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."
1875 was not "mindless knee-jerk reaction," in fact if we're talking about mindless knee-jerking perhaps we should talk about that group of people who misread things in one place and then go off to another place to complain to a totally unrelated person about their misapprehension.
1872 was pointing out that there is a group of people that persist in bringing forth the same rebutted arguments ad nauseum.
1884 was pointing out that a later post on that thread said that "nameless" and "lapdog" were screennames that those people had chosen for themselves, so it was a reasonable conclusion that those people were the ones mentioned (I still don't know who was meant, perhaps they are on a different forum, but I was right in saying they were not you two). Note that this was based upon what someone actually said rather than upon what I might have misread someone as saying.
I'm sorry if my confidence in my point of view makes you feel like I have "talking points" and am being mindlessly reactive. I've given a lot of thought to this topic and spent a lot of time researching it, and if I repeat things that you consider to be "talking points," it is because those are well-reasoned responses to the oft-rebutted arguments that people often bring here from sites such as AiG. I would love to be able to stop having to repeat myself over and over and over. How about you pray and I hope for people to stop bringing oft-rebutted talking points to the thread, and then perhaps we can get something done.
Played from the mole side, that is.
How else do you argue the Earth is 6000 years old? You just keep looking for new places to pop up.
Power corrupts.
LOL A-G!
Funny thing I noticed about Darwin Central when I visited there recently: There was little, if any, discussion about Darwin or evolutionary theory. Just a whole bunch of kibbitzing, identifying "enemies," and imputing motives to same. I gather it is a club where the like-minded can get together and schmooze....
Thous shalt have no other forums than FR?
I just counted about two dozen threads on the topic on one forum there, Science News.
Don't imply that she can't count - that would be personal!
Lurkers might be interested in your more thorough discussion of the issues here:
Oh good, I like those. :-D
Some can chart the waters without problems, others sink.
If the model were correct, those odds would look absurdly long to anyone, and thus would bother anyone. How odd, then, that no one has ever noticed a creationist wondering if that might not mean the model itself is goofily wrong.
You can compute the probability of you happening that way and it would only add another "billion billion" or two to the total. Yet here you are. You didn't jump together all at once from a soup of aminos. The closest you came to jumping together all at once by chance was a long-ago and not-so-chance encounter of an egg and a sperm. The thing that resulted was not exactly you.
Most complex proteins have googolplexes of workable versions. There are lots of known, observed, cytochrome Cs, for instance. The cytochrome C of humans and yeast differ from each other by fifty-something substitutions yet human cytochrome C works fine in yeast cells. Even that's grossly misleading regarding the possibilities of variation, as the observed distribution of c-C is skewed by the common descent of life. It would be possible to make c-C which differs in far more positions and would still work. It turns out that the critical factors are 1) geometry and 2) the exact right aminos at certain key bends and ends. The rest is structural padding. Certain potential substitutions mess up the geometry. Others mess up the "key-aminos-at-reactive-points" restriction. Everything else is OK.
Nobody thinks any particular modern protein just jumped together. Creationists only pretend to think some people think that. Early proteins in early self-replicators were probably simple and inefficient compared to their modern successors everywhere. That is, even in very simple "primitive" organisms the proteins have been evolving for billions of years toward working better. Complexity and efficiency came with competition, that whole "variation and selection" thing creationists make such a hash of.
I'm not a real abiogenesis enthusiast and only once in a blue moon read any of the research on the subject. It's interesting to me, however, to note that the people "refuting" the work being done in this area refuse to address said work AT ALL but only absurd strawmen. Many have been doing so for years on end and are utterly incorrigible in their bizarre perseveration.
In addition to what you've stated, examination of many genes provides evidence that a lot of genes evolved through a process of exon swapping. I read recently that the first organism may have started with somewhere around 1000 or possibly 2000 exons, and genes have evolved from mixing together exons and mutating them. If you examine many proteins you can see that they are made up of several different domains, and if you examine the gene each domain typically is contained in one exon.
Actually, it was "me," VR. And I wouldn't say that "chance" was responsible -- at least once there was a fertilized egg (I mean, my parents might never have met in the first place.) Anything I ever became subsequent to that "long-ago encounter" was captured and specified in that instant. It just needed time to play out, plus free will (choices made or not made) so to make me recognizably the person I am today; and all preceeding and succeeding developments of "me," from the moment of conception until the day I die.
You will doubtless recognize this insight as mainly Platonic and Christian in inspiration; but I imagine Aristotle would have agreed with it, too -- he who explained to us what a "formal cause" is, in logic.
For someone who isn't all that interested in abiogenesis, you seem to "defend" it in principle as being at least possibly true and valid. Well sure, anything's "possible" given infinite time. But evidently infinite time is not what we have to work with. The biggest critics of the theory that life arose from non-life happen to be the mathematicians these days. Such men as Chaitin, Yockey, von Neumann, Hoyle, et al., have advanced trenchant arguments against it. Yet I am not aware that life scientists have made much of an attempt to refute them on the merits of their arguments. At least not so far.
Also I note that there's nothing in Darwinist evolutionary theory that says anything about the origin of life, as you have already pointed out. Why, then, do so many of the same people who accept Darinist theory insist that life got statrted by abiogenesis?
But not mathematical ones. Gosh, I wonder why that is?
Yet I am not aware that life scientists have made much of an attempt to refute them on the merits of their arguments.
Gee, would that be because they have proposed no testable hypotheses?
Also I note that there's nothing in Darwinist evolutionary theory that says anything about the origin of life, as you have already pointed out. Why, then, do so many of the same people who accept Darinist theory insist that life got statrted by abiogenesis?
Because they understand science, although they don't insist on it (that's a simpleminded Creationist projection) but they do tend to accept it as the most likely cause and they are pursuing that whole research thing you've probably heard of and wondered at.
I was crediting you with more growth than that. ;)
And I wouldn't say that "chance" was responsible -- at least once there was a fertilized egg (I mean, my parents might never have met in the first place.)
Some chance, but not at the "all your aminos needed to jump together at once" level. Zygotes happen all the time.
Anything I ever became subsequent to that "long-ago encounter" was captured and specified in that instant.
All the forces and influences that would shape the present you were somehow contained in the world somewhere. I'm a determinist myself, having invented it as a teen-ager before I knew the word. (Turns out I got beat to the idea, though.) Most of those forces weren't in the proto-you, however. Only your genetic makeup was in "you" then. The environmental factors were in their own version of formation for their later collison with the ever-forming and growing you.
I suppose you have pictures and memories of much of that, but I bet there are gaps, too. We have a seven-year-old you and a seven-and-a-half-year-old you, but where are the transitionals? But I digress...
It just needed time to play out, plus free will...
You seem a bit conflicted here. Your free will is an illusion, meat-puppet. Your own words convict you.
For someone who isn't all that interested in abiogenesis, you seem to "defend" it in principle as being at least possibly true and valid.
I can tell when someone is paying less attention to its content than I am even as that someone flails at the idea. I don't see my real points addressed here, so I'll try again.
You'll never rebut abiogenesis flaunting mathematicians and a crackpot astronomer. The field has a real subject area, real experts, real studies, a real literature. If you're going to be the one who destroys it, you can't bypass that. There is no shortcut.
Real thinking on (the first replicator, the first cell, the first anything complex):
Also I note that there's nothing in Darwinist evolutionary theory that says anything about the origin of life, as you have already pointed out. Why, then, do so many of the same people who accept Darinist theory insist that life got statrted by abiogenesis?
Not a lot of alternatives there, really. Raelians and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
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