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.
If you have evidence of God's presence -- tangible evidence, as distinct from faith or belief -- by all means please post it.
I don't think most theists are hung up on the question of 'evidence' for God.
And again I will make my point, that those calculations are inaccurate and that you are having a difficult time understanding the probability.
The initial assumption that one and only one combination of chemical interactions would or could result in life are incorrect. My statement is that we do not know which possible interactions could result in life.
The assumption that one and only one environment is conducive to those interactions forming or producing prelife is also inaccurate. Again, we do not know which conditions out of the almost unlimited number available on prebiotic Earth would encourage life.
The calculations done to prove the unlikelihood of abiogenesis have one small and one large problem. The small problem is the inaccurate assumptions. The large problem is their inappropriateness in the first place.
This does not even address the ethics and efficacy of proving one hypothesis by disproving another.
In reading this post, please place it in context to my previous post.
I'm sure she will. I had assumed you pinged her to help you understand what I was getting at. Sorry for the confusion.
Of course there is doctrine in science. Darwinism is doctrine. What Galileo wrote was doctrine. It important thing is that his doctrine was generally true and was confirmed by others.
Nope. Given sufficient time and sufficient iterations, the probability of a specific event occurring, no matter how improbable the individual occurrence, approaches one.
We could assume a dozen different ways it could happen, but that doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly rare with an astoundingly low probability.
(As you would say, the proof of how rare is that God had to create me to get me here. :>)
The evidence is there is see: the perception of theorderness of nature. Without a belief in order, Galileo and Newton would never have sought to reduce it to formulae. Want pure fidism? Look at Islam, which found no middle ground between faith and skepticism.
Darwin did enough damage without he himself getting into the social sciences...however, his work definitely belongs in that realm rather than science.
What most creationists wish for is that darwinism and Evolution be taught as theory not as fact. That teachers allow the students the opportunity to question without ridicule, to hypothesize outside of the Darwinian model. Anything less, smacks of educational exortion.
Finally as there is no evidence for Darwin's evolution, multiple/other ways of teaching science should be included in any curriculum.
http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~etmcmull/Noev.htm
I believe you mean to say that there is no evidence of which your teachers were aware. That's not at all the same as "no evidence at all." For a brief glimpse at the mountains of evidence that actually exist, you might check out some of these sites:
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. Yes, macro-evolution.
Ichneumon's legendary post 52. More evidence than you can handle.
Post 661: Ichneumon's stunning post on transitionals.
Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ. Yes, transitional fossils exist.
8,000+ papers on vertabrate evolution. National Academy of Sciences.
There's lots more here: The List-O-Links.
No.
I also reject the possibility of a miracle.
My decision to become an atheist happened long before I knew anything about evolution and was based on other sciences. My rejection of the supernatural is based on skepticism which is in turn based on the information gleaned from a voracious appetite for science as an adolescent. The family I lived with, meaning my father and his parents, were fundamentalist Christians who taught me everything in the bible as literal truth. Up to the age of 13 or so, my intended vocation was to become a Lutheran Pastor.
My change to atheism did not occur in a vacuum. I suspect Dawkins did not either.
So, you are telling me that in order to prove that all races are one and the same, your creationism supporters are going to deepest parts of Africa in order to BREED with the locals ? Is that a normal practice for y'll ?
Wrong.
" What Galileo wrote was doctrine."
Did the Church do this? Science held it as theory.
"It important thing is that his doctrine was generally true and was confirmed by others."
You are either ignorant of the meanings of the relevant words, or are diliberately attempting to obfuscate their meaning for some purpose.
No. Prior to the draw and assuming a fair draw, all ticket holders have the same probability to win. Every ticket has the same likelihood of matching the draw.
So, what is the probability of the Carribbean Cruise Line having a hurricane blow a Cruise Liner 400 miles up the Mississippi?
Reason and Free thinking are to a creationist what peace and human rights are to a Muslim Terorrist.
Your list can just as well have come from the moon. They are orgs and institutions that support abortion, killing embryos for research, add nauseum.
Without a Christian based ethically supportive science, only dangers lie ahead.
You need to stop kowtowing to establishment institutions and start rebelling a little. That's how science can make the real progress it ends especially in the biological sciences.
My procedure, when a new name appears in these threads, is to assume that they are merely deficient in information. So I provide information, without insult. If, as is so often the case, the recipient displays an intellectual inabilty to deal with such things -- or worse -- an anti-rational hostility, then I just drop the whole thing, and never post to that person again. As a result, I most often chat only with the most rational posters. Which keeps the whole experience quite pleasant.
I think we can safely assume that dozens is an unreasonable number. The possible combinations of chemicals and environments is almost endless. Even a small percentage would modify your calculations away from zero. Far away.
I'm not sure that your grasp of probability compared to my grasp of probability justifies your attempt to make fun of me.
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