…The Church does not fear, and it is not limited to pronouncements on faith and morals.
I didn’t say the Church was afraid. I was referring to individuals. And what binding teaching has the Church ever put forth that was unrelated to faith and morals?
It is one thing to say some people say certain things and it’s their business, and none of ours. It’s quite another thing to see the exact same ideas in textbooks, which, by definition, should only supply facts, and not religious commentary…
I agree. And if I ever see a science textbook that presents religious commentary I would strongly oppose the use of such a textbook in schools. I realize that many people have added their own anti-God ideas to evolution. The list you presented are good examples of that sort of thing, I guess from the titles. I consider that addition to be poor science - actually no science at all.
A lot has been said about evolution being “only a theory”, as if a theory is a wanna-be fact that just hasn’t made it yet. In science a theory is an proposed explanation for empirical phenomena. No amount of evidence for a theory will ever promote it from theory to fact. It will always be a theory. Some theories have more supporting evidence than others. But they are still all theories. There is no reason to treat evolutionary theory any differently than the theory of Einsteinian relativity, or quantum theory. They all have the potential to be wrong, but they also have good reason to believed as correct.
that would cause proper concern to anyone reading it, except, of course, to those who already accept it.
The following is Philosophy, not scientific conclusions.
“[E]volution works without either plan or purpose — Evolution is random and undirected.”
(
Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph S. Levine (1st ed., Prentice Hall, 1991), pg. 658; (3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 1995), pg. 658; (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998), pg. 658; emphasis in original.)
“
Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life.”
(Stephen J Gould quoted in Biology, by Peter H Raven & George B Johnson (5th ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pg 15; (6th ed., McGraw Hill, 2000), pg. 16.)
“By coupling **undirected, purposeless **variation to the **blind, uncaring **process of natural selection,
Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”
(
Evolutionary Biology, by Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1998), p. 5.)
“Darwin knew that
accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that **matter is the stuff of all existence **and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was
not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit. Suddenly,
humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all,
there was no divine plan to guide us.”
(
Biology: Discovering Life by Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller (1st ed., D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pg. 152; (2nd ed… D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), p. 161; emphases in original.)
“Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that
evolutionary change occurs without any goals.’ The idea that **evolution is not directed **towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.”
(Life: The Science of Biology by William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, & H. Craig Keller, (6th ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co., 2001), pg. 3.)
“The ‘blind’ watchmaker is natural selection. **Natural selection is totally blind **to the future. “**Humans are fundamentally not exceptional **because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our bodies and brains “Natural selection is a bewilderingly simple idea. And yet what
it explains is the whole of life, the diversity of life, the apparent design of life.”
(Richard Dawkins quoted in *Biology *by Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reese. & Lawrence G. Mitchell (5th ed., Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), pgs. 412-413.)
“Of course, no species has 'chosen’ a strategy. Rather, its ancestors ‘little by little, generation after generation’ merely wandered into a successful way of life through the action of random evolutionary forces. Once pointed in a certain direction, a line of evolution survives only if the cosmic dice continues to roll in its favor.
“[J]ust by chance, a wonderful diversity of life has developed during the billions of years in which organisms have been evolving on earth.
(Biology by Burton S. Guttman (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pgs. 36-37.)
“It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. “The real difficulty in accepting Darwins theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. Earlier, astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the solar universe, or even of our own solar system. Now the new biology asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms,
we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.”
(Invitation to Biology, by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.)"
Peace,
Ed
