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.
Ooops!
Was I sleeping thru THIS class?
Because it vilifies evolution, and allows eleni121 to feel good about ignoring the truth in it.
Course, you knew that.
Both Darwin and Marx were British intellectuals in about the same era, and if they did have any connection, so what? Their respective theories are completly irrelevant to each other.
I can sure agree with this!
In the Land of the Blind;
the One-eyed Man is KING!
Obviously.
"500 million years.....I didn't know you could live that long. Maybe I'll have to sign on with your deity.
If I understand post #1266 correctly you were trying to say that abiogenesis was highly improbable and has not been observed. You then proposed an artificial limit of 100 years on it. I changed your limit to one closer to what abiogenesis proposes. Your limit of just one life time is silly on the face of it. Man does not just record his own observations but uses observations of those that go before him. We have not redone all of Descartes' work, or Pascal's or Kepler's or Galileo's or Newton's or even Einstein's work. We pick up on their work and expand upon it.
One really nice thing about creating a strawman of a concept is that it becomes easier to make it look silly. So far this is all you've have done.
"Observable time says, "No way." Experiments say, "no way."
Observable time has no bearing on the validity of abiogenesis. (or any other science) No one ever stated it would happen in one life time. No one ever thought it would.
It sounds like you are saying that there is some time limit or maximum number of tries for experiments. Is this indeed what you are saying?
"But, just cause I'm a really, really nice guy, I'll give you the 500 million and raise you 6.5 billion more. The inanimate stuff in your test tube will always be inanimate stuf. "
This may be true, but this is not what the original proposal was. You said any objects in any conditions. This was an attempt by you to narrow the possibilities down and increase the likelyhood of those calculations of yours.
Unless you are prescient, I can't see why your last comment has any validity.
This is also not an accurate experiment. The number of experiments available to the prebiotic Earth is an enormous number. The experiments done by the prebiotic Earth using simple chemical interaction and the rules of chemical bonding are not random in any sense and would be carried on trillions of trillions of times concurrently and over time.
Add those constraints into your calculations and redo them.
I can make it my concern.
This is, after all, an OPEN forum.
Some of my fellow congregants are doing that very thing, smarty pants. Though voluntarily, not mandated.
Question: How do know I'm NOT 'black' or 'hispanic'???
Perhaps a little RACSIM showing?
OOOoooooh!
NOW you are DAMNED as well!
As a matter of fact they do. All of us originated in Africa and from a group that later went through a bottleneck in Asia. This post of yours sounds incredibly bigoted. I hope I am just misinterpreting it.
This is not true for certain Chicago ex-smokers.
Darwin did not deny divine creation. He was unsure of how life started.
If you check other threads you will find posts by both creationists and 'evos' that claim Darwin was a Christian throughout his life.
Might as well clear THIS up!!!
Regarding this interjection, Martin Gardner writes:
"Darwin himself, as a young biologist aboard H.M.S. Beagle, was so thoroughly orthodox that the ship's officers laughed at his propensity for quoting Scripture. Then 'disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate,' he recalled, 'but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.' The phrase 'by the creator,' in the final sentence of the selection chosen here, did not appear in the first edition of Origin of Species. It was added to the second edition to conciliate angry clerics. Darwin later wrote, 'I have long since regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process." [stress added] (Gardner, 1984)
The reason they deny it could ever exist is because there is no scientific evidence.
I doubt if he's that subtle.
Thing is, they don't want to turn 'ID' into a branch of science; they want, rather, to turn science into a branch of theology.
Come on now...you are saying that it (abiogenesis) happened at one point in time, aren't you....that it DID happen?
Is this not what I said?
If you are correct, and I tend to think you are, he's just tarnished the image of all other evos.
No. They are are prone to rationalization as any of us are. The dots don't connect themselves.
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