And the country is not out of the reach of U.S. based pro-ID organizations, including the Discovery Institute. Copies of Explore Evolution (which offers "the arguments for and against neo-Darwinism"), authored in part by Discovery Institute members, were sent to many U.K. school librarians—bypassing science teachers altogether.
Although the country boasts a relatively robust national science curriculum now, until 1988 the U.K. had national requirements to teach only one subject in its state-sponsored schools: religious studies. And that subject remains in the publicly funded schools.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Williams says, it might be the persistence of religion classes that has kept more of the creationist push out of science classrooms in the U.K. compared with the U.S. "I think that this lack of separation of church and state meant that parents who do hold Christian values are very happy that schools are going to be teaching from the religious standpoint."
The religion classes offer a more comprehensive cultural introduction to various theologies around the world than strict Anglican instruction, but, Williams says, that does not mean they have kept out of the creation game entirely. "In science class we would never look at the evidence against the existence of God, but it seems to be perfectly acceptable to challenge the scientific standpoint in the religion class," he says.
All things (un)equal in the E.U.
In the E.U. the Council of Europe's legislative branch, the Parliamentary Assembly, has taken a fairly strong stance on keeping evolution in the classroom. In 2007 its members issued a report in which it called on member states "to promote scientific knowledge and the teaching of evolution and to oppose firmly any attempts at teaching creationism as a scientific discipline."
The report authors reject ID's employment of scientific diction as being "pathetically inadequate," and contend that the rise of "an 'all things are equal' attitude may seem appealing and tolerant but is actually disastrous." Like the "academic freedom" bills in the U.S., these arguments are gaining force in the E.U., notes Dittmar Graf of Technical University Dortmund in Germany who has been studying this issue.
Graf explains, however, that such strong perspectives are not necessarily representative of member states' attitudes. ("The members of the European Council are politicians," he notes, "and they tend to be a little harsh.") Likewise, European schools do not universally adhere to the council's precepts. Although creationism and ID are not on official member-state curriculum standards, these approaches occasionally appear in classrooms. "Legal processes are not an option in most European countries because we don't have something like your First Amendment," Graf says. And, as in the U.K., many European countries maintain religious education in public schools. And religiously affiliated schools often incorporate intelligent design and creationism.
Like Williams in the U.K., Graf suggests starting evolution education earlier in the E.U., introducing human evolution in elementary school and principles of natural selection by the ages of 10 to 12 years. And beyond boosting understanding of evolution by teaching it directly, he says, strengthening acceptance of science in general is a must. "In our own research we found strong [correlations] between 'acceptance of science' and 'acceptance of evolution,' so if you are able to improve the latter you get the former for free—and vice versa," Graf says.
In the E.U. organizations pushing an anti-evolution agenda include the German group Wort und Wissen ("Word and Knowledge"). Graf also notes that the Jehovah's Witnesses have been active in trying to introduce creationist materials into schools, as have some Islamic organizations. In 2007 many schools in Belgium, France, Spain and Switzerland received copies of Atlas of Creation, written by the Turkish Islamic preacher Adnan Oktar (who goes by the name Harun Yahya) and "is very influential in the Muslim parts of the European societies," Graf says. The majority of Muslims in Germany believe in intelligent design and/or creationism, Graf notes. And as Islamic populations in Western countries increase, more scholars are taking an interest in the status of evolution education in Muslim-majority countries.
Adapting attitudes in Muslim countries
Like any major faith, Islamic beliefs are incredibly varied across sects, regions and among individuals, and there is no single leader or doctrine to pronounce the official view on evolution. "The diversity that you find in Muslim thought around evolution is just as broad as you would expect to find in the West," says Jason Wiles, an assistant professor of biology at Syracuse University in New York State who has been studying attitudes and knowledge of Muslim students and teachers.
In many Muslim-majority countries Islam goes beyond providing a cultural force, shaping many of the foundational aspects of governance and societal decision-making. "We have to appreciate the central role that religion plays in Muslim societies," says Salman Hameed, an assistant professor of Integrated Science and Humanities at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, who has been researching the acceptance of evolution among Muslims.
In 2006 the InterAcademy Panel (IAP) in Trieste, Italy, which represents national science organizations across the globe, issued a statement on the teaching of evolution. The statement, which several Muslim-majority countries, including Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, signed, urged "decision-makers, teachers, and parents to educate all children about the methods and discoveries of science," asserting that there are "evidence-based facts about the origins and evolution of the Earth and of life on this planet."
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Add CommentAn ignorant world serves the hypocritical politician best.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDiscard democracy, it has brought about our current plight. Scientists and the core creators of social benefits get nothing for their effort.
We need a society controlled by scientists and engineers, like China.
I am a high school science teacher working in NSW Australia. We are fortunate in having a clear instruction that states no form of creationism can be presented as an alternative to evolution in the science classroom. Unfortunately this still allows creationist nonsense in through "scripture" or Religious Education.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn general however, I think the situation has improved. Far fewer students express these beliefs than ten years ago and in senior biology classes particularly it is often easy to observe how those believes disappear as the weight of evidence accumulates. The best biology student i have had in recent years was a Muslim who could recite half the Koran. He had no problem with evolution.
It is unfortunate some schools allow scripture. If we could get more suppression of the creationist information it would help, especially when people are young and their world view is forming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPossibly some sort of "Bible burning" effort is in order...
I am a high school science teacher working in NSW Australia. We are fortunate in having a clear instruction that states no form of creationism can be presented as an alternative to evolution in the science classroom. Unfortunately this still allows creationist nonsense in through "scripture" or Religious Education.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn general however, I think the situation has improved. Far fewer students express these beliefs than ten years ago and in senior biology classes particularly it is often easy to observe how those beliefs disappear as the weight of evidence accumulates. The best biology student i have had in recent years was a Muslim who could recite half the Koran. He had no problem with evolution.
No ttfweb, just a little intellectual honesty from those presenting the material would be fine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisblindboy - fair enough.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo for intellectual honesty: I'll ask you, have you read the Bible in detail? The bible is arguably the most influential book on western society, so I would consider it part of anyone's experience who called themselves educated in the west. To understand the context of science related to belief, I would think this is fundamental.
I have both a degree in Physics and regularly read scripture. I don't see the disconnect between the two, but support between them. Religion will never go away - both the Soviet block and China tried it, and it failed, with faith growing by leaps and bounds in these regions after suppression.
What we need here is a dialog by people who hold experience on both sides.
Well yes, of course but let us start from the point that if a belief, like creationism is totally faith based,that should be stated categorically in any educational situation. Many of the people presenting "scripture" or Religious Education programs present false or distorted "scientific evidence" to back their beliefs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe objection to creationism is not that people have no right to believe it, but that they have no right to falsify or distort the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. If you do not agree that the evidence is over whelming then let us go no further with this discussion. It would be pointless.
You are like my sister, like me she too is an atheist brought up by atheist parents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen she comes across people from foreign cultures, she is always, "Oh but look, see how much progress he/she has made". She forgets she is talking to a person a quarter of her age who should be well advanced of her 60s ideas. But she said she is only going to have 5 kids, not 28 like her mother, is not good enough. This is a patronising attitude, expect every citizen to be of the current time.
Can you tell me what good reciting the koran, bible or whatever does a person? Time that could have been better spent developing the mind and understanding how nature works.
Yes I know there is no purpose to life. Nothing is right, wrong, good or bad. However you do want a rational, just and fair society while you are alive.
I can not comprehend how you could be a Physicist and still find solace in fairy tales, time to grow up. Science demands scepticism, you obviously just accept.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bible, koran or whatever can be read by people wishing to study the development of the human race. Tribal religions were important to take us from tribes ruled by the strongest to those led by the wisest.
As societies developed we got organised religion. Then the religious leaders became despots (power corrupts ... you know). Read about the taking of the pretties women by the religious and their torture, rape and eventual burning in the name of gods. This is the Christian religion, and they documented every-thing. I was horrified, then I realised this was the porn of the period. Please read about the doings of the church in the eleventh to fourteenth century.
Teach whatever you want in school, I have taught my 19 year old to write down what they spout for the grade. I taught him the truth at home, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Genesis 1:1. Pretty simple. He knows the truth, and how to discern what is isn't. Everyone should hold scientific claims up to the same lens as you do the Bible. Look up and around, hold your hand up to your face and lie all you want, if it makes you feel better that you can say you just happened, go for it. I don't argue with people anymore, there are far too many mediums to find out about God today, everyone will have to account for their choice and beliefs one day. If you don't believe that, fine. Time is short, you gotta serve somebody, just make the right choice, you're gonna have to live with it for an eternity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is this so hard for people to integrate the How with the Who? Evolution describes how life has changed over time. God has kept his "plans" to Himself. The Bible doesn't even bother to reveal whether the sun is at the center of this Solar System, (took the Church 300 years to sort of apologize for the "mixup") let alone how God "put it there". As to how life itself has evolved? OK, dust to dust, doesn't mention if it was star dust or mud in some primordial ooze. Those who use the concept of "Intelligent Design" to find God and to see his "handiwork" should also be able to see his "handiwork" or "plan" in all the evidence of evolution. Creationists are so comfortable with His Mysterious Ways, why is it so hard to accept the parts that scientists have worked out? Adaptation is a beautiful concept, why can't they think of it as part of God's design? I think Creationists are extremely vulnerable when it comes to the whole concept of time. How long was, or is, one of God's days, especially before He put the sun in the sky and put the Earth to rotating in a 24 hour period, and surely God doesn't count His years as the Earth's revolutions around the sun? I was taught that God has no beginning and no end. Even if I accept that He created all life in six days and for some reason decided to "rest" on the seventh (doesn't He have limitless power, energy, and time?), nothing there to say that for all the time since then, evolution hasn't been happening, and no one knows how long until the end... that leaves plenty of time for all the changes over time, evolution, to be exactly what He put into motion. If the Bible is the word of God, He sure didn't feel the need to spend much time telling us about Creation, what percent of the Bible is dedicated to it? And on a final note, scientists refer to the "laws" of the universe as they are discovered and come to be understood. If God is our Father in Heaven, I imagine Him smiling as His children try to figure out how IT has all come to BE and continues to EVOLVE.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh no, the fundamentalists have arrived...abandon the thread......abandon the thread....no amount of evidence shakes their absolute faith that an ancient badly translated text with innumerable contradictions is the absolute truth. This is a science thread talk science! If you want to spout fundamentalist gibberish go to www.creationistnonsense.com
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisblindboy, you are blind. Blind to the truth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid any of you even bother to read the article? She is saying that evolution should be taught within the cultural context and she is right. If this were done so there would not be what is occurring here in the U.S.. Did you not notice what happened in the past election? Liberals and science minded people are not in charge anymore. Funding for science research is getting scarce due to the economic crisis we have been going through. There are many people here in the United States who have had enough of the arrogance of the scientific establishment, and in particular the biologists who are still stuck on Darwin as their dogma.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is it that physicists and astronomers are more open to a belief in God than biologists? It is because biologists are by and large caught up in a materialist ideology that has been superceded by current findings in quantum mechanics, but they are still stuck in the language of nineteenth century materialism.
Science is not against religion, but according to blindboy and scientific earthling it is. And so they deride people who actually believe in God. But this constant attack has backfired. They contribute to the distrust that many in the U.S. feel towards scientists in general. This cannot continue. So, yes, the articles strategy should be mandatory rather than the confrontational approach that the U.S. educational system has taken.
way2sec I agree. I came to the point where I had to accept the truth of the age of the earth and a common ancestor for all life forms. Of course by accepting it i have drawn fire from fundamentalists, but so be it. I can't deny the truth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, don't abandon the thread, at least not yet. If you are thinking I am one of the fundamentalists, please think again. There are many many levels to this post about the teaching of evolution, around the world, against the backdrop of all the world's religions. The article mentions that to try and silence (by force?) any of these religions and cultures does not help evolution and the sciences get taught. When confronted by someone who is just so sure about the first day according to Genesis, the creation of light, and to quote scientists who can honestly state that the first moments of the Big Bang are totally unimaginable, all "laws" of space and time as we know them now were not "working" in those first moments, it is wise to remember we are all in the same boat. So I ask you, what do you imagine that moment was like? It isn't hard for me to think of it as the Universe being created, creation itself. If "God" is everything, everywhere, without beginning or end, seems to me we are talking the same "unimaginables". If my use of the He makes you think I am less of a scientist, I use it to show respect to those who think of God as Michelangelo painted him... all the while aware that the feminine has been suppressed, perhaps by a patriarchal invasion from the North, their Sky god, their father in heaven coming to dominate the mother earth goddess, a different branch of the sciences to be sure. It comes together again if you study the cave paintings from 20-30,000 years ago. Only now do we have evidence that women and girls were painting as well as men, how and why do men still dominate the sciences, especially the "hard" sciences? Throw that into the evolution education mix with the three monotheistic religions being totally male dominated, i.e., Creationism and fundamentalism are products of male thinking. The article mentions the need for students to be able to understand how organisms EVOLVE to become drug resistant. Do you think a virus is "alive"? And if it isn't? Can you imagine a child from a Christian fundamentalist background trying to deal with what the HIV virus IS, let alone how it EVOLVES? Where do we put fungus, smuts, and molds? Venereal disease? Roman goddess Venus. Aphrodisiac? Aphrodite. Evolution had better stick with just the HOW it changes... where it comes from? where it's going? You ever been a science teacher?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, I pasted www.creationistnonsense.com into my browser to see if it was real.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not proud of it, but I did it.
How tedious that religious people constantly repeat the word "truth." But what do they actually mean by that? Ask them, then observe that they are just vacantly regurgitating their childhood religious indoctrination. There is no dictionary that defines truth as "whatever religion you accidently were born into."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan they prove their "truth?" What you get from them are declarations of blind faith, instead of proof. Bring IDer's to a court of law and you are confronted with fakery, fraud, hoaxes and circular reasoning....or they run and hide.
What has that got to do with science? Isn't that the opposite of science?
"What we need here is a dialog by people who hold experience on both sides."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAh, no. Religion has nothing of value to say to science. And a degree in Physics doesn't make you a scientist or grant your religious beliefs any significance. At best, it shows an ability to compartmentalize your brain, which appears easier to do the less foundation you have in scientific thinking.
China? Really? You should really look into the history of China and what it has done and what it is still doing to it's people. You must not know!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@talindsey2011, I taught him the truth at home, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." brain washing your children is child abuse. Depriving your child of an education is child abuse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Everyone should hold scientific claims up to the same lens as you do the Bible." the problem here is that religion refuses to justify itself or submit to any analysis. Scientific theories must be proven. Everyone must be able to replicate the findings when following the same protocols. Religion has no intellectual process. A dictator in a pulpit states what is true and everyone is threatened with death and torture if they do not comply.
Religion is structured like the worst totalitarian regimes of the past century yet you submit to them willingly. What is more, you deprive your child of an education and instead subject him to lies in order to brain wash him. I feel sorry for your child. He is starting life at a great disadvantage because of the ignorance and prejudice of his parents.
@Centaurus-A, "She is saying that evolution should be taught within the cultural context and she is right." no she is absolutely wrong. The power of science is that it has no cultural context. A person conducting an experiment in the US should have the same result as someone in China. Science does not care about culture only about facts. What you are suggesting is that the facts be altered to fit the culture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"They contribute to the distrust that many in the U.S. feel towards scientists in general." the distrust of science comes from religious leaders who lie and misrepresent the facts in order to perpetuate their particular brand of the religion virus. People fear science because it challenges their beliefs so instead of adapting their beliefs to fit the facts they ignore the facts and demonize the messenger.
It is most sad there are so many people who are unable to even perceive that their belief in a creator deity is only the 'truth' within their personal faith-based beliefs. Many are so singularly indoctrinated they use the term (capitalized)god, referring to only the Judeo-Christian version. They'll ask the question, 'Do you believe in God?,' when what they mean is, 'Do you actually not believe in the god that I 'know' exists?' Maybe they're right, but then again I have yet to have anyone show me any proof other than the strength of their personal faith (and, sadly, if challenged, they usually get angry).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am glad people feel their beliefs with such strength. I wish they could understand that it does not make it any more true for someone else. Nor does someone's disbelief in a creator deity make someone else's personal faith-based beliefs less 'true' for them. Believe what you want. Good for you. (I don't often get the good tiding in reverse, which, within their own beliefs, is quite pious)
Public schools are secular institutions so as not to be prejudiced toward anyone's beliefs (repeat - beliefs). Creationism is a belief (and to repeat: it is a belief). There are millions of pages of studies where biological evolution is observed. It is currently the best working theory of biological life. It in itself does not contradict the belief-based notion of a creator. Posit it all you want. Archaeological evidence unfailing shows a long progression of evolving organisms. Everything could have been 'created' at any point (even 10 minutes ago by some all powerful entity), but it was created with a fossil record and living organisms showing evolution.
It all comes down to this: "Theists, encountering someone not believing in their deity, feel they must call them atheists or fiends."
Sadly, the ones I am addressing will not be able to understand this (and hope that I 'wake up' and see what they believe is 'obvious').
I have to agree with the author that the best way to get more people to understand and accept evolution is not create conflict with the norms within the culture they live. To do otherwise is to ignore the reality of the current level humans have evolved to, which in my opinion, is not very intelligent.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisrobert schmidt, you have issues that go beyond the arguments presented. Please go seek help and quit your hatred towards everyone. SA please ban this person from posting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCentaurus-A: Are you reading this forum? Robert Schmidt has made factual comments that have no other 'problem' than that they disagree with your viewpoint. I'm sure it is neither your place or business to suggest he or anyone else has 'issues' I'm sorry to say the complete absense of any hateful remarks in his comments leaves only one source for this 'hatred', that being you. I, and I sure Mr. Schnidt, hope the strong faith you espouse can help you accept the differing opinions of others. In this situation, what do you think your personal creator deity would do?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do not usually reply to these threads but the wrath of ignorance displayed here has given me the motivation. Religions play an important part in our communities, be it Muslim, Catholic or Buddhist etc., they form values, especially where they are not taught in the home. I am not under the impression that some radicals have not interpreted or misrepresented the core of those values, but if you were to completely start an atheist school and taught ‘values’ then that would become a religion of its own because it would be someone’s values you were instilling –one cannot have a functioning society where values are omniscient. Therefore, can we stop blaming religion for all that is bad in our schools? I went to an all Catholic school and Darwin was not misrepresented in any way –nor was Science. I have Muslim friends who were thought to respect other religions in their schools, not all are fanatic radicals. I can provide many examples of how religion has benefited others but that is not the point here. Perhaps before calling for the burning of religious scriptures as in this tread(whether the scriptures are based on fact or fiction),could we shift focus on impoverished societies and their lack of access to resources and influences that teach them to think for themselves, and I mean teach –rather than preach. There is nothing wrong with teaching someone that there is something greater out there besides ourselves –Science itself is a religion that changes every day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are the one not reading his posts. One comment after another attacking the moral integrity of believers, and even accusing believers of abuse. This is not hatred?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am just saying anyone who believes in the scientific method is not furthering the cause by posting this kind of stuff. They are defeating the agenda by turning people off. I hope that we can reach out to others and win them over to science not turn them off. That is what this article is about. Schmidt even says that he is no longer trying to win over people.
If you agree it is a hopeless cause to do this then you are not even following what Harmon is saying here. In fact schmidt even disagrees with Harmon. I am a subscriber to the magazine and I am interested in science and want to promote its acceptance. Unfortunately these forums are letting all the buzzards and trolls come in from all over who are ideological. How do you expect people to accept science this way. Their distrust is justified.
Well enough said. Sorry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@lamorpa, Thanks
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Centaurus-A, so far you have made a number of personal attacks against me on this and other posts. Are you so delusional that you are unable to see that you are behaving in the exact way you are accusing me of acting? You are a hypocrite. Your opinion is meaningless.
At the same time, did you read comment 10 (talindsey2011)? Have you ever seen such a prototypical pile of narrow-minded pious crap in your whole life? I'm sure this is why Mr. Schmidt and many others get a bit frustrated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you think it is even sane to try to threaten someone with an eternal damnation that only exists within the threatener's own personal faith-based belief system? talindsey2011 is telling people that, because they do not believe in the same faith-based belief system, they will suffer a consequence that is defined by that very belief system (that the threatened don't believe in, by definition). One is truly left wondering if some people have absolutely no grasp of what faith and belief is?
Centaurus-A.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyone who challenges your opinions is hateful and abusive? Even though their arguments are more rational and objective than yours?
I haven't read any of these comments that is "hateful," with only your own last one as the exception.
It's instructive that your next resort is to demand censorship.
CKlu:
"There is nothing wrong with teaching someone that there is something greater out there besides ourselves Science itself is a religion that changes every day."
Prove that what you call "teaching" is something "greater." In my considered opinion that "teaching" something lesser, something WAY lesser. It is superstition, plain and simple. Superstition leads people to promote ignorance, intolerance and dishonesty. There is nothing "great" about it at all.
Science is, by definition, the opposite of religion. Of course it changes day-to-day. As you learn of new facts, you change your opinions accordingly--it's called Enlightenment, my dear.
For those who think that Science is something pure, factual, without bias or culture, think again. We need only go back a moment in time and look at what passed for science. Gravity is a "fact", or is it? Explain the facts of a gravity well. Explain the facts of magnetism. How long in human history have the "facts" of black holes been able to explain our reality? I was taught that men developed language to hunt better, our tool making (by men, for hunting) and our thumbs developed together. Evolution? The facts are not yet in on when we became human, nor even what it means to be human. Do you think we are the only species that are self conscious? Facts please. Even the definition of species, a breeding population, falls apart, inter-species breeding with Neanderthals? Science and Religion are totally dominated by men. Try and tell me that doesn't produce a bias. No one has responded to the question as to whether a virus is alive or not. Whatever it IS, it evolved and continues to do so. This article asks how to best get that taught, with or without a Creator. In another blog, do you want godless (male) scientists in "control" of nuclear science and genetic engineering? Pandora was a female, naturally. We need a new metaphor about men who have opened the box of "facts" called Science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI understand. I was excommunicated by a preacher for not believing in a young earth who probably thought my soul was damned. We have to try and take the high ground if we can. I'm not saying we can all the time. Obviously, with people like this preacher or with the post you referenced we can't because they will cut us off. It certainly takes patience. It isn't always easy, but we have to try I think because there's always hope. I'm an amateur fossil hunter and collector of trilobites, for example. And I have exhibited these at shows and there are always children and adults who are interested. Once they get interested my hope is that they will want to learn more about these Paleozoic animals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLook at his posts. It isn't a matter of disagreement. I'm just saying if we want to have people accept science we can't use a confrontational approach, and that is what Katherine is saying in her article. Of course I'm going to criticize this confrontational approach. It isn't just Christians or other believers that can be hateful towards other groups. Atheists have demonstrated that they can be just as hateful. In fact, I've seen more vitriol among non-believers than believers here in this forum.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we want to promote science, and I think we have to now with all the funding cuts and outright attacks on science from the right, we can't expect to change people's entire belief system overnight. It isn't going to happen. We have to demonstrate that science is not a threat to their belief system. And if you can't do this then yes I am saying you are going about this in the wrong way and in the end you will fail. Not just fail but even lead to greater hostility and even (down the line) possibly even persecution by society.
Well said.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI forgot to hit the reply. See post 34. Thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCome on. Making science 'palatable' to the pious is no different than saying the result of a logical analysis is actually subject to different divine interpretations, or, in a more extreme interpretation, allowing 1+1 to equal 3, making the population more pleased, because it is a more plentiful outcome. Science is based on factual analysis, not popularity. Science ceases to be science if it is made subject to popular faith-based beliefs. I know better than to compromise the logical tenets of science as well as I know not to give an alcoholic a drink. It won't help in the end.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe evolution/creationist 'controversy' is a creation of creationists alone. They could choose to believe that things were created 5000 years ago, or 10 minutes ago, without having to (for some reason unknown to me) demand that biological evolution does not exist (despite overwhelming validated evidence to the contrary).
As you see I am not saying (as you did) the opposite of, "I've seen more vitriol among non-believers than believers here in this forum," because I know I would have a biased opinion. You are saying that, and you _believe_ it to be true. As a logical person, wouldn't you know to be more careful about your own, known bias?
way2ec: Oh, please let "nuclear science and genetic engineering" be in control of people who are guided by commands from invisible deities and motivated by a reward (heaven), as opposed to those who are virtuous because they personally feel it is the correct thing to do...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the Creation model is religious and evolutionism scientific, how does one explain the following quote from Prof. George Wald?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation….Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”
[1954. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, August, pp. 46, 48]
It’s my understanding the terms “believe and miracles” are not scientific, but religious.
I don't think we need to compromise science at all as we try and share with others. It's just the first step, "the foot in the door" so to speak. I see no other alternative to this. If we don't do this as I replied to SteveinOG we will all lose in the end both at school and in society. The most natural way is to share the enthusiasm we have of doing science. WE just have to agree with one thing: science is neutral. It is not against religion nor is it for religion. It's just a method.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre suggesting that any text that contains the words 'believe' and/or 'miracle' is religious (and therefore not scientific)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe may come to different conclusions about God, but it doesn't mean I can't respect your experiment or your paper as long as it adheres to the scientific method and cites the relevant sources.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can't expect you to believe in God as you can't expect me to renounce my belief. We have had different experiences, but I'm just saying unless we can respect each others beliefs then we as a society are in deep trouble. Often this has lead societies down the road to civil strife, and eventually Civil War. Do we really want this? I don't think so. Science would suffer catastrophically as if it has not already suffered enough attacks on its credibility.
To avoid this outcome I don't think we have a choice but to reach out and get that foot in the door.
If you have to sneak in the back door then you might wan't to look at the basis of your motives. This whole discussion proves more than anything else that evolution as discussed here (macro rather than micro) is a religion unto it's self. The mere fact that the idea that creationism and evolution can be dicussed in the classroom side by side has bound to be sending many of you evolutionists into apoplectic shock.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou're being redundant. Science is science (which means it, by definition, attempts to be neutral). It is pious individuals and groups that have a problem with it. There is nothing to agree to, except to observe that, for some reason, some of those with faith-based beliefs either feel threatened, or feel the need to persecute those who do not hold the same beliefs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would be more valid for you to say scientists would appease the pious intolerant by letting them attack scientific inquiry and adjust scientific conclusion to their faith-based beliefs.
Sparcboy,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree (about the intelligence thing). Not that I think people with a solid grasp of scientific thinking are superior. I think people trained to think scientifically/skeptically are lucky to have been given the right environment to develop. We as a species overestimate our ability as individuals to process information and draw accurate and insightful conclusions. We are of the same raw potential in mind and body as people of the stone age. While certainly quality instruction and decades of diligent study and thinking can grant phenomenal understanding to individual humans, the implications of the fact that we do not achieve solid foundations in scientific thinking without formidable instruction should be obvious. The average person on this planet is quite confused about the workings of the universe (just take a look at some of the comments in this thread), and it will only get worse until we start artificially enhancing the human brain. Again, hugely improved science education would do wonders, but with increasing need for hyperspecialization and the refusal of the average person to cloister themselves for decades with nonfiction material...
"The mere fact that the idea that creationism and evolution can be dicussed in the classroom side by side has bound to be sending many of you evolutionists into apoplectic shock."?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy would a scientific subject and a secular philosophical subject be discussed side by side? In High School I had a combined English/Social Studies class, but they didn't offer a combined Biology/Christian Philosophy class (they didn't actually offer any religous classes, being a public school, that was left to our churches).
@Bill Crofut, "It's my understanding the terms believe and miracles are not scientific, but religious." clearly you have never heard of figures-of-speech, metaphor or poetic license. What Prof Wald is suggesting is that when one looks at complex life it looks impossible for it to have been created naturally. That is because we are looking at it from the perspective of human beings. Our lives are very brief so we are unable to experience evolution. We can't even imagine the timescales involved. It is these timescales that allow complex creatures to evolve, allowing the seemingly impossible to happen, giving the impression of a miracle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut I can understand your difficulty. Religious extremists view everything in the bible as literal truth (unless it is inconvenient), whereas clear thinking know how to differentiate colourful speech from statements of fact. Perhaps before trying to learn about evolution you should study literature. These basic concepts seem to elude you.
And there you go. You cannot even bring yourself to make a statement like, "We may come to different conclusions about creator deities" You use capitalized god as though you 'know', both for yourself and me that this entity exists. Entertain your audience and just try once to use agnostic terminology. You may be right, I may be right. That's where a discussion starts. I fear you are incapable of this, even in form, and thus incapable of reaching the starting line.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn this context, science has not had any attacks on its credibility. Only angry pious attacks on ideas that contradict old books deemed holy.
Maybe I should explain this better. I am not saying that scientists adjust their science for the believers. When I say reach out I'm saying reach out with science in a positive way. When genuine interest occurs in a young person's life and they become enthusiastic about fossils, for example, as they ask questions they begin to discover scientific explanations that will challenge what they were taught in Sunday school. As they see the contradictions they begin to question what they were taught. It's just the beginning. We have to start somewhere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom that place of change they begin to appreciate what science and its method of collecting data is about. That's what I mean, not that we water down and try and make it popular. I don't think Katherine is saying this. WE reach out in the context of society in a positive way. I just don't understand what other way we can present this.
We can please both sides. Teach evolution in science class, and creationism in religion class.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I'm saying reach out with science in a positive way. When genuine interest occurs in a young person's life and they become enthusiastic about fossils"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes. And this starts with getting faith and fable-based secular beliefs out of biology classes.
P.S. Maybe I was brough up in a too traditional Catholic environment, but who in the world took those CCD teachings literally? I didn't have to challenge what I was taught in Sunday school. I knew they were moral fables from the start. Noah's Ark? Jonah and the Whale? Immaculate conception? Coming back to life after being dead for 3 days? Who bought those stories hook line and sinker? They're pretty far fetched to say the least.
@Centaurus-A, "I'm just saying unless we can respect each other's beliefs then we as a society are in deep trouble" so do you respect the beliefs of the men who flew those plan into the towers? Do you respect the beliefs of the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Khmer Rouge, the men who circumcise their daughters, the men who beat their wives, rapists, serial killers, etc? Respecting one's right to believe whatever they choose is not the same as respecting the content of their beliefs. I have no problem judging someone based on the content of their belief and the way in which they act on it. If someone denies evidence that contradicts their beliefs then I will judge them as delusional. There is nothing noble about being delusional.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem we have now is that we have respected these primitive superstitions for too long to the point of condoning them. Our multicultural societies have tried so hard to accommodate people from all over the world that we have pandered to these hateful and caustic religions. Multiculturalism is one thing but people must obey the laws of the land. In the US, the law of the land is separation of church and state. Creationism has no place in any publicly funded forum. Any attempt to introduce creationism or ID to the classroom is an attack on the constitution. I don't respect that.
Sudden change in discussion. By saying the starting point is agnosticism is not right. That's your starting point. Just as I'm not saying for you to start with God as the starting point you can't expect me to start with agnosticism. We have to respect each other's starting points.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisrobert I'm done with you and discussing your hate filled speech and anti-religious agenda. That's final.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@sealj, "We can please both sides. Teach evolution in science class, and creationism in religion class." on the surface that may look like the solution but studying religion is different than practicing a religion. The last thing creationists want is the objective study of their beliefs which is what a course on religion in a public school would have to be. That is why creationists want ID taught in science class. They don't want people to objectively look at the creationist myths of religions, they want ID taught as fact. You are thinking too rationally about the motivations of irrational people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Centaurus-A, "robert I'm done with you and discussing your hate filled speech and anti-religious agenda" well it was you who chose to discuss those things, obviously because you couldn't discuss the facts. But I agree that it's wrong to pick a fight with an unarmed man. Perhaps if you spent time listening instead of preaching you'd have something to contribute here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"By saying the starting point is agnosticism is not right."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEither you don't know the definition of agnosticism (the view that the truth value of claims, especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious claims, is unknown) or you are, I'm sorry to say, a religous bigot?
Do you actually think you can hold what you would call a 'neutral' discussion when your starting premise is that you are correct and the other person is unequivocally 'not right'? I didn't realize I was wasting my time. People believe and don't believe in dieties. I'm not going to define, for them, who is 'right'.
I know most theists find agnostic ideas so unpalatable that they brand them atheist, but I was guessing you were beyond, at least, that.
I don't think you understand. I'm not trying to persuade you either way. I'm not expecting you to change your beliefs. I'm just asking for the same respect in return. If you cannot do that then that's your issue not mine. The whole problem I know is that both religion and science claims that they are the truth. I don't see a conflict between them because I believe in evidence and faith as well. There are things that cannot be known by empirical evidence and those things I attribute to faith.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience and scientific method is not all knowledge. There are forms of knowledge that science cannot address as successful as it has been historically. For example, what happened in the past, yours and mine are based on historical knowledge not science. What you did yesterday can't be proven scientifically. The spiritual realm is not an area that has been successfully tackled by science.
Okay robert. It is you who have lived with few facts. You cannot for one reduce all knowledge to just scientific knowledge. Your faith in just science is blinding you to the reality of other kinds of knowing. You cannot prove what you did yesterday scientifically through experiment for example. History--all of history cannot be proven scientifically. It is recreated through documentation and sometimes through archeological digs. But you cannot experiment on the past obviously.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, what you say when you raise Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin--all of those regimes were based on secular ideology not religious ideology. So this example just proves the opposite--the secular ideologies were the most murderous in history in terms of the total number of people killed.
It is precisely this problem with ethics that cannot be solved with evolution that partly lead to my belief that there was an outside source for ethics.
It is not correct to say religious people are deluded. Do you think all of faith is based on delusion? Of course not. Religion would have died a long time ago if it were simply based on superstition or ideology alone. People have and continue to experience the presence of God in their lives even in this day and age, otherwise why would people even believe?
So I could turn this around and say you are deluded robert by believing that the spiritual does not exist. Who is the one who is deluded? Do you see where this is going? Materialists including you believe that all knowledge can only be scientific knowledge but this is contradicted in so many ways as we use our memory to reconstruct past events (imperfectly). I could say much more.
Amen :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you think that I (and others) somehow do not notice that every time you reply to me you merely suggest that I don't understand you and proceed to not address the ideas you are purportedly replying to. I do understand and comprehend your comments. Don't simply assume I have an inferior understanding to your own. It is insulting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was your suggestion that common ground be found for a discussion. I suggested, even if just for the sake of argument, those involved adopt the middle ground of agnosticism (encompassing and allowing for all beliefs). Your reply was, "By saying the starting point is agnosticism is not right."
I will ask again, do you not know the definition of agnosticism (the view that the truth value of claims, especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious claims, is unknown) or you are a religious bigot?
Do you actually think you can hold what you would call a 'neutral' discussion when your starting premise is that you are correct and the other person is unequivocally 'not right'?
I have beliefs of my own, but accept fully that others have their own beliefs and may some day be proved correct. Do you think your beliefs are better than mine? Do you separate people into 2 categories: 1) Those believing in the Judeo-Christian deity and 2) those who are foolish and deluded (but who you will be charitable to and not persecute).
I have asked questions. I do fully understand what you are saying. After this many times back and forth, it is reasonable to expect answers if this discussion is to continue with some value.
Either you agree that agnosticism is a middle ground between 'believers' and 'non-believers' or you think that your personal beliefs are superior and should rule over all others.
Science is not a religion. Science simply lays out a method for shedding light on the unknown.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat? Now I don't understand. What prompted this hostility? And you say it is the believer's fault for the current crisis. You are wasting my time sir. And you obviously have no respect for my beliefs. What an absolute punk you are, and I thought I was talking to an adult.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChina today is a nation run by scientists and engineers. It has a massive population problem and a shortage of land. I have travelled through the country. In the villages there is no sanitation, education is poor, but they have overcome the biggest hindrance to progress: Religion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWithout religion, the mind opens and the people will continue to advance. Science has made the current world population possible, but science also demands a change of breeding ethics to survive. We are now reaching the limits of food production, potable water is becoming scarce.
The rest of the world has abandoned science in favour of economics, law and so called monetary sciences. This takes one back to hope and religion. You can see it happening in the USA. Money and gods are good bedfellows, gods also permit absolute power to the few. The best example of a crazed god person is George Bush. he destroyed a secular nation to create an Islamic state. Yes, a dictator ruled, but a secular dictator. The replacement US army rule was just another harsh dictatorship, replaced now by Islamic fundamentalists.
The current trouble in the middle east is also part of the Islamic plan to export hundreds of thousands of their tribe to the western world, Europe is bracing for the refugee flow. Once exported and resettled these people will return to the fold and dilute the non-Islamic populations in Europe further.
@Centaurus-A, "You cannot prove what you did yesterday scientifically through experiment for example." courts of law do this all the time. Evidence such as phone records, eye-witness testimony (by the way I am an eye-witness to my own experiences), computer logs, etc can give us brief glimpses of the events of yesterday. But there are things from my past for which there is no record, even I have forgotten them. Those things are lost forever. Science isn't a magical process, it is a simple codification of things we do every day. If I lose my keys I form a hypothesis based on what I know / remember, e.g. I left them in my jacket pocket. I then test the hypothesis by looking in my jacket pocket. If the keys are there my hypothesis has been validated, if not I devise a new hypothesis. Things like peer review are added to compensate for human failings but ultimately science is a very simple process; take an educated guess, gather evidence, come to a conclusion. But you are right, there are things for which we have no evidence and never will. The fossil record where I live has been scraped away by glaciers. The rock exposed here is 300myo. All the information in the overburden is lost forever. But if science can't "know" it, no other process can. Religion likes to think it is the default theory, any time science can't explain something they think, religion says it must therefore be god. Everyone is required to prove their hypotheses!"In fact, what you say when you raise Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin--all of those regimes were based on secular ideology not religious ideology" first, you need to read your history because Hitler was very much a Christian and believed his vision of Germany was ordained by god. The others imposed other types of faith based ideological cults. Atheism is not a belief. It is not an ideology. It is a position. There is no unifying ideology for atheists so to blame atheism for stalin or pol pot is like blaming teeth for what they did because they both had teeth. No dictator has invoked an atheist bible to justify his actions, but many have invoked the Christian bible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Centaurus-A, "It is precisely this problem with ethics that cannot be solved with evolution that partly lead to my belief that there was an outside source for ethics." I disagree, the work in evolutionary psychology supported by game theory has offered many intriguing hypotheses about the origins of human behavior. It also has the benefit of explaining behavior in non-humans which a theist approach does not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Do you think all of faith is based on delusion?" yes. Believing in things for which there is no evidence is delusion. The human brain is vulnerable to delusion. In evolutionary terms it doesn't matter why I do what I do, the only thing that matters is the affect of my actions on my reproductive success. If I believe I shouldn't eat pork because it contains disease or because god will punish me, it doesn't matter, just as long as it prevents me from getting the disease. The problem is, culture tells us what to do, not why. So when things change, for example, pigs are no longer a disease risk, then those guided by culture (religion) do not have the ability to adapt. If you study archeology you will find many examples of populations failing because they couldn't adapt their thinking because of their culture / religion.
"you are deluded robert by believing that the spiritual does not exist" to be precise, I do not believe that those that believe in spirituality have made a valid case for its existence. As I have stated, the onus of proof is on those that state the affirmative or the existence of. There are a rather large number of things in which humanity has believed from time to time for which there is no evidence. Do you believe in all those things, even if they contradict each other? There is no more evidence to support god than there is to support the idea of fairies or unicorns or dragons. There are a large number of gods that humanity has worshipped, do you believe in them all or just the one you like? How do you determine what is true and what isn't? What process do you use?
You are right, there are things that science can't prove because, for some reason, there is no evidence any more. But you are wrong in assuming that anything else can.
Disagreements between religious figures and scientists have occurred many times since the 16th century when men like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo discovered that our solar system was heliocentric, which seemed to be in direct contradiction to numerous scriptural passages. But science has nearly always won; few people today would argue that the sun circles the earth. And there were always some important religious figures, like Augustine, who understood that every passage in the Bible could not and should not always be taken literally.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the subject of Creation, all the book of Genesis states is the command "Let there be light." Genesis says nothing of how that command was implemented. Today, we know that nuclear fusion is the source of our daily light. Moreover, Genesis mentions a light of day and a "lesser light of night" as though they were two separate entities. It failed to mention that the lesser light of night was a reflection of that other light which illuminates our days. And there is nothing in Genesis about nuclear fusion or nuclear fission, nothing about gravity or any other physical force. Nor is there any mention of molecules or atoms or the subatomic particles like electrons, protons and neutrons which make it possible for the sun to generate light.
The Bible does mention God's laws, but not all of them. If God created the universe by commanding that the stars, the planets, the seas, rain and everything else should exist, then it is reasonable to assume that the physical laws which we have since discovered are additional laws not mentioned in the Bible. Perhaps the reason that they were not mentioned is that obedience to those laws is not a voluntary matter.
The one area that Genesis describes in some detail is the sequence of appearance of various life forms on Earth. And that sequence is remarkably parallel to what we know from the study of genetics and evolution. But the fact that certain people who claim to be religious and to value the Bible as sacred, reject the one science that actually confirms what the Bible says, makes me wonder why those people, who describe themselves as "Creationists," should not be considered heretics.
Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA
"What? Now I don't understand. What prompted this hostility? And you say it is the believer's fault for the current crisis. You are wasting my time sir. And you obviously have no respect for my beliefs. What an absolute punk you are, and I thought I was talking to an adult."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs this your reply to my comment 62? I honestly can't tell.
Hitler created his regime partly on the mythical Germanic past but his racist ideology was based on eugenics. His program was heavily influenced by social Darwinism (But of course I don't blame Darwin). It was the misapplication of his ideas by Herbert Spencer that lead to this. Communism was based on avowed atheism that saw Christianity as a drug (literally opium) for the masses. So some of your facts about these regimes are not correct. Hitler was definitely not a Christian in the least.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, your point about historical evidence is correct. But that is my point: scientific knowledge is not all based on experiment but on historical knowledge. In fact, Paleontology is considered an historical science.
Overall, your point about spiritual knowledge is correct. There is no consensus about this. However, many have experienced paranormal phenomena that have been documented historically but not scientifically.
The main problem I see is the idea that all people can be rational and base their whole worldview (including philosophy and ethics) on pure scientific facts. Very few do, most of the humanity operate on symbols, beliefs and personal interpretations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCriticizing religion (especially with dirty language) doesn't "enlighten" people, but makes them passive agressive to say the least. The more rational people should help the less rational and the poorly educated to recognize between religion (acquired only by faith,some people have it, some don't) , scientific fact (can be observed and proven), scientific theory (logical and needed for further research, but developed and corrected in the course of scientific progress), desciptions of events (amount of facts know and interpretation may vary) and pseudoscience (mixture of belief, folklore and research, useful in the ancient/medieval times, very bad today).
I think a lot of useless debate arises from confusing those domains or using inapropriate terms and figures (pardon a linguist here). It's not only what we say but how, and that's something that can be worked on.
I might be a little too optimistic though, since I look back on my good personal experience in education. Maybe there's this age factor, I read a lot as a child and then was more able to sort or link different ideas neatly rather than see them as conflicting or confusing
Two things about creationists really bother me:
1. How on Earth can 21st century Americans treat the Bible MORE literary than the Bronze Age Hebrews who wrote it (they obviously used symbols and figures of speech on purpose).
2. How on Earth can a creationist teach a course on Biology in a Western World public school.
Yes, I'm sorry for you, Americans.
I can only hope that thanks to people who can communicate with others with different views, societies would be able to improve teaching and eradicate confusions.
It was my reply. But let's consider what you are asking me to do. You want me to either a) believe or assume the position of agnosticism which I am fully aware of what it is, or b) admit I'm a religious bigot for believing in God? What kind of choice is this? Bottom line, you are not really accepting my beliefs as a true possibility at all. When I say respect I don't mean you have to agree with me. Respect just means accepting what the other person believes without trying to convert them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Centaurus-A, In regards to Hitler, here are quotes;
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I often feel that we will have to undergo all the trials the devil and hell can devise before we achieve Final Victory....I may be no pious churchgoer, but deep within me I am nevertheless a devout man. That is to say, I believe that he who fights valiantly obeying the laws which a god has established and who never capitulates but instead gathers his forces time after time and always pushes forward—such a man will not be abandoned by the Lawgiver. Rather he will ultimately receive the blessing of Providence. And that blessing has been imparted to all great spirits in history." - Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich : Memoirs. Bonanza Books ; Distributed by Crown Publishers, 1982
"We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out".
"For their interests [the Church's] cannot fail to coincide with ours [the National Socialists] alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life". - The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, Oxford University Press, 1942, cited in an Internet article by Doug Krueger.
None of Hitler's ideology was supported by science or by evolution. If he chose to try to emulate a scientific principal in his ideology, that is his issue. It has nothing to do with science.
@Centaurus-A, "But that is my point: scientific knowledge is not all based on experiment but on historical knowledge" who said it was? Scientific theory is based on evidence. Experiments offer a path to evidence but not the only path. Fossils are evidence. Artifacts are evidence. People's testimony is evidence. They are all weighted based on their reliability but they are all considered evidence. I don't know where you are going with this but you seem to be saying only experimentation is science and that is not correct. Please look up the scientific method.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"However, many have experienced paranormal phenomena that have been documented historically but not scientifically." I'm not sure what you mean by that. People have claimed to have had paranormal experiences but there is no evidence outside of their testimony that they actually did. People lie, exaggerate, misremember, forget, and are poorly equipped to objectively measure their experiences. Their testimony is weighted accordingly.
I'm not asking you to accept any of these things. I do not suggest any conversion of any kind. I'm sure your beliefs are valid for you and many people and I am perfectly happy with people who believe them. (I may find out some day that they're true) I think I make that clear by saying I am agnostic (accepting that any beliefs could be true).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am asking how is it possible to interpret that I am, "not really accepting my[your] beliefs as a true possibility at all"? That statement is untrue by definition for me. It is you who said, "By saying the starting point is agnosticism is not right." Are my beliefs "not right"? Is the only acceptable and 'right' belief system the Judeo-Christian belief in (capitalized)god? (this is a direct question awaiting reply)
I don't even expect people in general to accept agnosticism, but asked if it could be considered that a midpoint between faith-based believers in creator deities and some scientists who are atheists, only for the sake of argument and a common ground, that a philosophy which includes both, and does not deny either point of view, could be used? (this is a second direct question awaiting a reply)
Can you consider that to include all beliefs, including you own, with no denial of anyone else's beliefs, that a working premise could be agnosticism? You don't have to truly believe it, you just have to admit it includes the beliefs of all those involved. Or are you saying that only you have a correct belief system and others are deluded? (this is a third direct question awaiting a reply)
talindsey2011 (12:05 AM 3/4/11) wrote:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I have taught my 19 year old to write down what they spout for the grade. I taught him the truth at home, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Genesis 1:1."
It's a shame you also didn't teach him, "These six things doth the LORD hate : yea, seven are an abomination unto him: ... a lying tongue,...." Prov. 6:16-17, (KJV) <http://www.biblestudytools.com/kjv/proverbs/passage.aspx?q=proverbs+6:16-17>
Essentially, you're telling your son to lie to histeachers. The way I see it, your son has a choice: he can recognize that evolution HAS in fact taken place, or he can choose to deny it (without bothering to really consider the evidence, of course). What he cannot do, however, is "write down what they spout for the grade", then prate about knowing the "Truth." The reality is that if he doesn't have the integrity to own up to his beliefs, then he's actually "of (his) father the Devil."
And it's that moral dishonesty that actually brings disgrace on Christ. It also produces a deep sense of disgust among professional scientists, for the entire slyentific cretinist movement. Y'ever notice how cretinists don't try to sell their snake oil to the scientific community? Instead, they spend their time propagandizing in the schools. The reason isn't that a bunch of closed-minded, atheistic scientists refuse to accept the "Truth". It's because scientists can spot a con job. Non-scientists can't, so they buy the lie.
Spout your party line all that you want. But don't teach ignorance, then claim the moral high ground. You aren't anywhere close to that spot.
One of my favorite moments in history happened on Christmas Day, 1968. The crew of Apollo 8, the first manned flight to another world, were rounding off their broadcast back home to Earth from lunar orbit. For their final words they could easily have uttered some bombastic patriotic claptrap such as Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, had demeaned himself with just seven short years before when he assured his Chairman that "No, Comrade Nikita, I saw no angels in orbit!" Instead, seeking to draw everyone on Earth into the power and majesty of the moment, they chose to read from the first chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was a wonderful moment when religion and science weren't at odds, but rather complemented and even enhanced each other -- as they should. And then some spoil-sport ruined it by writing an angry letter to NASA complaining that the astronauts had violated the separation of Church and State. Worse yet, she made it stick. NASA hastily revised its official policy to ensure that no astronaut would ever again be so politically incorrect as to express wonder or joy in words from the Bible or any other achievement of the human spirit. (How Neil Armstrong managed to sneak his "one small step for a man" past NASA's censors after this, I have no idea.)
Fundamentalism in any form should be fought down. But in attacking not just religious fundamentalism, but religion in any form, militant atheists like "scientific earthling" and "ttfweb" aren't protecting science but undermining it. Quite frankly, they're worth their weight in gold to the other side -- just look at the angry responses they've attracted throughout this thread! This is because nobody like a Scrooge, and people like these (or like the spoilsport who muzzled the astronauts)come off like Ebenezer Scrooge at his worst, before he had his own semi-religious conversion.
Albert Einstein said it best: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Either way, you can't get far with one but not the other. One tells you how man and his world work; the other tells you how to be a man. Both are indispensable.
@seanbigay@yahoo.com, "the other tells you how to be a man" does that including stoning women to death for being raped or selling your children into slavery or murdering your neighbor for picking up sticks on the Sabbath? Moral behavior is the result of homo sapiens being a social species and living in cities. It has nothing to do with religion though religious fanatics like to claim ownership of moral behavior, despite their own behavior. The fact is that while under religious rule people have suffered terribly. It is in modern secular states that you find decreasing crime and violence. Religions advertise love and brotherhood but practice hatred and intolerance. But perhaps you can explain how science without religion is lame? Last time I looked the number of atheists in science was about 80%. How can you tell the lame science from the non-lame science? I realize you are just trying to find a place for your comfortable old religion in this brave new world but perhaps it's just better to let primitive superstitions fade away into obsolescence instead of trying to preserve them by forcing them down everyone's collective throat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes. On the whole I agree with you here. That is what I meant in the above post about "getting the foot in the door." We don't have to agree with a person's worldview to share with them our scientific interests. I do this all the time in the office. And we can't see exactly alike (even among friends). There are many types of languages and most do not operate in scientific discourse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet me wake up a bit here. I see. I should have qualified my statement. Now you're sounding like a woman! Instead of saying your starting point being agnosticism is not right maybe it would have been better to say "not right for me." I apologize for that oversight.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI see your other point. To be open minded is to accept a position of agnosticism. I agree that that is our attitude or should be our attitude towards evidence when we begin an investigation, but when a person has experienced a spiritual reality (using historical evidence, testimony) about the other --called God or the Deity, Boddhisatva, Brahman, Allah, the Creator--whatever name you choose to use then that is evidence for His existence for me. But just for investigative purposes taking a stand of agnosticism may be a starting point. It just never seemed to be in my experience going from being an atheist to being a theist--two extremes and nothing between.
Sorry to the paranormal investigative people. I'm selling them way short. Paranormal activity has occurred enough times and with enough consistency that it is a replicatable event approaching scientific evidence (google it). The use of EMF devices and recorders and personal experience (documentary evidence) it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that something beyond what can be adequately described by present day science is occurring.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisElectrical reading spike during times when investigators sense or see or hear some kind of entity. Call these ghosts if you will, and if you don't believe go to some of the badly haunted sites. You will become a believer fast! I have myself experienced these kinds of phenomena and they cannot be simply reduced to any kind of everyday occurence or something psychological or subjective since several people can and have experienced it at once.
That is why I say from the rooftops that materialism is dead. The assumption that we can reduce every experience to scientific materialist philosophy is outdated. But the biological science have not yet caught up with physics which has let go of a reductionist, materialist approach to science.
robert as much as I've butted heads with you you remind me of my younger days when I was attacking all and any theistic position which is fine as long as you are honest and open to admit wrong when you see contrary evidence.
So the Nazi movement was not a Christian movement at all as your quotes show. Did they try to ally themselves with the past symbols of power and traditional religion. Yes they did. Was it a religious movement? There were many trappings of religion that they used, but these are for the glorification of the state and their movement. It was a religion based on nationalism and glorification of the state not God.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRobert,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou wrote that "It is in modern secular states that you find decreasing crime and violence." Are you blaming the high level of religious belief in the US for the high US rate of imprisonment of its own citizens that is second only to the rate in Russia? Among OECD countries, the US rate is more than 5 times the OECD average and more than 3 times the next highest, Poland. You made the statement, I thought you should have the facts.
Another statement you made in an earlier post was "Scientific theories must be proven." If a theory is proven, it is no longer a theory, it is fact. Theories can only be disproven. Genuine sciences deliberately test their theories and assumptions with experiments designed to disprove them. Failure of those tests gives greater confidence in the theory. If they succeed, they lead the science to a better theory.
Instead of testing their theory, Natural Selection, the biological sciences defend it from challenges by Creationists, as well as from scientific challenges that would produce a better theory. They have made it a Law on which they base their rules and assumptions.
Thomas Huxley recognised that Darwin's theory came in two main parts. Huxley believed that Darwin came as close as it is possible to get to proving the main part of his theory, that all species evolved over long periods of time from common origins.
Huxley was skeptical about the second part of the theory, Darwin's explanation of the mechanism of change, Natural Selection. He questioned Darwin's decision that external conditions had no direct effect. Darwin excluded external conditions from Natural Selection. Instead, the drivers of change were improved internal qualities that favoured individuals in struggle involving competition for scarce resources.
Darwin's decision was wrong and reverential attachment to it leads biologists to apply wrong assumptions that give incorrect explanations of the evolutionary mechanism, leaving a gaping hole into which ID stepped.
In another post you stated that "The power of science is that it has no cultural context." Darwin's choice of the mechanism of change came from cultural beliefs of the society in which he grew up. Those beliefs show up in the writings of Malthus, Spencer and his cousin Galton, who all grew up in the same society, as well as in Natural Selection.
If Huxley knew what biologists have learned about genetics, he would recognise that Natural Selection has been disproved. His comment on biology's attachment to it might repeat his famous words "how extremely stupid....."
lamorpa (comment 42),
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes. Are you suggesting that believe and miracle have any scientific application?
robert schmidt (comment 48),
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are incorrect in your assertion regarding figures-of-speech. We are dealing here with a peer reviewed paper in a scientific journal. It simply does not occur to me how you, or anyone else, can "justify" such terminology. Regarding the literal Truth of the Bible, with respect to time frames, time my position was publicly stated in another venue:
http://www.minnpost.com/scientificagenda/2010/03/18/16696/understanding_earth%E2%80%99s_geological_age_and_evolution_linked
"Are you suggesting that believe and miracle have any scientific application?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen they are being used figuratively, as they were in the piece you quoted, they could be used in any way at all. What is your point?
With regards to Mr. Schmidt's response to my comment: First, a little review. I said, "Science tells you how man and his world work; religion tells you how to be a man." Mr. Schmidt then asked, "Does that include stoning women to death for being raped or selling your children into slavery or murdering your neighbor for picking up sticks on the Sabbath?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy answer would be... why, yes, it does! Little as we may like it, that's exactly what some people's religion teaches them to do. It is, of course, horribly wrong, but that's the kind of man they were taught to be. This is how things will stand with them unless they change for the better -- and the change, while it can definitely be guided be science, won't be a matter of science but of their own changing values.
This is all that Uncle Albert and I meant by science being lame (and religion being blind). Science enables us to discover facts and develop tools, but using those facts and tools involves a value judgment, and that no longer falls under the purview of science. It involves how you see yourself as a person, which ultimately leads to how you relate to the world around you, and this is the proper province of religion. (I hope "Shalotka" agrees with me, since s/he seems to hold much the same opinion.)
Let me give an example. It is a widely accepted scientific fact that every atom in every object around and even in us emerged from the long-exploded remains of dead stars; put another way, we are all literally made of star-stuff. This fact has been a part of my own value system ever since I learned it from Carl Sagan's The Cosmic Connection. It tells me that every person is of sublime if not literally cosmic importance; thus every person's rights and responsibilities are, pardon my French, a sacred trust that must never be violated.
This belief has given me strength all my life. So when a good friend fell into despair on being dumped by his girl, I decided to teach him Brother Carl's gospel about our being star-stuff, naively thinking he'd respond the same way I did. Imagine my shock, then, when he took Carl's gospel and ran with it in a direction I neither expected nor wanted: We are all star-stuff -- therefore we, as individuals, are nothing more than dust! We can only become more than dust if we unite in one great Cause behind one great Leader -- Sieg Heil!
So from one scientific fact sprang two very different beliefs. This is the way in which science is lame without religion. It can give us the facts and the tools, but not tell us how to use them -- for better or worse.
One of the more common ways that creationists lie is by the "quote mine." These are false quotes, either ripped out of context, radically redacted to mislead, or simply invented. Bill Crofut is obviously a master of this technique.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHe has lied about the quote he gave in comment #40, just as sure as if he said up was down. Fortunately, I don't need to research this particular "quote," as the job has already been done. It is "quote" Quote #4.19 of the "Quote Mine Project" hosted by the TalkOrigin.org website.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part4-2.html#quote4.19
Stop lying Mr. Crofut.
Stalin- Orthodox Christian seminarian. Enought said on that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHitler- "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them." - Adolf Hitler, speech, April 12 1922, published in My New Order
Hitler- he is a creationist affirming humans existed "from the very beginning", and have not evolved:
"From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump , as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today." - Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Tabletalk (Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier)
In 1938, the Nazi "Office of Racial Policy" publication "Inromationsdienst" featured Martin Luther’s advice on the “proper” treatment of Jews:
"... to put their synagogues and schools to fire, and what will not burn, to cover with earth and rubble so that no-one will ever again see anything there but cinders ... Second, one should tear down and destroy their houses, for they do also in there what they do in their schools and synagogues ... And third, one should confiscate their prayer books and Talmud, in which idolatry and lies, slander and blasphemy is taught”
I am disgusted by self-righteous pious frauds like "Centaurus-A."
Centaurus-A's comment, "I should have qualified my statement. Now you're sounding like a woman!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA religious bigot, and a sexist. I am not surprised.
scientific earthling,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI tend to agree.
It might be that China is as good an example of a nation ruled according to principles of science and engineering as we humans are able to create.
Science and religion are two disciplines using vastly different idioms. They are not in contradiction, unless you want to take bible literature literally. This was an era where people routinely spoke allegorically, even, or especially, the great teacher Jesus. Modern education does not deal any more in allegory, hence the disconnect. "The angel of death spread his wings on the blast and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed." (Byron)Only a total ingenue would think there was literally an angel of death breathing death and destruction on the adversaries. The creation story is true, but not literally so. "Consider the lilies of the field how they grow." Any scientist who has examined the occurrence of fractals in nature would recognize that this is an allusion to the natural patterns that occur again and again throughout nature. Whether these patterns stop at the polymers from which we are formed or occur in more diffuse or complex patterns beyond our imagination or observation is a matter of mere conjecture. The literature of the Bible seems to think so. The 19th Century scientist, Laplace, oft quoted out of context for his remark demarcating God as a hypothesis for which he had "no need." (In his explanation to Napoleon.) Also made this observation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<<"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.>>
—Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities.
Sounds like God, doesn't it? The God hypotheses of most peoples on the planet is a simple derivation from the patterns we observe in nature, extrapolated beyond the very limited observable realm that we inhabit. Extrapolation is not an exercise in ignorance it is a vital function of the scientific imagination.
Bill, re your comment 86.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are fond of quoting sources to make dubious points. The reference you gave referred to calculations by William Thomson in a submission to the Royal Society in 1866. Using his undoubted knowledge of the Law of Themodynamics, he estimated from heat loss and current temperatures that the earth had started as a hot ball 100 mya and for much of the time since had been too hot to be habitable. His argument that there had been too little time for Darwin's long, slow process to produce all the current species was a major problem for Darwin. Thomson's calculation meant that the earth and sun must keep on cooling: "...as for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation".
By the end of that century that heat source had been discovered, radioactive reactions that had been a stable source of heat for billions of years.
The biblical time of creation about 6,000 years ago coincides with the very first cities excavated from the soils of the Fertile Crescent, with evidence of the first centralised administrations and organised religion.
Humans evolved over millions of years as hunter gatherers. Every hunter gatherer society studied by anthropologists believed in spirits that inhabited the animals they hunted and the landscapes in which they hunted. Humans developed agricultural lifestyles 10,000 years ago. For the first time in millions of years they herded animals they previously hunted and farmed land they had hunted over. It took thousands of years to develop concentrations of populations and to work out how to manage them. The chronology in the bible dates from the first cities in which traditional hunter gatherer spiritual beliefs were channelled into organised religion that better suited the organised complex societies that humans were developing.
As far as I have been able to ascertain, every known complex society over the past 6,000 years has had religious belief and every hunter gatherer society has had spiritual beliefs.
Seems to me that, instead of beating people over the head, scientists should put their energies into working out why metaphysical belief has been universal in human societies as the brain's way of explaining events for which there was no physical explanation.
www.ideasintuitionandthinking.com
I am from the Philippines and looking back in our high school biology classes, I dont remember having issues about evolution and creationism during our class discussions. I think the problem starts when pro-evolutionists insist that students accept the theory as it is, and in the same way, when pro-creationism teachers insist that evolution is wrong. It is like forcing a believer to renounce his faith. Most of us in class are Christians and we pretty much just viewed evolution as an alternative explanation on how life came about. We knew what the theory says but we still held on to what we have been taught about the Bible. Our teacher did not discuss creationism because most of us know what it says, and concentrated on the theory of evolution. She did a great job knowing that this is a touchy topic by not insisting the theory and merely elaborated its claims, why scientists think it is superior to creationism AND some problems with the theory that remain unaddressed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKenjo, you make a good point when you mention "problems with the theory that remain unaddressed."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe first person to write about those problems was Darwin himself in ch. 6, Difficulties of the Theory. The difficulties were self inflicted by Darwin's decision that external conditions had no direct effect. Instead, in his explanation of the evolutionary mechanism, Natural Selection, change was driven by variations that gave individuals improved internal qualities that favoured them in struggle involving competition for scarce resources.
I do not blame Darwin for his error, which I describe as Neglect of Context, a focus on the behaviours of successful individuals to the exclusion of external conditions that determined which behaviours were successful. He was trying to make sense of a huge amount of information that required him to develop many new concepts. Natural Selection was consistent with the cultural beliefs of the society in which he grew up, that can be seen in the writings of Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer and his cousin Francis Galton. Darwin described his theory as the doctrine of Malthus applied manifold to nature.
I blame the perpetuation of Darwin's error in present day "science" on generations of biologists who have failed to do what is expected of scientists, to test their hypothesis.
One difficulty Darwin did not include in ch. 6 was how species became so closely adapted to external conditions. He believed that he had explained that in ch. 3, where he described changes of species between different climates...."the change of climate being conspicuous, we are tempted to attribute the whole effect to its direct action. But this is a very false view." He explained that species dominated in a climate because they were favoured in that climate. What favoured them were not external conditions, but superior internal qualities that favoured them in struggle in those climates. Different species dominated in different climates because different species were favoured in different climates. How could an explanation that relies on a magical innate quality of favouredness pass serious scientific testing?
Darwin left many of his arguments incomplete. In many cases the information he presents seems to argue the case for external conditions, but he leads the argument to his explanation, leaps of logic that are not obvious unless you understand that his explanation rejected external conditions.
The theory does have problems that remain unaddressed, that result from Darwin's error and scientific failure by biologists.
This is an old argument, educated people make a guess about something they cannot prove and they teach it in schools to youngsters. Evolution is true, we see it everyday, but it is only a means of adaptaion, not creation. No species has ever been found that has been totaly created by evolution. In humans they call it the "missing link" and that is because it does not exist. Our DNA is closer to a pig than a monkey, and we do not even favor monkeys. Secondly, science says the universe is endless, therefore God has to exist. It is not possible that He does not, it would go agianst science itself to say otherwise. Even if this missing link were found, then that is the mechanism God used, just like the "Big Bang", a mechanism to form a solar system. Evidence that a large chain reacion started "somehow" and happend suddenly. Science talks alot about the big bang but has no idea how it started. Hey guys, are you overlooking something? Stop the speculation everybody - both sides of the argument. True science sticks with the facts with no room for speculation. Last word to some of the holdouts - the earth is NOT flat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is an old argument, educated people make a guess about something they cannot prove and they teach it in schools to youngsters. Evolution is true, we see it everyday, but it is only a means of adaptaion, not creation. No species has ever been found that has been totaly created by evolution. In humans they call it the "missing link" and that is because it does not exist. Our DNA is closer to a pig than a monkey, and we do not even favor monkeys. Secondly, science says the universe is endless, therefore God has to exist. It is not possible that He does not, it would go agianst science itself to say otherwise. Even if this missing link were found, then that is the mechanism God used, just like the "Big Bang", a mechanism to form a solar system. Evidence that a large chain reacion started "somehow" and happend suddenly. Science talks alot about the big bang but has no idea how it started. Hey guys, are you overlooking something? Stop the speculation everybody - both sides of the argument. True science sticks with the facts with no room for speculation. Last word to some of the holdouts - the earth is NOT flat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi everybody,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSometimes I was a little abused about the comments, it seemd like onece a point was taken , it couls not be reviewed, that is not an intellectuel reaction.
I think that both scientist who are religious and those who are not, have the same input, as a matter of fact science and religion can unite very good.
The most important thing is that scientist are asking "HOW" and religion is asking "WHY", together we can make a very good team , but the technique of the HOW with its experiments and laws is quite different from the approach of the WHY, (in the WHY camp we have not only to put all the religions, but all esoteric movements and mythes, in fact all the spiritual activities of mankind) we cannot think of experiments with GOD, just because of the fact that it is an entity created by our consciousness (sorry), our consciousness that has a direct line with the infinities that are not "existing" in our four-dimensional causal deterministic Universe (but we can feel its effects), so our consciousness could also be called "divine" as a matter of speaking.
Our minds are making calculations and are trying to find solutions for the HOW problems that we meet every day and night, one question solved and a hundred of new ones are born.
Our human behaviour has the tendancy to explain everything of the WHY questions, we are like children who keep on posing this same question, and if there are no more answers we still have GOD as an explanation, GOD as the theory of everything, a theory long sought for but ...
If creationism begins with prohibition of the HOW questions I think it is dangerous, it is also dangerous if science prohibits people to believe in God.
If you like to read more please do not hesitate to read my essay for the contest of FQXi (sponsor Scientific American) :
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/913
title : Realities out of Total Simultaneity.
Wilhelmus de Wilde
There are a lot of things mankind does not understand or just simply do not have the technology to "see". It would be unwise to ingnore what we know to be fact, likewise to assume what we can't prove to be fact. Why fight over what we don't know yet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience and Religion go hand in hand, there is no need to separate them,one can not survive without the other...Baha'i teachings tell us so...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also teach science, in Canada. I have found that any students of the Baptist faith tend to reject any discussion of evolution, to the point of walking out of a class where the topic is raised. The problem here is not that the teaching of evolution is clearly mandated, but that the audience rejects it, based on home- and church-taught biases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbsolutely not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience is based on scepticism, everything is questioned and a rational answer proposed, which is tested and accepted if it predicts events theoretically that can be verified by experiment. The theory is valid till another theory proves to better answer the question.
Religion is about turning off your mind. you must accept everything no matter how ridiculous it might seem.
Example: Pope Innocence intervened in the trial of a beautiful young lady accused of being a witch. The entire congregation at her wedding claimed she was present at the wedding and then went into the marital chamber with her husband at the time the church was claiming she was engaging in sex with the devil. The pope claimed the people had been fooled by the devil who pretended to be the young lady, while she was indulging in illegal sex with him.
Nice Pope, nice religion: Sadists and pornographers ruled, just like paedophiles fill the ranks of the priesthood in recent times. Sadly the young lady was tried by searching for signs of the devil, conveniently located in vaginas or on breasts, great masturbatory aids for the priests. The documenters of these activities were the porn writers of the era.
It is disurbing indeed to withness this great shouting down by religious indoctronees in a SA comment blog.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObserve: The empty wagon makes the most noise.
Wilhelmus, not sure where your argument is headed, but I do agree that science looks at HOW and creationists at explanations of WHY. Your sentence "creationism begins with prohibition of the HOW questions" should have continued "and science prohibits WHY questions".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience is forced into that prohibition by incorrect assumptions stemming from Darwin's decision to exclude external conditions from his explanation of species change. Excluding external conditions makes it difficult to come up with a sensible explanation of HOW change happens in a species and impossible to explain WHY. That is why a basic rule of biology is that change can have no purpose or direction. By freakish stringing together of small random changes, complex organs that give sight, smell, hearing and, in the case of humans, speech evolve by accident.
In ch. 3, Darwin argued that species did not adapt to conditions through the effect of external conditions, but because their internal qualities favoured them in struggle in those conditions - magical science.
Darwin's explanation relied on internal qualities of individuals. It came from the internally-directed cultural beliefs of 19th century Britain. When Huxley questioned his exclusion of external conditions in a letter to Darwin the day before publication, Darwin replied two days later “You have most cleverly hit on one point, which has greatly troubled me; if, as I must think, external conditions produce little direct effect, what the devil determines each particular variation?” Darwin was wrong about the source of variations and wrong in excluding external conditions.
Biologists in the C21st reverentially cling to Darwin's errors. They attempt to explain what they observe in nature through an internal focus on successful individuals. An external focus would tell them that the difference between a species before and after major change is defined not by survivors, but by elimination of individuals unable to survive changes in external conditions.
The WHY in evolution is survival. Sight and the big human brain evolved through elimination of individuals lacking abilities to sense and respond adequately to external conditions. Science's quashing of attempts to explain WHY opened up the way for Intelligent Design.
Science has failed to recognise that species are designed for their conditions, not by an external metaphysical agent, but by a simple, natural process of pressure from change in external conditions that eliminates individuals unable to survive, resulting either in extinction or evolution.
Scientific earthling,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not sure who is worse, creationists who scour through articles by long dead scientists to shed doubt on scientific claims, or socalled supporters of science who scour through all-too-often violent human history to disparage religious belief.
I live in Australia and was shocked when a recent public survey showed that a majority favoured the creationist or ID explanation of present day species and only 42% favoured the scientific explanation. That is about the same as in the UK and in the US support for the scientific explanation is 14%.
The world is telling us that the scientific message has failed. WHY? I forgot - biologists are prohibited from asking WHY? I will tell you the answer anyway. The problem with biology is that they do not, as you claim, treat their assumptions with scepticism expected of scientists. They made Natural Selection their Law and built their rules and assumptions around it and do not challenge it.
The assumptions that led Darwin to Natural Selection were that change came from variations that produced improved individuals, favouring them in struggle over scarce resources. It followed that those advantages must immediately show up in incremental change and the more variations, the more change. Darwin understood that an essential prerequisite for change in a species was elimination of less favoured individuals. Having excluded the effects of external conditions, Darwin was left with their extermination (his word) by the activities of improved individuals.
Genetics has found almost the opposite of all those assumptions - variations happen continuously and instead of creating change, accumulate as diversity. What creates change is not emergence of diversity, but elimination of part of that diversity by survival pressure from external conditions, the very factor rejected by Darwin. Geneticists cite more variations in the genome as a sign of a LACK of evolutionary change.
If biologists tested their hypotheses, how could they miss the glaring discrepancies? Read my blog for a more complete explanation of the errors.
http://ideasintuitionandthinking.com/blog
Follow the error trail and it becomes clear that the "scientific" explanation relies on magic, just like the creationist explanation. Surveys tell us that the public believes that creationist and ID metaphysical explanations are more credible than the metaphysical explanations of biologists, whose own science contradicts the assumptions on which their explanations are based.
scientific earthling, It is true that religious institutions have wronged and killed many people throughout history, but it is wrong to attribute the crimes of these zealots to all religious people. It is also true that "science" can become a religion to some. Also, not all religion opposes skepticism/questioning (although this is not true for all and often does not come across). For example, I meet with a group to debate theology weekly (many of those who come are also scientists and we believe that questioning allows our faith and understanding to grow).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree that it is wise not to shun religious belief when teaching science in schools since it would get past knee-jerk reactions. Furthermore, religion and science don't necessarily contradict each other. There is a place for both religion and science, since science allows us to help our fellow man and do what religion calls us to do and religion allows people to see order and purpose in the universe. I don't believe that creationism should be "taught" in school, but I also don't believe that evolution should be taught as the full and only explanation for how things came to be. Both positions are oversimplifications and would needlessly turn people off from science.
"Why is this so hard for people to integrate the How with the Who?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBecause you can observe the How and the What but you cannot see the Who. If you already know the How and the What, why do you need the Who? And why do you cite the bible? Why not Zeus? He can answer the Who.
"Our DNA is closer to a pig than a monkey, and we do not even favor monkeys"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, this is a common statement that the uninformed toss around and think is true because it is stated over and over again. It is not true (like many of your statements).
Hoamingin: I too live in Oz, you are speaking to a person who initially graduated in Chemistry and Zoology, a long long time ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have studied Darwin's theory of evolution, it was not his alone. The theory is simple and borne out by evidence. Today we have the almighty DNA.
In era's before we could artificially rescue genetically defective individuals, these defects were eliminated from the gene pool. Today we use science to allow these individuals to survive and procreate.
example: A young girl had a serious genetic defect which caused her skin cells to multiply rapidly, causing thick skin and all forms of scarring. The solution is using all sorts of creams and physically rubbing the skin to rid it of the excessive cells, she survived, then found a male with the same genetic condition, they now have three children all with the same condition. The media portraits them as heroes, I think its a crime.
This person chose the benefits of science but refused to be responsible and not have her own biological children fathered by her husband. She was aware that every child would inherit her disease. Recently we jailed an African immigrant who had HIV and deliberately went around infecting others, the same rules should apply to genetic disease.
Religion claims its texts are the word of god and are beyond criticism and the full and complete truth. Laws of heresy killed people for contradicting the church and its texts.
Science does not claim its laws are infallible, we give our highest rewards to those who prove them wrong. On these grounds alone it is right for us to hold religion accountable for their past deeds. Why are crimes of religion the deeds of individual zealots and not the whole organisation?
The current ongoing crime by the Christian church is not recommending birth control, in an extremely overpopulated world. Why? Because they are competing with Islam.
Your theory that external factors, such as extinctions bring on evolution sounds credible, write a paper and publish it. Also make predictions about what will be the result, time will bear out the truth or otherwise of your theory. Do it quick, we are in the throes of the sixth extinction.
Also read about Barry Marshall and Robin Warren and their work on Helicobacter pylori, see how they were derided, but eventually truth prevailed.
Science and religion are diametrically opposed notions of reality. Science requires thought, religion blind belief.
Tell me which religion encourages scepticism?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRead my previous reply to find answers to your other ideas.
Keep your religion in your home, don't force it on anyone else, not even your children. Let each one make up their own mind. Do not ever broadcast it by wearing symbols or uniforms.
Religion and science can never mix. If you believe in religion, you don't believe in science.
@hoamingin, "If a theory is proven, it is no longer a theory, it is fact. Theories can only be disproven." you have no clue what you are talking about. A Theory by its nature is proven. A theory is a proposition that agrees with the evidence. That means it is factual, not a fact. It is like the legal distinction between evidence and a conviction. I conviction of guilty is not a fact. The smoking gun was a fact, the finding of guilty is factual in that it agrees with the facts. To extend the analogy, a hypothesis is like the charges against the accused. It is often not possible to disprove a theory, but only to find a better one. This is like the finding of innocence in a court of law. It doesn't mean that the accused did not commit the crime, it means that the evidence presented did not provide the best or most reasonable explanation given certain requirements such as the "burden of proof".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fact that you completely messed up the basic concept of theory and facts suggests that you need to spend a little more time learning and less time lecturing people about what they don't know.
How do you know the bible creation story was true?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLaplace's hypothetical intellect was not a supernatural god just like Maxwell's demon was not Satan. Laplace used the hypothetical intellect to illustrate the principle of determinism, which actually negates the God hypothesis. A deterministic universe operates on its own like clockwork free from the influence of supernatural beings. That's the essence of his quote "I have no need of the God hypothesis."
REALLY good point lamorpa. And in the end, what difference would it make if an atheist or a religious zealot dropped a nuke on say, Jerusalem? Or if an atheist wants to create the super race at the expense of the others, or a religious zealot tries to do it "in God's image", or according to the words of the prophet? For a moment I forgot that religions have never been a guarantee of moral decision making abilities, and was caught up in the arguments that Science is somehow unbiased, operates in some kind of culture vacuum, and is always based on "facts".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe "think" we see the how and the what (of evolution) and are continuing to debate or refine our theories. Can't see the Who? Billions of people claim to "know" the Who. My definition of God has been the everything, everywhere, endless (without beginning or end). And if I add the all knowing, all seeing (consciousness), I end up with my Who. When I "see" the universe, or with my mind's eye I try to imagine seeing the universe, I imagine that I can "see" God. If I imagine that the Big Bang and expanding universe will someday shrink back, be the unimaginable whatever "IT" was before the Big Bang, and explode again, I imagine God breathing out, pause, breathing in, no beginning, no end. Western man/male thinking puts things into separate "boxes", is reductionistic, and so Science and Religion are forced to be separate, and from these commentaries, antagonistic. At least Physics and Metaphysics have no clear cut boundaries, multiple (infinite) universes for example. Why I have referenced the Bible? Because I know so little of the rest of the world's religious texts. Why not Zeus? I am unaware of people having attempted to record his words/teachings, mostly just "information" about his mating habits and "interspecies" offspring.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The biblical time of creation about 6,000 years ago coincides with the very first cities excavated from the soils of the Fertile Crescent"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what? The universe is 14 billion yrs old. The biblical creation date was way off. Btw, Jericho, probably the oldest city, dates back 11,000 yrs ago and prehistoric religions date back 70,000 yrs ago.
"why metaphysical belief has been universal in human societies as the brain's way of explaining events for which there was no physical explanation."
Because humans are naturally curious and for most of human history and prehistory, religions offered the explanations on how and why the world works. Science is a relatively recent method of knowing the world. And it competed with the traditional domain of religion.
Galileo, considered by some as the father of scientific method, immediately got into trouble with the Catholic Church. It was no coincidence that the 17th century scientific revolution was followed by the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of atheism, agnosticism, deism, pantheism and secular philosophy in general, which all undermine theism and religion.
If I could offer a way to connect back to the original theme of worldwide teaching of evolution, I will mention the Gaia hypothesis. That all systems and organisms of Earth can be considered one self-sustaining organism. That for millions of years Gaia was blind, but as billions of eyes evolved, now Gaia can "see". That the sum of all consciousness on the planet (how many scientists maintain that only our species is conscious? and taught that we were the only tool makers? and that both tool making and language development were male driven? sorry guys, still lots of bias) IS the consciousness of the planet. Extrapolate that outwards through the galaxy, and all the billions of galaxies in the known universe, and yeah, I think we can be scientists who also try to "grok" a creator, or at least creation, AND take responsibility for the changes/destruction/extinctions we are responsible for here on this planet. We will be witnesses to the sixth great extinction. Will the fact that billions of us are conscious beings make this event any different? Will our collective consciousness (hard to measure, but any less "factual"?) be viewed as an external or internal element in the evolution of life on this planet? In terms of the evolution of life on this planet, will our being conscious of our actions, the changes we must make, and our attempts to "save" first species, and then whole ecosystems, become viewed as a "natural" part of evolution?We are beings that sense "spirit" (as in spirited horses, Pegasus, that's the spirit, Holy Spirit, spirit/energy of a storm, Thor). We don't have to be Strangers in a Strange Land or to each other. We have total control when drawing the boundaries in the us and them games that are being played out in microcosm in these commentaries. And we are all from the same language/culture/community. We started with an article on the challenges of the worldwide teaching of evolution. Must it devolve into personal animosity?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBillions of people also 'know' UFOs, astrology, feng shui, elves and all sorts of weird things. So perhaps that's enough to establish their reality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure you can imagine God but you don't have to imagine the big bang bec. you have the microwave background radiation as evidence.
Physics and metaphysics do have a boundary. Untestable and non-falsifiable theories are outside the realm of science. They are therefore metaphysics. Ask the physicists if they can test the multiverse hypothesis.
Read other religious texts. They are also useful. Zeus will do. I'm unaware of gods actually talking to people, just people claiming to talk to gods.
Robert,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWonderful to read your dulcet terms again.
Rather than accept your simplistic definition, let me quote from an AAAS statement defending evolution against claims of Intelligent Design that distinguishes between theries that can be accepted as fact, and those that cannot:
"A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment....Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact."
Let me pick up on the last point first. Like you, I accept that gravity and evolution can be accepted as fact. The AAAS points out that theories that attempt to explain gravity (including Newton's Law) cannot be accepted as fact. Similarly, I am saying that the theory by which Darwin attempted to explain the mechanism of evolution cannot be accepted as fact. It needs to be "repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment", but biologists do not. In fact, they have placed themselves into a highly unscientific Catch-22. They constructed their rules and assumptions on Natural Selection in such a way that it is impossible to test their theory using assumptions that assume the correctness of the theory. Biologists have set themselves up in the unscientific position of their basic beliefs being unfalsifiable (though I am sure you can find an angle to argue the opposite).
approach would have saved many philosophers and scientists years of thought about what represents sufficient proof. We should tell physicists to stop wasting their time running experiments to test the Theory of Relativity. Enough is enough. Can't yop see that it is proved!! But physicists keep doing what scientists are supposed to do, they keep testing their theory, and failure to disprove it increases the confidence in its correctness.
I notice that you have attacked one , which means that, despite having found nothing to disprove the theory for almost a century, they are still checking the evidence. Maybe we should tell them to stop wasting their time checking a theory that is fact.
So what is a proven theory that is wrong?
Your attempt to equate the Gaia hypothesis with your New Age religion is disingenuous. The Gaia hypothesis had nothing to do with "collective consciousness." It is about how living things in the biosphere interact as a system to create an environment conducive to life. It is driven by physical and chemical processes not by some mysterious metaphysical "collective consciousness." The use of mythology and supernatural entities are unnecessary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour attempt to equate the Gaia hypothesis with your New Age religion is disingenuous. The Gaia hypothesis had nothing to do with "collective consciousness." It is about how living things in the biosphere interact as a system to create an environment conducive to life. It is driven by physical and chemical processes not by some mysterious metaphysical "collective consciousness." The use of mythology and supernatural entities are unnecessary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYoiks,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat was careless, just noticed a heap of detritus at the bottom of my comment that should have been deleted.
Ignore it, if you can
Strangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou missed the point. Religious fundamentalists believe that life began 6,000 years ago, when in fact it was when religion and complex human societies began.
One of the other contaminating beliefs that effects western theists is that, since their religious rules specify it and include a threat of harm (eternal damnation), they feel they have some kind of moral/ethical superiority to other kinds of believers and non-believers, when in reality, practising a system of ethics based on the promise of a reward, in their case an afterlife, is possibly less virtuous to practising a system of ethics based on it simply being the right thing to do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisscientific earthling, I am talking of my own experiences. I know that Church history is ugly, but that just shows how a good thing can be corrupted. What you don't hear about in these forums are the religious people who stayed to help people when plagues hit cities when everyone else left and other kind acts motivated by religion. There is a place for religion. I have had many discussions with members of both clergy and laity that encourage questioning and skepticism. I am sure that similar notions exist for other denominations and faiths, as well. Eboo Patel wrote an excellent book (Acts of Faith) about how his Muslim faith was enhanced by questioning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience and religion are not diametrically opposed notions of reality. Both require thought. Religion, also, is not blind faith (although it is faith). They can mix, in the sense that religion can motivate people to learn more science and that science can bring people to a better understanding of their religion, though unfortunately, they are often mixed inappropriately, doing a disservice to both disciplines. If you want an example of this, look at Michael Faraday, the scientist. This mixing is what this debate is really about. When you describe a "belief in science," what does that mean? If you mean an adherence to empirical evidence and non-bias when validating claims, religion should not be excluded, since that would be pre-supposing a conclusion.
Disingenuous? I haven't linked anything to anything, and the term "New Age Religion" could just as easily be "linked" to Science as some commentators have written. This Science vs. Religion pits belief systems against each other. It takes quite a leap of scientific faith to go from background radiation to "images" of the Big Bang. I'm glad you have problems with the idea of collective consciousness. I think it is a good example of the limits of current science. We know it (consciousness) exists. Like background radiation, we can detect something, as with EEGs. I extrapolated the almost 7 billion bits of human consciousness and proposed that "it" has the power to influence the evolution of life on this planet, as an influence on the survival or extinction of species. As it is our collective activities that have altered this Spaceship Earth's life support systems, I think it "fair" to include our awareness or consciousness in sum total. My reference to the Gaia hypothesis and Spaceship Earth hardly qualifies as a disingenuous attempt to bring whatever you call New Age Religion into the Science VS. Religion "debate" in commentaries on the challenges of the worldwide teaching of evolution. It was you who asked me why I made references to the Bible (I know too little of the Koran) and why not Zeus himself. Knowing many creation stories, many cultures attempts to explain how life began (and all of these without benefit of modern science to inform) doesn't make me a pagan or a New Age anything. Knowing that the laws of Physics were not operating during the first moments of the Big Bang, doesn't cause me to lose "faith", the believing without evidence, without the "facts", the unproven and untestable hypotheses of "modern" Science. Science has absolutely no proof of how life began on this planet. Science has absolutely no proof that there is life anywhere else in the Universe. Science and Religion have that much in common. Now lets get back to the worldwide teaching of evolution.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my opinion religion should not be a subject inside the classroom, but we should teach them the history of religion, either within philosophy class or history class. They need to know since kids that religion is a representation of a mind's subjectivity, therefore it is personal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe neoreligious trend in the USA dates back to the anti-Vietnam war movement. The US army believed that warfare could be done in a scientific manner using computers, and therefore – as they failed – the idea of warfare came to be blamed on science. So the idea of a science based society were opposed by two ideas. (1) Socialism-communism. (2) The hippie-ideology made great by large amounts of wonderful pop and rock. I believe that there are some reasons why science has failed to convince some. (a) Most people across the globe are uneducated. (b) We possess existential longings that religion promises to solve, but that science claims to be unsolvable. We would also love to be immortal. (c) Certain people with lots and lots of money think, still, that religious beliefs are a fine way to keep us in our place, and so they finance willingly all of these attacks at a scientific education. These forces include christian as well as muslim ones. The response lies in a recognition that science deals with the world of experience, whereas religion deals with whatever lies beyond. The Bible says nothing about atoms or quarks, and in so far as it says anything about the Moon or the Sun or the stars, those words come from people who lived in tribal communities and were quite simply misinformed. Even if one as of today believes in a Jewish, Christian or Muslim God, one must recognize that although that God did his best to communicate with us, in those days, he could not provide people who wrote on parchment with detailed knowledge about quantum physics or DNA theory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet us add that there is eminent neurological and neuropsychological research going on to show that our brains are wired as to long for Meaning. The same brains are also, unfortunately, wired so as to accept the first emotionally acceptable answer. Who would not like to have a Father in Heaven who just likes Me, and whose whole aim in his immortal existence is to ensure My happiness. It is this emotional naivité that rational thought has to fight against. So please let these enemies of the Freedom of Thought not invade our schools. The schools of Babylon were better than that. They taught mathematics, linguistics and so on.
I am so sorry for your son.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think your last comments are very apt. What we think or believe about the afterlife is one thing, what we believe about this world another. We need not attack religion to make room for science. What we need, as Galileo Galilei maintained, to to give each a space of its own.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs I said, religion and the first city started much earlier 70,000 and 11,000 yrs. ago respectively. So the biblical 6,000 yrs. age of the earth is still trivial.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience is not linked to New Age religion. Only pseudoscientists try to make that link. You don't need faith to believe in the microwave background radiation bec. you can measure it as predicted by the big bang theory. It was proven and tested hypothesis. Quantum mechanics operated during the first moments. Theoretical physicists had a detail account of this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon't confuse consciousness with "collective consciousness." The former is a subject of psychology and neurology. The latter is a buzzword of New Agers. Pseudoscientists try to link the two to make New Age religion sound scientific.
Biologists have scientific theories on how life began on earth. They had tested this in lab experiments and produce animo acids, the building blocks of life. That's proof their theory is sound. So what if there's no proof of life elsewhere in the universe? Does that make science weak?
Science and religion ask the same questions but their methods of finding the answers are very different. Science is based on observation. Religion is based on faith.
Btw, why are you trying to link your religion (whatever it is) to science, New Age religion, mythology? Isn't your faith enough?
lamorpa (comment 86),
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy point is that even the editors of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN seem to have disagreed with you (and it only took them 25 years):
"Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times in his professional life when Wald has been wrong. Examine his main thesis and see. Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds?"
[C. Folsome. 1979. Life: Origin and Evolution. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS. Quoted in: Edwart T. Peltzer, Ph.D. 2006. ABIOGENESIS: The Faith & the Facts (DVD). Colorado Springs: Access Research Network]
Gary Hurd (comment 88),
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAw shucks! Why not research the quote anyway and provide the evidence of my alleged mastery? For example, where is the evidence of contextual rippage, misleading redaction or invention? Actual research would certainly lend a measure of credibility to your assertions.
The quote miners also took others to task for the following quote by two evolutionary biologists [Quote #4.20, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part4-2.html]:
“Our theory of evolution has become, as [philosopher of science, Karl R.] Popper described, one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus 'outside of empirical science' but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training.”
[L. C. Birch and Paul Ehrlich. 1967. Evolutionary History and Population Biology. NATURE, vol. 214, p. 352]
Peter Hutcheson was given credit for the following snappy rejoinder: “The creationists did not cite the very next sentence...”
The problem for the miners is, the very next sentence does not change the admissions concerning empiricism or dogma (a religious term). However, allow me to quote the very next sentence anyway:
“The cure seems to us not to be a discarding of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, but more skepticism about many of its tenets.”
Now we're dealing with tenets; also a religious term. Where's the science?
hoamingin (comment 93):
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have me completely baffled! Where, in any of my comments, is even the hint of a reference to Lord Kelvin? Specifically what source was quoted to make what dubious point?
Not often, but sometimes I wish there were a place like hell, and a God who would send the fanatic followers of every rigid religion to duke it out with the fanatic followers of the Atheist religion, the Nationalist religion, and/or a silly and rigid religious faith some ignorant persons call Science. How could anyone possibly embrace evolution and NOT yearn to be a lifelong Seeker? Can't haters and baiters ever relax? Can't they tentatively, skeptically, embrace one of the laid-back, always evolving philosophies like Agnosticism? Or Process Theology? Or Unitarian Universalism? Or Hicksite Quakerism? Or Ethical Culture? Or transcendental Neoplatonism? Or Deism? (And they are just some of the most open and welcoming results of Christianity. There are equally open and welcoming denominations within and beyond Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, et cetera, too.) If the haters and baiters would seek more than tunnel vision.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt least they could admit that there are plenty of Religious Liberals all over the world who tackle life and want to make it better, because they are excited by evolution, paradox, metaphor, indeterminacy, contingency and quantum unknowns. We delight in the company of other people who believe quite differently and who might actually be able to teach us something new. We get our kicks examining the ultimate unanswerable questions but we don't freak out over them: whether or not there is a God, and if there is, what if she/he/it isn't ominpotent, omnipresent or omniscient? What if humans or pre-humans invented God long ago but now something like God is useful because the needs of love and cooperation have become the key to our ethical maturity? Perhaps to our very survival? Closed minds are juvenile. Please grow up. You could read some good poetry and you might benefit by fitting the world's sacred books into your reading. Listen to the wind, look up at the sky now and then, bend down and pat a dog. Best of all, start listening to something other than your own wiggling tonsils and the clones of yourself who crowd and smother you by agreeing with every last tenet of your personal theologies. Stop boring the rest of us with diatribes. Stop messing up the world with anger. Thank you.
Bill,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn your post #85 you stated "my position was publicly stated in another venue:" and quoted a reference that linked to a Minneapolis website, an article about how Darwin was obliged, by estimates of Earth's age by Lord Kelvin, to adjust his theory.
Does this mean you do not read your sources?
Bill,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour post #133. You have been busy. And this was well picked: "The cure seems to us not to be a discarding of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, but more skepticism about many of its tenets. "
Do you think it is a good or a bad thing that the authors are saying that biologists should start acting more like scientists and applying some skepticism to their assumptions?
That is what I have been saying all along. There can be no question of the main part of Darwin's theory, that all species evolved from common sources, but his explanation, Natural Selection, was just plain wrong.
Strangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot sure where you got your numbers from. 70,000 years ago was one of the low points of the last Ice Age. Modern humans were living then in the Middle East as hunter gatherers. Their populations grew there as the world came out of the Ice Age 14,000 ya, but it was only after the sudden dip back into the Younger Dryas mini Ice Age about 11,000ya that humans started to settle on land as farmers, then the first towns developed, but the oldest city with evidence of laws, central administration and a place of religious worship appeared about 6,000 ya, after a long drought that probably concentrated populations into river valleys.
I guess that was the first time records were kept and when someone wrote the first bits of the bible 2,000+ years later, they went back to the beginning of recorded history.
I've copied this from my Apple dictionary. I hope it implies the "link" between my belief in Science and my use of religions to explore those aspects of life that Science and the scientific method don't cover. And the study of religions does something else that Science can't do and that is help me understand other people, their belief systems, histories, cultures, etc. I am glad you haven't been able to identify my religion(s)... or whether I have a "personal relationship" with God, god, gods and goddesses, Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, Mohammed, Zeus, Jehovah, follow the teachings of Buddha, or am just an old hippy with flowers in my hair, it shouldn't and I hope hasn't interfered with my ability to contribute to this discussion on how to better teach evolution worldwide. FAITH, trust, belief, confidence, conviction; optimism, hopefulness, hope. antonym mistrust. The personal attacks and attacks or outright rejection of other people's belief systems included in just this set of commentaries, (and all in English, how to teach evolution in all the other languages of the world?), does not bode well at any level for the advancement of scientific thinking.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPrehistoric religion began with religious practices such as burial, animal worship, belief in deities and the supernatural. There are archeological evidence dating back to the Middle Stone Age from 90,000 to 30,000 ya in Israel and Africa. Jericho dates back to 11,000 ya.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat so special with 6,000 ya? None of what the bible said happened 6,000 ya. actually happaned at that time. Not the origin of the universe, not the origin of earth and sun, not the origin of man, not the origin of animals. It requires a stretch of imagination to say the bible made an accurate prediction.
Read carefully my commentaries and tell me where are the personal attacks? They are merely statements of facts. Does the truth hurt?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBelief in spirits was probably the way that the first humans explained things such as lightning and thunder millions of years ago. Hunter gatherers who have been studied had belief in spirits that lived in the animals they hunted, rocks or the landscape in which they hunted, but not specific gods or organised religions.
After humans domesticated the animals they used to hunt and farmed the land they used to hunt across, religions were the way that humans channelled the spiritual beliefs of hunter gatherers into organised forms that fitted better into the new complex societies they were developing 6,000 years ago.
The very earliest rituals you mentioned were about 170,000 years ago. Richard Leakey thought that they, and the use of jewellery and pigments (probably body paint) were the first signs of consciousness.
It was 200,000+ ya that humans evolved speech. Speech must have involved humans giving names to different objects for the first time in millions of years of evolution. That includes giving themselves names, or words like "I" or "me", so it is not surprising that we see behaviours that differentiate self from others. If they had spiritual significance, they related to hunter gatherer spiritual beliefs, not religion. Religion was a relatively recent human invention.
Some of the first (pre-verbal) humans found their way into Asia, so they must have moved through the Fertile Crescent. Humans have been living there for that long, but as hunters and gatherers.
One estimate of total human population of the world 10,000 ya was as low as 1 million, so they were widely scattered in tiny groups. As humans developed the agricultural lifestyle, the same source estimated that populations grew to 5 million, mostly in the areas with the new lifestyle, by the time the first cities developed 6,000 ya.
It is frustrating. Where and how does one express the simple truith about evolutition/creation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere’s the way it is.
Evolution is a proven scientific fact. It happened. Is happening.
Creation, I believe, is also true, but is proven by the reverse logic. There MUST be a beginning and a creator of some sort. And, indeed, a creator of the creator, or at least a something without beginning or end - beyond the mind of us humans.
We call this super-something God. I beleive in God. I can’t prove He/it exists, but no one can prove He/it does not exist, either.
Ok, lets get past that. There is a God and he created everything. That’s what I believe.
Evoltuion: It is absoltuely amazing to me that there is such a mess over evoluation versus creation. It just demonstrates how damn dumb us humans are, I guess.
I cannot understand the creationists. Do they think God could not have come up with what we call evolution? They must believe in a different God than I do, for my God can do anything - has indeed done things we will be foreever trying to understand.
I don’t know what to call the other side. Most scientists believe in God, but some think evolution somehow proves there is no God. No, it only proves some of thie things some religions believe about God are inadequate.
The simple truth is, God created everything and evolution is one of the tools he used. We will discover more.
I’ve been looking for a short way of saying what it and I think that is it.
'Way back in 1960, in a biology class at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, a lecturer addressed the debate over evolution and creation succinctly by saying:"The problem seems to be scientists trying to be theologians and theologians trying to be scientists." He left it at that, and that's where I leave it. Enough said. Edward Holden
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf creationist explanations are "nonsense," as they often seems to be, let's also look at the nonsensical explanations for ultimate origins put forth by some scientists. One is reminded by the comment of Dr. Seuss at the end of "The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins," in which he states that no one knew just how the magical events transpired, but that it just happened to happen and wasn't likely to happen again. Nice phraseology, but not very scientifically satisfying. Ed Holden
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe University of Minnesota, Duluth lecturer addressing the debate over evolution and creation saying, "The problem seems to be scientists trying to be theologians and theologians trying to be scientists," was half right. The actual problem is scientists being scientists while theologians are trying to be scientists. Hence the conflict.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishoamingin,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(comment 136):
Re: "Does this mean you do not read your sources?"
It could mean that. However, in this case it means my memory and fifty cents will allow you to make a telephone call at any coin phone if one can be found.
comment 137:
You'll get no argument from me that it would be good for biologists to be more scientific. That also applies to physicists, chemists and cosmologists.
The 'one' that is reminded of Dr. Seuss is you, Ed Holden, and you, I suspect, are the only one reminded. I'm sure it is not the concern of the scientific community that you do not understand the science of evolution. Just keep working at it. You'll get it, I believe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBill,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are obviously trying to juggle too many threads and do not have time to read either what you write or what you are replying to.
That reference you gave without realising was the Minneapolis Post, so I assume you are from that area. If so, what is this thing about Minneapolis and public payphones? One of the funniest ever radio comedy skits (remember when people used to listen to radio for entertainment?) was a telephone operator running a scam to steal money people were putting into payphones. I thought her accent must have been made up, but when I transited through Minneapolis airport and heard a few public announcements, I realised that was where the skit had been made.
That's a good account of human prehistory and it contradicts the bible bec. according to the holy book 6,000 ya there was only Adam and Eve. As you said, by that time there were already 5 million people and cities (Jericho started 11,000 ya). That shows the bible story was a myth (did you really believe it was real?)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow we can stretch our imagination and think what significant events happened 6,000 ya and say hey that's what the bible really meant! Sure.
Hate to break it to your ego Dr. Strangelove, time for you to reread my comments. Never said that the personal attacks in these commentaries were yours. Does the truth hurt? Do blind men see?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy not teach adults that Father Christmas does exist?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the main question is this : To teach evolution, you need a university diploma certified by the state.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTherefore to teach creationism you should possess a degree in theology at the very least.
Thanks Hoamingin foryour reply and sorry for my late answer,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are quite right that one of the most important answers of the WHY is survival and that Darwin was wrong, I always wonder if science can be right, it will always be a momental state of the art, tomorow we will find new data that are going to change our vieuw, so it has always been.
Also the "why" followers change in their belief (I am not talking of the survival, although that changes also), but not in the degree of science, their basical LAWS remain the same, the trunk stays the same but branches keep on growing.
I visited your website, liked very much your expression "connecting the dots" a phrase that I also used in my essay but in a slightly different way, if you find some time...
best regards
Wilhelmus
hoamingin (comment 149),
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy telephone call/memory comment was only to indicate having forgotten that the Minneapolis Post web page contained information on Lord Kelvin. My residential area (third generation native) is a small village 20 miles west of Syracuse.
However, you may be correct about my tortured brain attempting to juggle too many threads.
Two very simple questions. One, does the Bible really say that the world was created only 6000 years ago, or is that just an interpretation? Yes, ADAM was FORMED 6000 years ago. However, when Cain was driven out from "the face of the earth", where did he go? And where did he get his wife? After all, the land of Nod means, the land of the wanderers, or nomads.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, another question. We have the Endiacaran fossils. These do not seem to fit anywhere in an evolutionary line. And extract for thought.
"New seaweed-like fossils have been found in the Lantian Formation of China's southern Anhui Provence, along with fossils that are hard to put into a specific category. One of the new finds could be considered a young polyp or sea anemone. Two others are peculiar cone-like organisms with a bulbous end that has been interpreted as a couple of different things. It could have been a plant's holdfast used to anchor itself to the ground, or it could have been the proboscis of a worm-like creature. The researchers who published on these discoveries in the February 17 issue of Nature were unwilling to take a dogmatic position on the ancestors or descendants of their discoveries.
"Animals in the Ediacaran Period are almost universally bizarre, and it is very difficult to place them in any modern animal phyla," researcher Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geobiology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, told LiveScience. "They may be precursors to modern animals or offshoots of modern animals that don't have any direct descendants.""
A subsidiary comment. A question of semantics. Is a law higher than a theory, or is it the other way around? For as long as anomalies occur within a range of knowledge, a theory is still just that, a theory.
EXCELLENT point about needing some credentials to teach theology. And your comment about teaching about Father Christmas? I think you could make a connection to evolution. Human societies being more successful when there is cooperation and sharing of resources. Humans have "invented" culture, religion, and so on. Humans have invented Father Christmas as one of many expressions of sharing. The invention of tool making has had hundreds of thousands of years to "play itself out" in terms of evolution, language probably millions of years. There has always been culture in human history, but modern cultures, like modern tool making, has not had the same amount of time to "play itself out" in terms of our evolution. I think that the debates here between science and religion haven't taken into account the power of the invention of religion to influence human evolution. A Creator is not necessary to explain the evolution of life, and some would claim that to allow for a Creator is an unacceptable bias, a contamination of the scientific process itself... but just as culture and religion is one of the "tools" that humans have invented to understand the universe, so is the scientific method. A Nobel Prize winning scientist can come home and be Santa Claus to his or her kids, go to church/temple/synagogue and give praise to a Creator and/or Creation, and go back to work on solving the latest puzzle in the evolution of Life. There are those here in these blogs that would insult, denigrate, and question the scientific credentials of that scientist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Does the truth hurt? Do blind men see?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes we can see the truth hurt your ego badly.
"Hate to break it to your ego Dr. Strangelove, time for you to reread my comments."
So you're trying to break my ego? Sorry try again.
"Never said that the personal attacks in these commentaries were yours."
Good you admitted I never engaged in personal attacks. Look at Item 139. It says "reply to Dr. Strangelove." Perhaps you were referring to another Dr. Strangelove. Anyway, I accept your denial.
"does the Bible really say that the world was created only 6000 years ago, or is that just an interpretation?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is based on biblical chronology which put the date of creation at around 4000 BC.
I don't see how the Endiacaran fossils contradict evolution. It would be best for biologists to explicitly say so if that is indeed the case.
"For as long as anomalies occur within a range of knowledge, a theory is still just that, a theory."
That is correct. Einstein's theory of relativity is 'only' a theory but GPS (global positioning system) would be useless if the theory were wrong. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory is 'only' a theory but radio, TV, cellphones, Wifi wouldn't work if the theory were wrong. Quantum theory is 'only' a theory but we wouldn't have microwave ovens, laser, semiconductors, computers if the theory were wrong.
Evolution is 'only' a theory but it is the best explanation we have so far for the observed diversity of life. Creationism is not even a scientific theory, it is a religious doctrine.
"A Nobel Prize winning scientist can come home and be Santa Claus to his or her kids, go to church/temple/synagogue and give praise to a Creator and/or Creation, and go back to work on solving the latest puzzle in the evolution of Life."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere shouldn't be any conflict between science and religious belief. Conflict arises when believers start claiming that their religious belief like creationism is science. To justify their claim they deliberately or inadvertently misinterpret and misrepresent science thus promoting pseudoscience.
Everybody can believe in a Creator and proudly declare it is based on religious faith. Nobody can argue against that. But it is dishonest to engage in pseudoscience to justify one's religious belief.
I replied directly to you with a dictionary reference to explain my trying to "link" science and religion using the word faith. I have faith (belief, confidence, trust) in science, where there isn't enough evidence or proof, or if something is untestable. Religious people are often ridiculed for their faith, as in their belief or confidence in there being a Creator, as if He/She/It is some kind of mythical being. The set of commentaries I have referred to are the 160+ comments made to this article. You have assumed that I have been hurt? and badly so? by some kind of truth? and have accepted my denial? Break it to your ego? As in break the news to you. Never said the personal attacks were yours. Never said they weren't, because I never identified anyone nor any particular attack, but have tried to say that an adversarial relationship between Science and Religion (and their advocates) will never help in the worldwide teaching of evolution. To quote again from my Apple dictionary..."The term pseudoscience is often considered inherently pejorative, because it suggests that something is being inaccurately or even deceptively portrayed as science.[4] Accordingly, those labeled as practicing or advocating pseudoscience normally dispute the characterization." We seem to agree that there shouldn't be any conflict between science and religious belief. You state that everybody can believe in a Creator and proudly declare it is based on religious faith. Do you think I have misinterpreted and misrepresented science and am thus promoting pseudoscience? Or that I am engaging in pseudoscience to justify some religious belief? And no, no matter how you may or may not choose to respond, hurting each other is not going to happen. I thought you might joust with me with something like my being blind to some "truth", or blinded by the truth, or that when Gaia had yet to evolve eyes to see and was still "blind", the truth about evolution was already happening. Perhaps I should address this to Dr. Strangelove and sign it from Stranger in a Strange Land. Do you really think either of us is taking this as all that serious? Let's coin a term pseudoreligion and use it to justify our science beliefs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCreationism will continue to 'evolve' because people are increasingly discovering that the theory of evolution has its feet planted firmly in mid air.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem with evolution is that all “historical” based theories are based on “unobserved “ past events that supposedly occurred over time, ensuring there were never any observers. There is no way of ever establishing that evolution happened one way, and not another way, or even whether it actually happened at all. All historical theories (cosmology, geology, and Darwinism) are "ultimately" based on SUBJECTIVE presuppositions, inferences, conjecture, predictions, and more often than not, on sheer speculation. Like it or not, this is the reality Darwinians must ultimately face.
The Nobel Laureate committee well knows the distinct difference between historical based theories and objectively based empirical science. Science based on the Empirical & Scientific Method (gravity and Newton's Laws of Motion), is testable, repeatable, verifiable, and "publicly observable" such that everyone is forced to accept its conclusions in spite of their scientific or religious beliefs. In contrast, even after 150 years of relentless scientific activism billions still don’t buy evolution, and for good reason.
Claims that evolution can now be observed happening in real time amount to a mirage. This is nothing more than micro variation, NOT MACRO variation, with every lifeform struggling to preserve itself “as such”. In short, bacteria in, bacteria out; finch in, finch out - end of story. No one in the world of science, or anywhere else, has ever observed macro evolution; earth turn into Einstein, or a frog turn into a prince. Laugh you may. But every breeder that has ever lived KNOWS that there are natural variation and breeding “limits”, even with hybrids.
The theory of evolution ultimately amounts to “science by explanations” as to what "supposedly" happened in the unobserved past. With “explanations” endlessly manufactured to fit any and every situation. All of which have made evolutionary theory so elastic it is now “unfalsifiable”, and therefore unscientific. Of course, the scientific establishment will protest and engage in verbal semantics and mental gymnastics to prove otherwise, and therefore will be the last to discover this reality. Their unqualified commitment to the “priority of the Darwinian paradigm” and their unquestioning faith in the “blind watchmaker” exceeds all else.
A further comment. The current rejection of the teleological concept of Intelligent Design by the scientific establishment is utterly bazaar, by any measure. To argue that intelligence and design have no place in science is to deny the very foundations on which all of science is founded.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe reason that scientists need to apply vast amounts of intelligence in science is because we live in an "intelligent rational" universe. And the fact that scientists are forever studying the design of biological systems, and probing the underlying structure of the natural world, affirms that there is “real design" in nature. Scientists DO investigate the operation and design of biological systems, and endlessly apply their discoveries to new technology.
Every scientist "assumes" that we DO live in an intelligent superbly structured universe. As there is no other basis on which any science can ever be conducted. Not only is intelligence and design an integral part of science, it is an integral part of the fabric of nature and the cosmos. Why would any scientist actively "opposes" this foundational reality.
One can only assume that, unlike the founders of modern science, scientists of today apply vast amounts of “intelligent” to a "non-intelligent" universe and study the "apparent design" in nature rather than real design. All of which causes us to wonder what "non-intelligent" and "design-less" foundation their science is actually founded on.
We are further told that everything in science, and science education, must be explained solely by natural law and material processes alone, to the exclusion of all else, particularly God. However, this too turns out to be an utter in-house delusion. Because ALL of science is founded on realities for which there is absolutely NO NATURALISTIC answer, and there may never be. Science hasn’t the foggiest idea of what "matter" and "energy" ultimately is, even though this is what science works with. Nor does science have any verifiable “naturalistic” answer regarding the origin of natural law, mathematical regularity; sub-atomic and cosmological fine-tuning, or the universe itself.
This makes it impossible to conduct science in a vacuum, to the total exclusion of such broader considerations. The scientific establishment now functions on the delusion that ALL of reality can, and will,be ultimately explained by “natural causes” alone. Thus, science is no longer “tentative” and in terms of defining ultimate reality is “the final word”. This current delusion turns the scientific method on its head.
johnhei: You said, "The theory of evolution ultimately amounts to science by explanations as to what "supposedly" happened in the unobserved past."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'unobserved,' except for the fossil records and long term collections (as in entomological studies)? You speak as though your unconventional and unsupported statements are generally accepted truths and then build on them. This building has no foundation. The rest of the statements, extrapolation and conclusions (which seem well put together) are irrelevant, because your basic tenets are clearly invalid.
P.S. I've never been to an 'utterly bazaar' What do they sell there? At the bazaar near me they sell a lot of bizarre stuff...
I've never heard of scientists using religion to justify their scientific theory. On the contrary, science is distancing itself from religion while religion is associating itself with science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCreationism is desperately trying to be recognized as science despite the fact the U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled that creationism is religion. On the other hand, anthropogenic global warming is vehemently denying accusations that it is a religion. (Isn't religion a good thing?) Is this a credibility issue?
I'm not a science teacher but I take science seriously. If you don't take science nor your religion seriously, then you're just fooling us with your comments.
Emancipation from religion comes through education and critical thinking skills. The facts speak for themselves. Teach children to think critically and to trust their own reasoning abilities. The first thing a child who is taught religion does when presented with an illogical idea is question it. They need to learn to trust themselves, rather than be bullied into believing the impossible, and that is only done with education. Many kids who have embraced atheism were raised in religious families, but had the opportunity to be allowed to question and seek their own answers as young adults. Shedding superstitious ideas is easy when one learns to think.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo Dr. Strangelove... I want you to know that you continue to pique (as in stimulate) me with your references to psuedoscience and creationism and I respect the fact that you are serious about it all. Creationism trying to claim to be a science and your reference to the Supreme Court got me to do some further research. I thought I had a grasp of it but when confronted with hundreds of years of this ongoing debate (dare I say battle) with legal rulings right up to the present time, yuck. At least the religious zealots aren't in a position to burn people at the stake, or put scientists under house arrest. Attempting to control science curriculum at the national level is scary enough. And I am almost happy to learn that there are so many factions with the creationist camp as they basically cancel themselves out. I also looked into Creationism and Islam. I want to share the following as it is closer to what I think of as the common ground when addressing worldwide education of evolution, again from my Apple Dictionary... "There are several verses in the Qur'an which some modern writers have interpreted as being compatible with the expansion of the universe, Big Bang and Big Crunch theories"... Qur'an 21:30, 41:11, 51:47, 21:104. Regarding evolution of life, "Khalid Anees, president of the Islamic Society of Britain at a conference called 'Creationism: Science and Faith in Schools' made points including the following: There is no contradiction between what is revealed in Koran and natural selection and survival of the fittest." The quotes are like God said on the first day "Let there be light", so in Genesis we have compatibility with no light before the Big Bang, and then light. The fact that in Genesis we don't get the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day... well, chalk another one up for my not being a Creationist. I'm with Hawking on that one, God wasn't necessary to have the Big Bang... which isn't to say it wasn't Him. The religious folks understandably want all credit to go to their Creator. I think we could make just as good a case as those who go for Intelligent Design (convenient way to get around using the word god or creator) but use Incredible Beauty, how could anything so incredibly beautiful have happened by accident or just naturally. And no, scientists shouldn't even be bothered to find these places were the latest scientific thinking might be "compatible" with religious texts. But science teachers trying to find common ground might.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA bit more to Dr. Strangelove. Hard to explain my not taking Science and Religion too seriously. A loving God helped me as a young child to get past the God of the Old Testament that nuked Sodom and Gomorrah, men, women, children, and then Lot's wife turned around to say goodbye and got turned into a pillar of salt. My Irish ancestry with all the jokes about arriving at the Gates and greeted by Saint Peter taught me that God likes a good joke, (He created us, joke enough). Found this by Voltaire, “God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.” And as far as Science goes, just read an article about some genetic changes to explain why we and the Neanderthals don't have penis spines like chimps and other primates do. Just not worried about making a monkey of myself I guess. And could probably write a thesis about why we make just these kinds of jokes... or to paraphrase a commentator here, maybe getting too close to the truth hurts. The discovery that primates are tool makers hurt many many egos. Can't imagine what that did to Intelligent Design and Creationist proponents. But then they say God put dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith. Flunked that test too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisParable of the Wife
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA man went to a psychiatrist seeking help to solve his martial problem. The psychiatrist said I'm sorry I cannot help you. That's outside my scope of work. I only treat mental illnesses. You should see a moral counselor for your marital problem.
The man got angry at the psychiatrist for rejecting his marital problem. He attacked the doctor's credibility and insisted that he had absolutely no reason to reject his marital problem. Bewildered, the psychiatrist inquired and learned that the man had never seen his wife.
Moral of the story:
Psychiatrist = science
Moral counselor = theology
Man = theists
Wife = god
Marital problem = god's existence
johnhei,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with you on one point. Natural Selection does not explain the data very well. For years the proponents of Intelligent Design have been given a free kick by the attachment by biologists to an explanation that does not even agree with the findings of their own science.
I will use an analogy between evolution and gravity. You pointed out that noone can seriously disagree with gravity, which is a phenomenon whose existence is beyond question. Scientists separate the phenomenon from the explanation and accept that they have a correct explanation for it. In the meantime, Newton's calculations have been near enough to get people from the moon and back.
The bones of long extinct species and DNA of existing species is sufficient evidence that evolution is a natural phenomenon that is beyond question. However, biologists do not distinguish the phenomenon from the explanation that does such a bad job of explaining the phenomenon.
As I have explained on other threads, the basic error in that explanation came from Darwin's decision to exclude the effect of external conditions. There is a more complete explanation on my blog:
http://ideasintuitionandthinking.com/blog
Follow that and it becomes clear that Darwin's explanation relies on variations having an unexplained metaphysical ability to favour individuals and adapt the species to the conditions without the conditions having any effect. So the supposedly scientific Natural Selection relies on magic, just like Intelligent Design. And the public consistently show in surveys that they believe that the metaphysical explanations of ID are more credible than the metaphysical explanations of Natural Selection.
For years proponents of Intelligent Design have been living off glaring holes in the scientific explanation. Biologists are unable to recognise those holes because they treat the phenomenon and Natural Selection as one and the same, and have made it a Law on which they have based their rules and assumptions.
If biologists accept the evidence of genetics that change in a species occurs when some individuals are eliminated, reducing genetic diversity, they should reverse Darwin's decision. Change is the result of pressure from external conditions that eliminates individuals unable to survive, evolving the species towards survivors and adapting it more closely to the conditions.
Then biologists could produce explanations that make sense and wipe Intelligent Design off the map.
Just want to insert a word. Scientists accept that they do NOT have a correct explanation for gravity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The bones of long extinct species and DNA of existing species is sufficient evidence that evolution is a natural phenomenon that is beyond question."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo evolution is not just a 'theory' and that effectively eliminates alternative explanations like special creation and intelligent design. Complex life were not created or designed complex. They evolved from simple to complex.
The question now is how evolution happened. You said not by natural selection. Then you said:
"Change is the result of pressure from external conditions that eliminates individuals unable to survive, evolving the species towards survivors and adapting it more closely to the conditions."
How is that different from natural selection? Is that magic?
Btw, physicists have some law and theories about gravity. Newton's law of gravity, Einstein's general theory of relativity, and gravitons of quantum field theory. Theories and observations about gravity agree. To say that we still do not know what we see is metaphysics.
Wow, these creationist apologists really are hilarious. Get a load of this:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The current rejection of the teleological concept of Intelligent Design by the scientific establishment is utterly bazaar[sic], by any measure."
Really? Wake up and smell the coffee here, pal. The scientific establishment couldn't care less. ID is not based upon evidence--therefore it is unscientific. End of story.
The people who are actually willing to argue with these crackpots do not represent the scientific establishment. They represent the few individuals who believe that there is some kind of intrinsic value in debating the merits Intelligent Design. These are these valorous individuals who believe that in battling ignorance we may be able to improve society. Unfortunately, the ID crowd is completely unwilling to listen to reason. As far as I am concerned, that's their choice. But honestly, we don't want to hear any more of your bs. So please, find something better to do than trolling with your insipid nonsense.
Your lack of understanding of science does not validate your criticism of it. You mispresented science then you criticized your own misrepresentation of science. A strawman argument, a logical fallacy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou want science to explain metaphysics and theology as well. Then you criticize it for not being able to do so. You don't seem to understand the difference between science, metaphysics and theology.
Strangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI used gravity to show that physicists recognise that the phenomenon, gravity, is independent of their explanation of the phenomenon. Multiple explanations mean there is no unanimous agreement. They use formulae to describe the action of gravity and a test of accuracy is their ability to predict those effects in all circumstances. Ask a simple question “what is gravity?” and science cannot give a definitive explanation in words. But they are still looking for an answer, which means that some physicists are asking that question.
Biologists treat the phenomenon, evolution, as if it is synonymous with their explanation of the mechanism by which it happens, Natural Selection. Biologists do not question Natural Selection, even though it does not do a very good job of describing the phenomenon. That is why so many people think that other metaphysical explanations are more credible and you chew up so much time arguing against them.
Even worse, biologists have created their own Catch-22. They base their rules and assumptions on Natural Selection, so the rules by which they would test Natural Selection assume the correctness of the proposition being tested.
I am surprised that you seem unaware that, when Darwin worked out Natural Selection, he decided that external conditions had no direct effect on evolution. Instead, change was driven by variations that gave individuals superior internal qualities that favoured them in struggle for scarce resources. If so, change had to result directly from emergence of a favourable variation and produce continuous incremental change. The more variations, the more change. Geneticists find the opposite, yet they cling to the explanation that their science disproves. More detail on my blog:
http://ideasintuitionandthinking.com
Assumptions based on Natural Selection do not allow questions of why? or purpose or direction because, if external conditions are excluded, there is nothing to give direction or purpose.
Switch the driver from internal attributes to external pressures that eliminate individuals unable to survive and all the assumptions change. Evolutionary change can only happen for a purpose (survival) and has direction (adaptation).
Increasing complexity of organisms was not the result of a random walk. Complexity evolved as the cost of flexibility that enabled species to modify behaviours to suit changing conditions. Flexible behaviours evolved when species with inflexible behaviours became extinct when conditions changed.
www.ideasintuitionandthinking.com
I'm surprised that you're describing natural selection yet you do not call it "natural selection." You claim natural selection is wrong. This is the correct explanation - then you describe natural selection. And your statements are contradictory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"when Darwin worked out Natural Selection, he decided that external conditions had no direct effect on evolution. Instead, change was driven by variations that gave individuals superior internal qualities that favoured them in struggle for scarce resources."
So the struggle of scarce resources is not an external condition? There wouldn't be a struggle in an enviroment where resources are more than enough to support the whole population.
Btw, the multiple explanations of gravity all agree with observations. So it's not true there's no unanimous agreement. What is gravity? The 3 theories of gravity all have an answer for that. It is the philosophers not the physicists who are not satisfied with the answer.
As I said before, you should distinguish physics from metaphysics. For philosophers, asking what is gravity is like asking what is reality. That is a subject of metaphysics.
hoamingin: Your arguments are based on a personal denial of broadly supported information and intentional misinterpretations of scientific concepts. This, if you somehow do not know it, is a very weak argument, that will only be subject to failure in analysis. You might have a stronger chance of getting more 'converts' if the strength of an argument was based on the number of words in it, but that is, of course, not the case.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen Darwin worked out Natural Selection, he excluded external conditions and decided on variations that favoured individuals in a struggle that involved competition for scarce resources.
The day before publication of Origin Thomas Huxley wrote to Darwin and questioned why he gave such little importance to external conditions. The day after publication Darwin wrote back: "You have most cleverly hit on one point, which has greatly troubled me; if, as I must think, external conditions produce little direct effect, what the devil determines each particular variation?"
Read the first three chapters of Origin. Darwin thought that external conditions had an indirect effect on variations. In ch. 3, arguing the case for Struggle, he described different species that existed in different climates: "the change of climate being conspicuous, we are tempted to attribute the whole effect to its direct action. But this is a very false view".
I invite you to read the chapter and see if you agree with my version of his argument: external conditions have no direct effect on survival of a species; species dominate in particular conditions because their qualities favour them in a struggle for existence in those conditions; different species dominate in different conditions because different species are favoured in different conditions.
I am sure you can see the gap in the logic. Natural Selection relies on individuals having an innate quality of "favouredness" independent of external conditions, a piece of magic in the heart of Natural Selection.
You say that my description is contradictory, but the contradictions are in Darwin's arguments. Check out my blog for more details:
www.ideasintuitionandthinking.com/blog
Huxley never gave up his reservations about Darwin's explanation, keeping the question of the source of change open, even in Darwin's Obituary that he wrote in 1888.
In 1876 Darwin wrote “In my opinion the greatest error which I have committed, has been not allowing sufficient weight to the direct action of the environment ..... independently of natural selection". He still considered external conditions to be independent of natural selection, but thought that conditions had more effect, even though natural selection was based on rejection of their effect. Logic was not one of Darwin's strong points.
Intelligent Design has been living off the contradictions in Darwin's explanation for decades. Biologists do not know there are contradictions because they do not test the theory, they treat it as Law.
lamorpa,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Your arguments are based on a personal denial of broadly supported information and intentional misinterpretations of scientific concepts".
If you turned your brain on and reread my earlier posts slowly, you would see that I gave specific backup for each of my arguments and that the "scientific" concepts you defend misrepresent their own science.
Let me quote another of your sweeping statements from an earlier post: "It is currently the best working theory of biological life". Have you asked yourself why, if this is the best working theory around, a majority of the public in educated western societies believe that the metaphysical explanations of Creation and ID are more credible than the socalled "scientific" explanation?
I qualify "scientific" because it is not scientific for the following reasons:
a) the biological sciences have not challenged their theory as expected of a genuine science, in fact have placed themselves into a situation where they cannot, and
b) if they could break out of their intellectual straitjacket and actually question the assumptions, they would recognise that they do not even agree with their own science.
Another person who wrote something similar to you was Thomas Huxley after Darwin's death. Describing how the theory became accepted, Huxley wrote that, despite reservations about it, "The only rational course .... was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis, and see what could be made of it". Huxley maintained his reservations until his death. He made clear that he expected future generations of scientists to do what scientists are expected to do, question the hypothesis in search of a better explanation. Huxley would be extremely disappointed that for 70 or more years biologists have not behaved like genuine scientists.
If they did, biologists would recognise that they must reverse Darwin's decision to reject the effect of external conditions and accept that the only factor driving evolution is how species interact with the conditions in which they have to survive.
They would have to reverse their rules and would then be able to produce credible explanations that would cut the ground from underneath Creationists and IDers.
Your reply certainly bolsters all of the reasons I stated for the invalidity of your assertions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpecifically, you state, "Have you asked yourself why, if this is the best working theory around, a majority of the public in educated western societies believe that the metaphysical explanations of Creation and ID are more credible than the socalled(sic) "scientific" explanation?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven if I agreed this statement was true, which it most certainly is not, here you show the most fundamental ignorance of the definition of science. Science is not about a popular vote. Your assertion would be irrelevant even if it were true.
lamorpa,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou seem to have developed a knack for trivialising important issues with sweeping asserions unsupported by evidence. I live in Australia, which is a very much more secular place than the US. I was shocked when a survey that coincided with the bicentenary in 2009 of Darwin's birth found that only 42% supported the "scientific" explanation of evolution. A majority favoured a Creationist or ID explanation. Survey results were similar in UK and in the much more religion obsessed US, support is as low as 14%.
The evidence supports my statement that the "scientific" explanation is losing the test of public credibility. This not a popularity test, it is a basic test of the ability of a theory to explain its data.
I am sure that you and I agree on the following:
a) all the data support Darwin's proposition that all species evolved over time from common origins, and
b) there is no data to support the alternatives, Creation and ID
So how come, despite the overwhelming evidence, the "scientific" explanation fares so badly in the credibility test? Understand that I totally agree with the phenomenon of evolution, but consider the explanation, Natural Selection not only illogical, but also contrary to scientific evidence.
What I do know about science, that biologists ignore, is the need to check and recheck your assumptions. Most, if not all the biologists I have communicated with believe that the environment has major impact on evolution. Yet they persist with rules and assumptions that were based more than 70 years ago on Natural Selection, which in turn was based on Darwin's decision that external conditions had no direct effect.
A number of biologists told me they did not agree with the term Survival of the Fittest and they did not think that Darwin ever used it. They were unaware that in his 5th edition Darwin used that term interchangeably with Natural Selection and wrote that of the two "Survival of the Fittest is more accurate”.
One biologist worked through my evidence and agreed that Darwin was wrong, but said "that is all history. All the evolutionary biologists I know accept that external conditions are the major factor in evolution, so your points are irrelevant". Except that the assumptions those biologists apply are still anchored to an incorrect explanation that produces incredible explanations of the data.
Instead of wasting your time attacking Creationists and IDers for ignoring scientific evidence, how about having a go at biologists who also ignore their own evidence?
Don't get stuck up with Darwin bec. evolutionary theory has been improved by Huxley and subsequent biologists after Darwin. A weakness in Darwin's argument is not a brownie point to creationism. Only religious fanatics and science ignorant would fall for that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not stuck up with Darwin. The biological sciences have stuck themselves with Darwin.
I wrote above that I think most biologists believe that external conditions have major impact on evolution, but stick with Natural Selection. That is like being half pregnant.
Accepting the effect of external conditions is the reverse of Darwin's decision that they had no direct effect. Reversing that decision requires reversal of all of Darwin's assumptions that flowed from it.
Evolution is not the effect of advantage that somehow magically selects individuals. Unless some individuals die, nothing changes, so evolution is the effect of disadvantage that deselects individuals lacking what is needed for survival. Their elimination evolves the species towards survivors and adapts the species more closely to the conditions.
Pressure from external conditions gives purpose (survival) and direction (adaptation) to evolutionary change. Competition is just one of many behaviours, not THE central behaviour.
When you read biological reports, note how their explanations exclude the effect of external conditions. Look at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=just-how-big-a-deal-is-milk-drinkin-11-02-23&posted=1
The explanation that this gives for the concentration of the lactase gene around the Baltic is that lactose tolerance gives a 10% benefit in birthrate, thus spreading the gene. This is compatible with Natural Selection, a favourable variation imparting a benefit. If it were true, why is there a concentration around the Baltic and not through other parts of Europe, where people also drank milk?
Take external conditions into account and a major health problem in that part of the world is vitamin D deficiency in winter. Cattle herds are heavily tilted to dairy and the region is the source of many dairy breeds, indicating that dairy was an important source of vitamin D through winter. Everyone lacking lactose tolerance was disadvantaged, either by lactose reaction or vit D deficiency.
As for competition? There is no better example than the evolution of one of the most complex of all behaviours, speech among humans. Speech could never have evolved through competition. It could only have evolved through strong pressure for better communication to improve coordination of activities of groups that humans lived in. Those groups lacking the necessary level of coordination were eliminated, evolving speech.
Strangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisForgot to mention that the weakness in Darwin's explanation is just about the ONLY point intelligent design has going for it.
Note that my previous comment described how external conditions shape a species to what is required to survive in those conditions. There is Intelligent Design, but it is not done by some metaphysical entity, it is done by a very simple process, ever present pressure from external conditions.
Rejection of the effect of external conditions by Natural Selection leaves it with no mechanism to direct evolutionary change. Biology's attachment to Natural Selection has stuck biologists with all the assumptions that go with it. That is why they have rules that say that there is no purpose, no direction and no progression.
That provides Intelligent Design with its best arguments, because it is obvious that species are designed for their purpose (adaptation) and that there has been increasing complexity. The weaknesses in Darwin's explanation created the inability to explain the data. Back in the 1980s some smart guys recognised the hole and parked Intelligent Design in it.
The reason you have to spend so much of your time combatting IDers is because, as public surveys show, Intelligent Design provides explanations of the data that are more credible to more people than explanations based on Natural Selection.
Plus, as mentioned previously, the magic at the heart of Natural Selection, the "logic" in ch. 3.
1) External conditions have no direct effect
2) Species dominate in conditions because they are favoured in struggle in those conditions
3) Different species dominate in different conditions because different species are favoured in different conditions.
I hear you screaming at the screen "IT IS THE EXTERNAL CONDITIONS THAT FAVOUR THEM!!!"
Go back to 1).
See the magic?
And biologists call this science.
Understand why you never seem to run out of combatants?
Your argument amounts to semantics. "Natural Selection" as understood by modern biologists accept the effects of external condition. You insist on an interpretation of natural selection that denies or downplays external condition, which Darwin himself belatedly admitted was flawed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not semantics.
Most biologists accept that external conditions have major effect. You accept that they have major effect. In correspondence in 1876 Darwin wrote that his main error was to understate the effect of external conditions INDEPENDENT of natural selection. These are all examples of being half pregnant.
Reverse Darwin's decision that external conditions have no direct effect and you have to reverse all the assumptions that flow from that decision.
Those assumptions are embedded in the rules of biology, so you have to reverse the rules.
Biologists need to trust the evidence of genetics that change happens when external pressures eliminate some individuals.
All change has a purpose, survival. The survivors do not have purpose, that purpose is imposed on the species by external conditions.
The mechanism of change is elimination of individuals unable to survive. Survivors are unaffected and may be unaware that anything has happened.
All change has direction, again imposed by external conditions. In the short term, that direction is adaptation to a change in conditions. In the longer term there is pressure for more flexible behaviours that make the species less vulnerable to changes in conditions.
Natural Selection (and the rules of biology) are unable to explain progressive increase in complexity. If, instead of focusing on internal qualities of survivors, the focus is on interactions between the species and external conditions, increasing complexity can be seen as a sign of a greater range and flexibility of behaviours that make the species less vulnerable to extinction when there is a change in conditions. Flexibility comes at the cost of complexity.
It is this pressure that replaced instinctive behaviours with learned behaviours. Species with instinctive behaviours are always vulnerable to extinction from a change in the conditions for which behaviours evolved. Eliminations of individuals whose behaviours were unable to adapt to changing conditions eventually found individuals able to adapt by learning, rather than inheriting behaviours. Hence mammals replaced reptiles.
Similarly, ongoing pressure on humans for better co-ordination of their activities kept pressure on them for better communication, ultimately evolving speech.
As long as biologists remain half pregnant, accepting that external conditions have major effect, while sticking with rules based on them having no effect, they have no explanation of how speech and other complex capabilities evolved, except by magic.
If you think you know better than professional biologists, why don't you publish a paper in a scientific journal? For sure you will be hailed greater than Darwin and win the Nobel Prize.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI bet that will not happen because what you are describing is already common knowledge in biology yet you claim biologists don't know it and you're the only one who has seen the light.
Strangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had hoped that a few people reading these blogs (you, perhaps) might actually take the time to sit down and work through what I have written to recognise the gaps in the logic in Darwin's explanation and the rules of biology that are based on it.
In most of my arguments I have used Darwin's own writings and the findings of the biological sciences, so I am not making anything up, just taking a close look at what they say.
I even worked out why Darwin made his error and why generations of biologists since have not corrected it. Cognitive scientists have carried out exhautive studies of how humans, in particular from western cultures, use the brain and have identified a long list of errors of logic and probability.
The most common error is to attribute outcomes to personal qualities of the main subject and to ignore or understate the context which made the outcome possible. An Attribution Error. That describes Natural Selection; evolution results from variations that give individuals improved qualities that favour them in struggle - no mention of the external conditions that work out which qualities are favoured, Darwin specifically excluded them.
When you read scientific reports, notice that biologists look for the explanation of their study in the behaviours of the active agents being studied and very little to the circumstances in which the action happens.
The other error is that the human brain innately constructs arguments from the positive and rejects the negative. Improved qualities that favour individuals sounds like a nice, positive mechanism, until you keep reading Origin and find that, for change to occur, the individuals who are not favoured have to be exterminated by the actions of the favoured.
Strangelove, I thought you would recognise the issues, because you have spent more time than most beating down proponents of Intelligent Design who live off the errors in Darwin's explanation. ID was started in the 1980s by a couple of smart guys who understood far better than biologists the errors in Darwin's explanation, that make it impossible to explain what can be observed in the natural world. Change the explanation and most of the arguments of ID go away.
If anyone can suggest a science journal that would accept an article on why Natural Selection and the rules of biology are wrong, let me know.
Meantime, read a more complete explanation on:
http://ideasintuitionandthinking.com/blog
I suspect science journals will reject your paper because 1) your explanation of Natural Selection differs from the modern understanding of biologists 2) your explanation of evolutionary theory is already well known and therefore not original work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBtw, no amount of scientific explanations will make Intelligent Designers go away because ID is not science, it is religion, a euphemism of creationism.
Strangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are still not getting it. I am not giving a different explanation of Natural Selection. Natural Selection is wrong. What I say is that evolution is driven by Natural Deselection, the elimination of individuals unable to survive in the conditions.
Darwin understood that for change to happen, some individuals survived, while others were eliminated. He focused on survivors and attributed change to their internal qualities (independent of external conditions).
I say that the ONLY change in the species from before to after is the elimination of the individuals who were unable to survive a change in conditions. What enabled some to survive was not that they were innately superior (Darwin's belief), but because they happened to have attributes that enabled them to survive in the new conditions.
If you take the time to compare these approaches point by point, you find that all the factors are the same. The main difference is that I say that change results from the removal of some individuals and that this is so self-evident that it barely requires stating, while Darwin attributed change to internal qualities of survivors. He made clear that the demise of the others was essential for change in the species, but was not the cause (a gap in his logic). Having excluded the effect of external conditions, Darwin held that they were exterminated by the activities of favoured individuals.
If, as you say, my explanation of the evolutionary is well known, there should be a reversal of the basic assumptions of biology. It ain't happened yet, so I will keep pointing out what looks obvious to me.
If you take the time to wrap the brain around these issues, you will have a switch in perspective that makes the errors obvious to you.
Maybe there will always be IDers, but how do you account for a 14% level of belief in the US that Darwin's explanation is more credible? ID feeds off the logical errors in Darwin's explanation and in the "scientific" explanation based on it. Remove the errors, get a truly scientific explanation that fits the data and agrees with their own science and ID loses its feed source.
Play of words. What you call "Natural Deselection" is Natural Selection to biologists. I'm not surprised with the 14% Darwinians. A lot of people believe alien abductions, elves, astrology, 2012 end of the world and all sorts of weird things. Do a survey of professional biologists and see how many believe in ID or Natural Deselection.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDarwin called the creationists Demigod's. And I think that's what they think they are. We have not evolved as far as you think we have. We still eat meat, consumed with procreating or at least constantly watching the opposite sex.We...... You know what? I'm tired of arguing about this subject. Go watch planet of the apes. No offence to apes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStrangelove,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not a play on words. It is a complete reversal of the decision that Darwin made that led him to Natural Selection. He rejected the effect of external conditions to arrive at his contrivance that internal qualities favoured individuals in particular conditions, without the conditions having any effect.
Darwin defied logic to develop Natural Selection, but I can understand why, because his explanation fitted the beliefs of the society in which he was raised.
What I do not understand is why present day scientists defy logic by clinging to that explanation. Most biologists now accept that external conditions are a major (if not THE) driver of evolution. If they reject (in fact, reverse) Darwin's premise,they have to reject (and reverse) the conclusions that Darwin based on that premise.
I describe the position of present day biologists as a commitment to being half pregnant.
If biologists accept that evolution is driven by external conditions forcing adaptive change on species, they have to change the assumptions that they apply to their science, which are based on Natural Selection.
Why did brains that learn behaviours largely replace brains with instinctive behaviours? Instinctive behaviours evolve for specific conditions. When those conditions change, species with instinctive behaviours are vulnerable to extinction. If some individuals are able to modify their behaviours, they survive the change and those behaviours are passed on by being learned. The assumptions of biology give no explanation.
Why did mammals evolve with multiple connections between muscles and the nervous system? Again, when changed conditions force a change in behaviours, single connections that evolved for previous behaviours may be inappropriate for different behaviours essential for survival in the new conditions. Multiple connections enable bodies to connect muscles to the axons most suited to the present lifestyle by the simple mechanism of using the body the way it has to be used. Biologists call it competition at the neuromuscular junction, but again, have no idea why it evolved.
These mechanisms, one of the brain, the other of the body, evolved in response to pressures from external conditions that eliminated individuals lacking them.
Biologists cannot see it because they apply rules and assumptions, based on an incorrect premise, that focus their attention on individual muscle connections and ignore the context that produced multiple connections.
If that is a play on words, who is playing on which words?
This article starts out by assuming the the USA has any science education standard! It does not. Home schooling... or letting your dad be the school-board, is legal in the USA. Recently a german family got political asylum in the USA because in germany their children were forced to study science and evolution, while in the USA, they can study the bibble :) So the author needs to correct his attitude and educate himself about the state of affairs in the USA before talking about other countries.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving said that, the rise of 'creationism' is not surprising. Science is hard, religion is easy.
Just to summarize 195 comments: Scientifically established and vetted biological evolution is sometimes being mixed with, or substituted by sectarian-based creationist notions, to the detriment and dilution of appropriate, correct (separation of church and state) education. A real effort to keep faith-based beliefs (no matter how strongly felt by some individuals) out of public schools is necessary and important.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that it is kind of unfair that science advocates and teachers are willing and even insistent that evolution is taught but are not willing to deal with the deeper ramifications of the teaching. You can teach evolution scientifically, but if you do you end up implicitly addressing humans as "uniquely moral beings" as pointed out in the article. To follow evolution to its most logical conclusion, following only the science, logically points to morality as an illusion. (How is morality anything absolute and worth listening to if mindless evolution is true? Why should I follow laws? Why should I care if anyone lives or dies?)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStudents will decide what morals they believe and if morals are real or not, but if teachers and advocates don't realize and acknowledge that they are influencing this aspect of childhood development, then they are being careless. It's like teaching kids about all the science behind guns without at least acknowledging that guns can do a lot of damage. A morally weak generation can also do great damage to a society. Why should they follow the moral laws of their forebears if evolution leads them to believe that morality is an illusion anyway?
The weird thing to me about science education is that we often conceptualize it as simple, rote induction and deduction of the natural world. It is that, but it is not ONLY that. Many of the claims of science have metaphysical implications. In some ways, it would help to consider school as an examination and search for TRUTH wherever it may be found. If that examination leads you to metaphysics, so be it. Everyone has to and should grapple with it. If you teach evolution in a way that pretends that there are no metaphysical consequences of evolution, you're not giving students the whole story. Thinking about it this way; science is a search for truth just as is history, religious studies, math, and poetry. When these subjects intersect, why separate them? At times, this only stymies a complete picture of truth. Natural morality in humanity seems to be an absolute, something that anthropologist observe empirically. If evolution does not satisfy this phenomenon that we observe and its implications, then it should be taught differently to deal with all data whether that data appears to fit into the canonical scholastic realm of "science" or not.
Science does not claim to have truth, it claims with the foundation of investigative evidence to be closer to the truth than those belief systems who do not challenge their creed but believe in a written word that is specious at best, written thousands of years ago by ignorant hands who it has been shown through detailed scholarship to be contradictory among the alleged authors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBecause of its interest in truth, science is always open to revision upon discovery of new evidence. Religion is absolutely not! Believers in religions are compelled to believe their holy books, then rely on self-appointed interpreters of the dogma of their religions to tell them what to believe. They have given up rationality for the comfort of ancient storytelling that began in the cave when humans had no means to verify their imaginative explanations of phenomena as they were encountered.
It is consoling and appeasing to believe an extraterrestrial deity is responsible for the universe and the world, particularly as suffered in the hostile environment that is experienced, than it is to be completely self-reliant and responsible for one's own survival and the survival for those one has developed love and care for their survival. Then to believe some self-effacing figure came to one appointed people to save the entire world! Salvation is such a seduction. It is the epitome of self-pity to be religious.