Posted on 08/01/2005 10:58:13 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
The half-century campaign to eradicate any vestige of religion from public life has run its course. The backlash from a nation fed up with the A.C.L.U. kicking crèches out of municipal Christmas displays has created a new balance. State-supported universities may subsidize the activities of student religious groups. Monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments are permitted on government grounds. The Federal Government is engaged in a major antipoverty initiative that gives money to churches. Religion is back out of the closet.
But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."
Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. Schönborn's proclamation that it cannot exist unguided--that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way--is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.
In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, Schönborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.
This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.
How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.
To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.
"Intelligent design is a mathematical model that demonstrates how improbable it is for inanimate objects to combine into animate ones."
ID says, "the laws of physics are insufficient to govern the world." You can't use a model that is based on what the model shows is impossible. It's illogical. Nothing, but circular rubbish.
I think there've been exactly zero finds of extra-terrestrial life at this point. If there had been, Lord knows we would've heard about it a gazillion times.
So far as highly advanced life forms: Have you met any lately other than on Star Trek?
The awesomely high improbability is borne out.
I think there is no place where the statement "the laws of physics are insufficient to govern the world" appears in any ID writings that I know of. Can you give the citation for your quote.
I hope you are not asserting that the appearance of life from the inanimate is highly PROBABLE, are you?
Miracles are phenomena that do not fit into the scheme of the scientific method (I will remind you that Huxley and Darwin, like many other scientists, had different notions of what scientific method was, since Darwin was looking for explanatory power and Huxley for what can be treated experimentally). As for psychology, it still faces the conundrum that Freud did when he abandoned neurology for a quite different approach: that human beings are quite mysterious beings who do not fit the categories of the physical sciences. That we are intellectual beings does not mean that the psychologist can know who is behind the mask.
I'm the only source that I know of.
Your model is based on the laws of physics. Your model then concludes that the laws of physics are insufficient to account for certain observaitons. That is a fact. That's where the designer part comes in.
The problem is that your model's conclusion means the foundation of your model is rubbish to begin with. A model that concludes it's own foundation is insufficient is what? Logical?
"I hope you are not asserting that the appearance of life from the inanimate is highly PROBABLE, are you?"
I haven't attempted the quantification. You hiring?
Evolution offers no solution to the question how did the first cell come to be. Supporters such as Haeckel recognized this from the beginning. Ask the ordinary high school teacher how he would answer the question where does like come from? It would not come from evolutionary theory.
God is powerful enough to create via evolution. Anyone who says otherwise has in mind a little, teeny-tiny God...something other than the Big, real one.
Actually, I have all of the evidence that does exist right now, but that doesn't really highlight the main point f ID, that life from inanimate object is extremely rare.
Well, that's something else. I meant quantifying the probability of life on Earth arising just from the laws of physics. To do that, I need some work to develope a model. A model of an actual process is what you need to make the calculation. None exists right now. If you don't know the process and details, how can you model it. You can't, but you can handwave until you die, or someone else picks up the slack.
digital is for mindless zombie robots who like to take orders.. analog is for space cowboys with a very bad attitude.
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