In the U.S., Darwin still needs defending
And for at least one good reason: we can elucidate laws of physics. Does this say that the set of laws we observe to operate are the only possible set and that the universe must necessarily have been?
I think not, thus Dawkins draws a distinction where there is only difference in appearance: Mount Rushmore's etching is the result of the action caused by physical properties imposed, which could have been otherwise.
Yet after a lifetime of studying Americans -- I have gone to school with them, I have argued with them, I have had sex with them, and now I live with them -- I am still puzzled.
Purity of heart and wisdom go hand in hand. Wouldn't it be in the interest of someone who treats human beings as disposable objects of pleasure to support a philosophy that reduces human beings to mere physical processes?
The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church's teaching office.
Buridan's vision of the universe was steeped in the Christian doctrine of the creation; in particular, he rejected the Aristotelian idea [in De Caelo] of a cosmos existing from all eternity. He developed the idea of impetus in which God was seen as responsible for the initial setting in motion of the heavenly bodies, which then remained in motion without the necessity of a direct action on the part of God. This was different from Aristotle's approach, in which the motion of heavenly bodies had no beginning and would also have no end. Buridan's work was continued by his disciple, Nicholas Oresme, around the year 1370; impetus theory anticipated Newton's first law of motion.
Thanks for this link. I believe in universal health care as well, it's called medical savings accounts and catastrophic insurance. Why are people who are rational about science so often irrational about politics?