Posted on 11/17/2005 11:33:50 PM PST by nickcarraway
Only a small percentage of the American people support the evolutionary claim that life arose through purely material causes. Consequently, many Darwinists, recognizing that they need to win new converts lest they completely lose control over the debate, now loudly argue that Darwin's theory harmonizes with religion. As Brown professor Kenneth Miller put it in the New York Times recently, Darwin's theory isn't "anti-God." But this PR strategy of emphasizing the compatibility of Darwinism and religion is running into a problem: Darwinism's most celebrated experts -- that is, the scientists who understand the theory most purely and deeply -- admit that it is an intrinsically atheistic theory.
Edward O. Wilson's introductions to a newly edited collection of Darwin's writings, From So Simple A Beginning, is newsworthy in this respect. Wilson argues very straightforwardly that the attempt to reconcile Darwinism with religion is "well meaning" but wrong. The theory excludes God as a cause of nature, he writes, and any "rapprochement" between science and religion is not "desirable" and not consistent with Darwin's thought.
"I think Darwin would have held the same position," Wilson writes. "The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion."
Buttressing his argument that Darwinism is a godless account of nature, Wilson reminds readers that Darwin rejected Christianity, and that this "shedding of blind faith gave him the intellectual fearlessness to explore human evolution wherever logic and evidence took him." (Wilson's anti-religious prejudice is so strong he doesn't even consider the possibility that love of God might inspire a scientist to study carefully and reverently God's handiwork in nature.)
Theistic evolution -- the idea that an omnipotent God could use random mutations and natural selection to produce life; in other words, create not by his intellect but by chance -- is no more meaningful of a concept than a square circle. Wilson doesn't say this but he would agree with it. Natural selection necessarily means that nothing outside of nature is necessary to explain it, he writes. "Implicit" in the concept of natural selection is the "operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose." Nature is self-sufficient and therefore has no need for God. He writes that "we must conclude that life has diversified on Earth autonomously without any kind of external guidance. Evolution in a pure Darwinian world has no goal or purpose: the exclusive driving force is random mutations sorted out by natural selection from one generation to the next."
The earth creates itself, according to Wilson, and man is like everything else on it -- a product of a "blind force." This means that man is no more special or purposeful than anything else. Yes, he possesses interesting "adaptive devices," which include a curious inherited tendency toward religion, but he is still an accident and an animal. This is why, writes Wilson, Darwin's theory is revolutionary: "it showed that humanity is not the center of creation, and not its purpose either."
WILSON'S COMMENTS, PRESENTED in an authoritative collection of Darwin's work, make the Darwinists hawking the theory as consistent with religion look either confused or opportunistic. They either don't understand the implications of the theory or they are willfully distorting the theory in order to gull the religious into embracing it. If they are doing the latter, they are reprising a game Darwin himself played very effectively: using the rhetoric of theism to upend theism.
Lest he lose his Victorian audience, Darwin made sure to conceal his hostility to religion in his work, and even presented On the Origin of Species as an extension of the tradition of natural theology. It wasn't until his unexpurgated autobiography came out long after his death that his view of life as godless became widely known. He reminded himself once in a note that he better "avoid stating how far I believe in materialism."
In his autobiography, he notes that he came to regard Jesus Christ's apostles as simpletons for believing in miracles. People of that time were, Darwin wrote, "ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us." And even as he unveiled a theory of nature as a blind and brutal force, he rejected Christianity as a "damnable doctrine" on the very sentimental grounds that if true it meant some of his family and friends were doomed: "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished."
Of course, Wilson, who praises Darwin for his fearless, unflinching, hardheaded approach to thorny matters, sees no irony in Darwin's soft and emotional dismissal of Christianity as an unpleasant doctrine. (By the way, Wilson says that anybody who thinks Darwin "recanted" his view of Christianity is mistaken. "There is not a shred of evidence that he did or that he was presented with any reason to do so.")
Critics of evolution who observe that Darwin's theory is an account of nature that negates any role for God in life stand on very solid ground. They are not twisting the theory; they are stating it. Theistic evolutionists like Kenneth Miller, who has said that his Catholicism gives his Darwinism "strong propaganda value," are misrepresenting the theory for rhetorical reasons. Were they really serious about their position, they wouldn't spend their time browbeating figures like Austrian cardinal Christoph Schonborn for stating that Darwinism and religion are incompatible; they would spend their time debating fellow Darwinists on the theory's real meaning. Schonborn merely understands evolutionary theory the same way its most exalted exponents do.
IT WAS DARWINIST William Provine, not a critic of evolution, who said that Darwinism is the "greatest engine of atheism devised by man." Richard Dawkins, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Maynard Smith, and a host of other Darwinian experts, have made similar declarations of evolutionary theory's essentially atheistic character.
That evolutionists are downplaying this for PR reasons is understandable. What's not understandable is why certain religious are helping them. The modern religious who eagerly embrace random mutation and natural selection as an explanation of nature look as dim and craven as the hollowed-out Anglican ministers at Darwin's burial at Westminster Abbey.
If nature is not the work of divine intelligence but of blind chance, God does not exist. Darwinsim is a "universal acid" that burns through "just about every traditional concept," says evolutionist Daniel Dennett. This is illustrated by the increasingly wan and risible theology evolutionists within the Catholic Church are producing. Jesuit George Coyne, head of the Vatican observatory, is straining so hard to work God into his evolutionary schema that he has written that God is like a parent standing on the sidelines speaking "encouraging words" to earth. Kenneth Miller has declared, in a statement that would come as a great surprise to the doctors of the Church, that "randomness is a key feature of the mind of God."
Nietzsche wouldn't need to revise his view that "God is dead" were he to hear these descriptions of God. "Theistic evolution" is producing a theology of God as powerless and mindless, a God who is dead in man's thinking about life on earth. In separating God from nature, theistic evolutionists end up with a distorted view of both. And for what? To salvage a theory that Darwin's disciples like Edward Wilson have said is unavoidably atheistic?
ROTFLMAO!!! You guys actually made me bust out laughing.
Exactly! The ChiComs have clearly adopted the tenets of The LaLanne Way, and hundreds of millions of Chinese will soon be brainwashing themselves into accepting the "Three Represents", the "Five Coordinations", and the "Five Adherences" as they follow the "Magic Five".
Check out this page for a ton of multimedia clips from this subversive agent's long career of transmitting diabolically subtle communist propaganda to the trusting masses.
bump
So inability to use randomness is a limitation of George Neumayr's God. It's always amusing to see how the religious limit their deities.
Listening to the crickets chirping...
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and -- one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency -- bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again. 'You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade, that's much better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
A healthy lifestyle was encouraged by the Nazis and group calisthenics for young people were compulsory. Family values were the order of the day: abortion was banned; homosexuals and prostitutes were imprisoned; women were encouraged to be homemakers, and mothers with four or more children would shortly be awarded military style medals for serving their country. It was safe to walk the city streets at night; no bars were needed on the windows of German homes to keep the criminal element out; all the social misfits were being sent away to the concentration camps; bums and vagrants were no longer allowed to beg on the streets. Money that had formerly been spent to care for institutionalized persons with mental and physical disabilities was now being used for other purposes as the mentally ill and the severely disabled were being put to death in gas chambers.
The same "logic" she used to decide that she is the only one with a mind and others are merely pre-programmed robots. LOL
Just like I said, Quark2005, lame excuses. Note how RunningWolf never actually offers a single bit of evidence against the theory of evolution.
read later.
What is scary is how scientifically ignorant most pundits are. Anyone with the remotest familiarity with stat. thermo. - even the kinetic theory of gases - wouldn't inveigh against randomness in science. What is it about biology that people like Neumayr feel qualified to rail against its fundamental principles, whereas (presumably) they wouldn't feel qualified to express skepticism about atoms or string theory?
Do you deny that Stalin and his Communist regime rejected Darwin?
You do make a good point, though. If the Chinese Communists can abuse evolution to advance their dangerous doctrine, it is all the more reason we should be vehement about making sure that American students get a proper, thorough education in the real facts about evolution so they can't be victimized by the false ideology of Communism. Ignorance is not bliss.
There is some railing against string theory on FR though (by creationists.) YEC's must also reject geology, physics, and astronomy. One guy at least has complained about imaginary numbers (he said that's when he walked out of class.) Chemistry is rejected mostly by positing some regurgitated version of vitalism.
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