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."
Placemarker, because I should've kept following this.
Great observation, marron! Here we are referred back to Aristotle's four causes: the formal (plan, blueprint, or schematic that specifies the design of the phenomenon "engine"), the material (the physical stuff used in its construction), the efficient (intelligent directed effort to realize the the intended phenomenon according to plan), and the final (the purpose or goal for which the phenomenon "engine" is being built). That's a heck of a lot of information at all four causal levels.
Seems to me the "chemical soup" scenario of the origin of life is directly analogous: It is a staggering improbability that the material cause alone can create a living cell, even adding an efficient cause (light, electricity, and so forth).
Ontological materialists reduce all of the universe to simple matter. That's all they've got to work with. And yet all systems in nature, living and non-living, are made up of the same exact particles and fields. Matter alone gives us no insight into what makes a thing a living thing.
Thanks for your excellent essay/post marron!
Wimmer on the other hand started with the DNA message which he was able to synthesize to RNA and by using a cell-free juice, bootstrapped the polio virus. I repeat, he started with the message.
Following the Shannon model, a virus is tantamount to a broadcast message – somewhere in genesis there must be an explanation for autonomy - directed messaging - and semiosis et al.
It’ll take all four Aristotlean causes to investigate the complete picture IMHO.
Interesting read
Ask me if I care.
Hello Radio-Astronomer! Thank you for the valuable link!
Notwithstanding, as a life-long student of Plato — starting with Symposium at age 16 (and many, many moons have intervened since then), I take exception to the characterization of his political theory set forth in the italics at the top.
First of all, I gather this text relies on the quite modern understanding of The Republic (as widely promulgated by Ayn Rand and others in the last century), that the work must be read and understood as a formula or blueprint for an undemocratic, "utopian" political state. But such a characterization testifies to ignorance of Plato's main purposes and goals as a world-class, preeminently distinguished political philosopher.
In the second place, Plato was not a "doctrinalizer" nor a system builder. This is difficult for us moderns to grasp, because we have come to believe that one-size-fits-all prescriptions to treat what ails the human condition can be administered "from the outside" just by setting up the "right" expertly-designed arrangements to facilitate the public good (however determined). In other words, the good political order comes from the proper institutional arrangements.
Plato did not believe that at all. Plato's conception of political order can be put thusly: The polis is the individual man writ large. In other words, the order and quality of any political system depends on the type of person that constitutes its majority beliefs/opinions/habits. If the people are disordered, then the state will be disordered. There is no "external" corrective that can be successfully applied to end the disordered state.
Plato didn't "hate" democracy per se; though it seems he worried about it. Because in a democracy, it is entirely possible that the majority opinion is not ordered to the objective public good: If the people are corrupt, then their political order will be corrupt, and corrupt things will happen...to the disadvantage of actual citizens -- "corrupt" and "uncorrupt" alike.
On the other hand, Plato was well aware that other forms of political organization were equally subject to opportunities for corruption: monarchies, aristocracies, et al. Timocracy especially gave him the fits it seems.
Plato's life-long political search was always ultimately focused on the state or condition of the individual man, of the state and condition of his psyche, or soul; and how that condition propagates from the sphere of the personal into the public sphere.
And that I daresay is the outline of Plato's political theory in a nutshell.
Anyhoot, if you want to understand Plato's political thought, you can't stop with The Republic, a comparatively early work, in which it seems he is more interested in delineating problems and propounding the right questions to ask about them than in dealing with prospective solutions to them. Continue on and read The Laws, the work of a more seasoned, mature mind....
Thank you so much for writing, R-A! It's good to hear from you again.
Even with bolding, this evaded my notice amid all the brew-hee-hee.
Let's examine your follow-up on this thought.
A Darwinist Believer may claim, "We are VERY CLOSE to finding them!" Close may be good enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and government work, but that is not how Science operates...at least, it ought not operate that way.
You are definitely saying that scientists are scratching their heads wondering where all the transitionals predicted by Darwin might be. That should clearly preclude the conversation following this kind of template. You are ABSOLUTELY NOT saying, "Yes, science THINKS it has the transitionals but it is wrong." You are saying, "Science DOES NOT THINK IT HAS THEM and is--however belatedly--wondering why not."
Remember that. One more time: In one version, the statement in your post, science knows it does not have the transitionals. Thus, you're not going to change your story to one in which it does think it has them but you personally know it doesn't really.
So, the only question before us is whether science itself thinks it has found Darwin's transitionals over the last 150 or so years. Here's a sample of why I say it does and it has.
Placemarker.
I would love to sit down with someone who makes such investigations his pursuit, who could describe for me in layman's terms what can be observed and what has been understood, and where this knowledge is leading to in the continuing discovery!
Thank you for your post: I know it wasn't addressed to me, but I admired it, and it awakened this delight in me, and a desire to reply.
Ontological materialists reduce all of the universe to simple matter. That's all they've got to work with. And yet all systems in nature, living and non-living, are made up of the same exact particles and fields. Matter alone gives us no insight into what makes a thing a living thing.
I love reading your words!
Studying this path myself of late! (;
Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness and geological abruptness of this formative event..."
(Gould, Stephen J., Nature, vol. 377, October 1995, p.682.) Source.
Do you care??
Silly, if you post behind someone's back it's not personal.
About what?
Oh.
I rememember now.
But now I've forgotten again.
As you can see, there are many possible interpretations besides your default negative "they're just puppets" explanation.
Must not be that important then!
"Punctuated equilibrium proves evolution is false" is so 80's.
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