Posted on 09/18/2006 1:51:27 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. Politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry. What these figures confirm for us is that there are religious and political reasons for rejecting evolution. Can one be a conservative Christian and a Darwinian? Yes. Here's how.
1. Evolution fits well with good theology. Christians believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God. What difference does it make when God created the universe--10,000 years ago or 10,000,000,000 years ago? The glory of the creation commands reverence regardless of how many zeroes in the date. And what difference does it make how God created life--spoken word or natural forces? The grandeur of life's complexity elicits awe regardless of what creative processes were employed. Christians (indeed, all faiths) should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divine in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts.
2. Creationism is bad theology. The watchmaker God of intelligent-design creationism is delimited to being a garage tinkerer piecing together life out of available parts. This God is just a genetic engineer slightly more advanced than we are. An omniscient and omnipotent God must be above such humanlike constraints. As Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey wrote, "The Christian idea, far from merely representing a primitive anthropomorphic projection of human art upon the cosmos, systematically repudiates all direct analogy from human art." Calling God a watchmaker is belittling.
3. Evolution explains original sin and the Christian model of human nature. As a social primate, we evolved within-group amity and between-group enmity. By nature, then, we are cooperative and competitive, altruistic and selfish, greedy and generous, peaceful and bellicose; in short, good and evil. Moral codes and a society based on the rule of law are necessary to accentuate the positive and attenuate the negative sides of our evolved nature.
4. Evolution explains family values. The following characteristics are the foundation of families and societies and are shared by humans and other social mammals: attachment and bonding, cooperation and reciprocity, sympathy and empathy, conflict resolution, community concern and reputation anxiety, and response to group social norms. As a social primate species, we evolved morality to enhance the survival of both family and community. Subsequently, religions designed moral codes based on our evolved moral natures.
5. Evolution accounts for specific Christian moral precepts. Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and marital fidelity, because the violation of these principles causes a severe breakdown in trust, which is the foundation of family and community. Evolution describes how we developed into pair-bonded primates and how adultery violates trust. Likewise, truth telling is vital for trust in our society, so lying is a sin.
6. Evolution explains conservative free-market economics. Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is precisely parallel to Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of competition among individual organisms. Smith showed how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of competition among individual people. Nature's economy mirrors society's economy. Both are designed from the bottom up, not the top down.
Because the theory of evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, it should be embraced. The senseless conflict between science and religion must end now, or else, as the Book of Proverbs (11:29) warned: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."
js1138 at 1570 common descent is just the current best interpretation of evidence. It is unrelated to biogenesis or to the dynamics of evolution.
All evidence at hand is consistent with the descent of all multicellular organisms from a common population. But evolution would still happen if this were not the case.
What you said:
That is the point. One cannot say it is a continuum - a “tree” - in the face of the possibility of multiple episodes of abiogenesis or biogenesis.
Here's how your logic seems to work: "John died with two bullets in his head and no other ecivence of illness or injury; there are many ways that people can die; therefore, because there are many ways to die, we cannot say John died from bullet wounds."
Evolution is a process. The process works regardless of the specific history on a specific planet.
Our best available knowledge of common descent goes back not much further than 500 million years. When you get to the era of single celled organisms, the word "descent" has no clear meaning. Single celled organisms share and acquire DNA in ways that are not really analogous to bisexual reproduction.
The known history of life goes back 3.5 billion years. In other words, the vast majority of the history of life is blurred or erased.
Your generalizations are not helpful to understanding. You have attempted to sidetrack the discussion from its starting point, which was the claim that a quote was fabricated. Are you willing to concede that Darwin never said life can only come from life?
He's not, but I don't think we have any particular conflicts. Perhaps over whether Coke or Pepsi is better?
Tastes Great!
Less Filling!
I prefer... its not what you believe you are, that makes you a christian, its you really are.. i.e. "You MUST be born again"- Jesus.. Its whom you are not whom you think you are..
Humans are given to 2nd realitys.. As many Jews worked against God's plan in the old testament (thats why God whistled for Babylonian and Assyrian rulers to take them captive) and (some did learn from that experience) each time.. Same with being a christian..
Some approach spirituality as a club and as a club member with fund raisers, titles and all that.. others as a family with family duties around "the House".. It might be impossible to be born again and not know it.. Some christians are simply not christians(family) its not a matter of sanctification.. Expecting a club member to be a family member is a serious mistake.. expecting the club member to perform duties not possible.. or faked.. you know, mimicked..
Bornagainology is not very scientific, thank God..
Any formulae are laced with too much infinity to be practical..
What makes it an irony is the unexpected fact that the issue [Darwin] chose not to tackle (abiogenesis v biogenesis) — is itself raised by his own presupposition, that life begets life. The irony does not change the fact that Darwin did not posit a theory to address abiogenesis v. biogenesis.
Hello Alamo-Girl! It seems the only way I can understand what the fuss is all about regarding this “life only from life business” — which is implicit in Darwinist evolutionary theory as you point out — is that there are people here who would be crushed by the idea that life cannot arise spontaneously from physics and chemistry. Even though Darwin didn’t have a “dog in that fight” respecting biogenesis vs. abiogenesis, it seems many people today do. I get the distinct impression that not only do some people want life to be the spontaneous product of physics and chemistry exclusively, but they absolutely insist on it.
Pasteur’s name has come up before on this thread. I think it is js1138’s view that all Pasteur really showed was that maggots are not spontaneously generated by rotting meat. (I could be misquoting here, and if I am, I’m sure I’ll hear about it.)
Yet regarding the immense contribution of Pasteur to biology, Hubert P. Yockey writes (in Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, 2005):
One of Louis Pasteur’s (1822–95) more important discoveries, relevant to the nature and origin of life, is that ammonium tartrate tetrahydrate when made from grapes has only the left-handed molecules…. When examined in a polarimeter, they are found to rotate the plane of polarization of light to the left. Ammonium tartrate tetrahydrate made synthetically is racemic, that is, composed of equal numbers of right-handed and left-handed molecules. The human hand is chiral. Each hand is the mirror image of the other. Neither can be superimposed on the other. [Emphasis added.]From life comes life.Pasteur carefully selected the two kinds of crystals, called optical isomers, and found that each rotated the plane of polarization in opposite directions, one left and the other right. He prepared a synthetic ammonium tartrate tetrahydrate solution and contaminated it with a mold. The solution became more optically active with time. It followed that the mold was using only the left-handed ammonium tartrate molecules [i.e., the kind you get from grapes]. What a delicate appetite that mold had! This achievement of Pasteur is the first demonstration of chiral molecules as an essential and unique element in biology. It can serve as a definition of life, as any substance composed of only one optical isomer must have come from life. [p. 2]
Yockey further observes that the existence of the genome and the genetic code divides living organisms from living nonmatter. He says “there is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences.” For one thing, as Chaitin has shown, the information content of biological organisms vastly exceeds the information content of the physical laws. Chaitin actually programmed the latter, and found the information content amazingly small, less than a couple of typescript pages in length. This suggests that there is nothing in matter as governed by the physico-chemical laws that alone can account for life, let alone the origin of life.
Which Darwin didn’t concern himself with. He was concerned with what happens to life once it’s already gotten going. He wrote:
As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary progression by generation has never once been broken and no cataclysm has devastated the world. …from so simple a beginning [i.e., pre-Cambrian life forms] endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. [Origin of Species, Chapter XV.]This “unbroken” lineal descent is your “tree of life,” Alamo-Girl, in Darwin-speak.
The chemistry of life is controlled by digital sequences recorded in DNA, as George Gamow, according to Yockey, “was the first to realize”:
…J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick showed that the molecule of deoxyribosneucleic acid, which can be considered as a chromosome fiber, consists of two parallel chains formed by four different kinds of nucleotides. These are either (1) adenine, or (2) thymine, or (3) guanine, or (4) cytosine with sugar and phosphate molecules attached to them. Thus the hereditary properties of any given organism could be characterized by a long number written in a four-digital system. On the other hand, the enzymes (proteins), the composition of which must be completely determined by the deoxyribosneucleic acid molecule, are long peptide chains formed by about twenty different kinds of amino-acids, and can be considered as long “words” based on a 20-letter alphabet. Thus the question arises about the way in which four-digital numbers can be translated into such “words.”Watson and Crick wrote in 1953 that “the phosphate-sugar backbone of our model is completely regular, but any sequence of the pairs of bases can fit into the structure. It follows that in a long molecule many different permutations are possible, and it therefore seems likely that the precise sequence of the bases is the code which carries the genetic information.” [emphasis added.]
Gamow was very excited by the findings of Watson and Crick, which he considered “brings biology over into the group of ‘exact’ sciences” by placing biology on an exact mathematical foundation. He realized that “different properties (single genes?) of any particular organism are not ‘located’ in definite spots of chromosome, but are rather determined by different mathematical characters of the entire number.” This code Gamow jokingly referred to as “the number of the beast.” Life is not in the chemicals, it’s in the code being successfully communicated within the organism (see Shannon information theory). When the organism stops communicating, it reverts to its chemical basis; i.e., it dies.
In 1958 Francis Crick published The Central Dogma, stating his view of how DNA, mRNA and protein interact. “The Central Dogma states that information can be transferred from DNA to DNA, DNA to mRNA and mRNA to protein. Three transfers that the Central Dogma states never occur are protein to protein, protein to DNA, protein to mRNA.” [Yockey p. 20].
I understand that experimental attempts to develop life from the twenty or so amino acids are bound to fail if the Central Dogma is correct. The hypothesis of abiogenesis is that you can get from amino acids to proteins, and from thence, to RNA and DNA. But this involves transfers that the Central Dogma states do not occur in nature. Life is not fundamentally about material transfers, but about information transfers.
Life is more than “complicated chemistry,” as Gamow put it. It consists of the digital information in DNA sequences sent to the digital information in the proteome by means of a code. The origin of the code cannot be accounted for on the basis of a 20- or 22-letter “alphabet,” which is all that amino acids can provide.
The Watson-Crick theory is not a chemical explanation of inheritance. Rather, it is a genetic information system based on mathematics that involves the recognition that “it is mathematically impossible, not just unlikely, for information to be transferred from the protein alphabet to the mRNA alphabet. That is because no codes exist to transfer information from the twenty-letter protein alphabet to the sixty-four-letter alphabet of mRNA.” [Yockey, p. 24.]What is not at all clear is the origin of the genetic code itself. Crick, along with Darwin, Bohr, and Yockey, regarded it as either unknowable or undecideable.
Yet Crick was evidently interested in biogenesis nonetheless. His speculation about the origin of life involved what has become known as panspermia theory, that life on earth was “seeded” by unknown extraterrestrial agents. I gather that, to an atheist, this utterly untestable seeming “long-shot” is preferable to having to acknowledge a living God Who implemented the genetic code (or Logos) “in the beginning.”
Regardless of the code’s provenance, however, the successful communication of the code seems to answer the question, “What is life/death in nature?”
Well enuf for now. Just some thoughts….
Thank you so very much, Alamo-Girl, for your outstanding essay/posts on these issues!
Wrong. Why do people say these things?! Current thought is that RNA preceeded both protein and DNA.
Chirality additionally has been shown not to be problematic. Inorganic processes can produce organic molecules with enantiomeric excess, and enantiomeric excess can then be amplified in further reactions.
Indeed, what comes first "the chicken or the egg".. Some say/imply here that neither comes first.. They both came from a chemical soup.. Really, quite a simple argument when broken down.. Trumping the old, very old, argument about the chicken or the egg.. with profound implications.. And the SoupNazis are quite proud of their way of doing business(science)..
"Evos" = SoupNazis.. cooking up delicious tales/yarns..
Ah, ad hominem. Your post ought to be deleted, but will it be? *sits back with tea to watch*
Touched a sensitive spot did I?...
SoupNazi is a generic term.. i.e. no particular person is named..
GET OUT!... No soup for you!... d;-)~',',
Funny. I get the distinct impression that not only do some people not want life to be the spontaneous product of physics and chemistry exclusively, but they absolutely insist that it not be.
I can only speak for myself, but I really don't care one way or t'other. And what difference would it make if I did?
I'm not accustomed to comparing people to Nazis, no matter how roundabout the comparison. But I see frequently that many creationists don't mind doing this a bit.
The reference was an inference to a Jerry Seinfeld episode..
You know..... A TV sitcom about nothing..
SLAP.. SLAP.. Wake up we're having a conversation here.. ;)
You say, The hypothesis of abiogenesis is that you can get from amino acids to proteins, and from thence, to RNA and DNA.
If you get a chance to read my reply to LibertarianSchmoe (#1553), please do. I suggested that abiogenesis is theoretically possible in two ways. Does that make sense to you?
Why do suppose that is?
I can only speculate, but I guess it's either a percieved threat to a particular philosophy, or it's that all-too-common trait of not wanting to be proved wrong about something. That's the danger of certainty.
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