroups. Best regards , Hubert
Apparently the rules are flexible based on who we're talking about.
Conversely, creationists who seek to convince evolutionists without patience and love, pounding them over the head with Bible verses and bizarre conjecture are by their own behavior a powerful testimony against their faith.
You've certainly spent a heck of a lot of time supporting it.
That whole bit about not assigning motives was always the most completely unworkable bit of the whole agreement of the willing, which should be tolerably obvious by the fact that we can say exactly the same thing in both instances by simply adding a little "seems to be" fig leaf to the second. It is completely unenforceable, as a posting rule. I am, in fact, rather surprised that you chose to resurrect it here in this forum, given how easy it is to evade.
If you want to play it that way, then I simply suggest that I have read it. You can find a copy here (scroll down to the bottom) if you need refreshing:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~js1138/
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