Posted on 04/24/2008 11:04:16 PM PDT by RussP
Darwin critics know Ernst Haeckel as the German philosopher whose faked embryo drawings helped generations of clueless students accept Darwinism – "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and all that.
But there is still another problem with Haeckel, a darker one than mere fraud. Critics of the Ben Stein film, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," apparently do not know this.
If they had, they would not have savaged Stein for daring to connect Adolf Hitler to Charles Darwin. In Scientific American, for instance, editor John Rennie describes this connection as "heavy-handed." In Reuters, Frank Scheck calls it "truly offensive."
In reality, it is neither. If anything, Stein and the makers of "Expelled" understate this historically irrefutable link, and the key to understanding it is Haeckel.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
Did you choose this? Do you have a choice whether you are or not? What do you base this choice on?
So has God and Christ been used to justify bigotry
I base it on natural justice. Many “Christians” support abortion.
It’s the Descent of Man, and I take your point. My question was that it removes the distance between man and animal. The idea of “consciousness” comes to mind.
BTW, I see you’re in dock here and battling on all sides. No doubt the odds will change later, but it’s appreciated that you engage and discuss with courtesy.
I convinced her to go to work with Good Will Industries. What’s wrong with feeding the hungry anyway?
“I am a member of the same culture that you are. I am anti-abortion and very conservative. The source of the meme doesn’t change it’s power. I say it evolved, you say it is because “God says so”. The source is different, but the result is the same.”
No it isn’t. If morality simply evolved and has no absolute basis, it can unevolve — fast. If I can “see through” the cultural illusion of conscience, then I can simply choose to ignore it — as so many mass murdereres did, for example. I just need to be sure not to get caught at whatever I choose to do for sport, be it murder, torture of children, or whatever.
Thanks, I’m certainly aware of natural law in religion, however that concept still relies on an absolute value of good. It holds that the universe favors this absolute value, which comes from God.
Is this what you mean here?
If not, could you explain a bit more what you mean by natural justice.
Thanks for your kind response. The evolution of consciousness is predected by the engineering discipline of real-time process control as part of the evolution of complexity. I don’t type fast enough to cover it here.
An important point is that evolution doesn’t change what is. It just offers a scientific explanation of how it got that way. Morals are still morals. Love is Love. Consciousness is still consciousness.
“So has God and Christ been used to justify bigotry”
Not at anywhere the level that Darwinism has been used. I’m not a historian, but I’ve read that the number of people killed during the Inquisition per *decade* was something like the number of people killed by Nazis and Communists per *week*.
OK, that’s a vague recollection, but you get the point. We know, for example, that communists murdered something like 100,000,000 of their own countrymen during the past century. That’s why I get very annoyed when Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and other try to pin genocide and mass murder on religion.
My point is that science cannot explain how “Good” got to be “good”. It can’t see it with the tools it has wisely limited itself to.
To science, purely scientifically, dead is no better than alive, pain no better than comfort, kindness no better than cruelty.
And to logic, or philosophy, values can only be conditional, “If/then”. Each better than relies on a previous premise - always conditional: IF life is better than death then..
To arrive an an unconditional value, requires, by the nature of the tools available, some knowledge beyond either science or logic.
This is the sphere of religion. And in this area, our absolute values, everyone has them, or acts as if they do. Even you; even Dawkins.
Evolution cannot explain consciousness. Sorry. I just don’t buy the idea that complex machines or computers will someday become “conscious.” And even if they did, how would we know? If they tell us they are conscious, how could we know they aren’t lying?
Come to think of it, how can you know that anyone other than yourself is actually conscious? You cannot determine that “scientifically.” That’s something that, when you get right down to it, you *must* take on faith. No way around it. That one reason that people like Dawkins who ridicule “faith” are just morons.
No, I'm saying that the theory of evolution is about one species becoming another, not about the origins of life It is unlikely, however, that ID is a valid theory for the origins of life. Chemical evolution has been demonstrated up to the life/non-life barrier. Evolution of species is accepted science from simple slime molds to us. ID isn't required in these processes, so it is unlikely that it is necessary between chemical evolution and slime molds.
So your theory is that morality is based on God so evil can not exist? How is the result--the obvious existance of evil in the world--different whether morality evolved or was created?
Oh, that’s a neat little trick. Did you fool yourself, or are you just trying to fool me?
So let’s get this straight. We can’t explain the origin of life, but we’re close. But we *can* explain everything thereafter, so in just a short time we should be able to explain the origin of life too.
Nice try, but please educate yourself on the problems of the origin of life, because you are clueless.
I see no contradiction. Could you explain it please?
Of course there is complexity theory and chaos theory and life existing on the boundary of chaos, etc.. All of these are ways of inferring up from science. Interesting stuff.
But at some point, I know you'll admit, scientific theory reaches it's limit to explain consciousness. The eyeball looking at itself. And the same holds true of religion deducing science.
I have to leave soon, but I'd like to share a religious/scientific :) theory. It is inferential, therefore evidence but not proof. It goes like this:
Where matter is favored (in conditions in a particular place in the universal environment) life emerges. Where life is favored, intelligence emerges. Where intelligence is favored, consciousness emerges.
From the available evidence, this is the way the universe works.
Oh, good grief! Now the existence of evil if proof that God does not exist?! C’mon on, man. OK, here’s the short explanation: God gave man free will — and man used that free will to do evil. Had God not given man the freedom to defy Him, we would be nothing more than robots.
Dawkins is using scientific method (along with faulty logic) to prove God doesn’t exist.
If science cannot prove A, then:
Scientific evidence cannot prove A, then:
Lack of scientific evidence to prove A proves nothing
Sorry, slipped a parallel
If science cannot prove A, then:
Scientific evidence cannot prove A, then:
Lack of scientific evidence to prove NOT A proves nothing
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