Blatant falsehood that. Atheist and creationists try to pit religion against science. Darwinists like Francisco Ayala and Kenneth Miller argue that God and science are compatible. And it’s been that way since the beginning. Both men who discovered natural selection (Darwin and Wallace) acknowledged God as creator, as did historically important Darwinists like Dobzhansky and Walcott.Darwinists try to pit religion against science when history shows the opposite is true.
The most atheist evolutionist I know of is Richard Dawkins, and he doesn’t claim it’s random. It is undirected in the same sense that a rock rolling down a gully follows a path but is not directed.It is the atheist evolutionists who insist that the entire process of evolution is random and undirected.
It is, according to Pope Benedict XVI. And by all the Christians I know in science.So by that, then why isn’t what we see in Nature as selection simply attributed as it ought be to God?
Ah, creationism.Actually, in my post I was using the colloquial meaning for myth - simply something that lots of people believe, but which happens not to be true.
With the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin this week, people around the world are celebrating his role as the father of evolutionary theory. Events and press releases are geared, in part, to combat false claims made by some who would discredit the theory.
One frequently cited “hole” in the theory: Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, aka missing links. Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false.
As key evidence for evolution and species’ gradual change over time, transitional creatures should resemble intermediate species, having skeletal and other body features in common with two distinct groups of animals, such as reptiles and mammals, or fish and amphibians.
These animals sound wild, but the fossil record — which is far from complete — is full of them nonetheless, as documented by Occidental College geologist Donald Prothero in his book “Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters” (Columbia University Press, 2007). Prothero discussed those fossils last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, along with transitional fossils that were announced since the book was published, including the “fishibian” and the “frogamander.”
Expelled is largely a hoax. Can you show us a claim the “documentary” makes that you know to be true?Extraordinary claim it is not. Watch Expelled with Ben Stein. It contains much evidence.
Why is it odd? Catholics (I don’t know about Orthodox) are least likely to be biblical literalists.It seems odd that among Christians we RCs and the Orthodox are the most accepting of evolution.
Most Catholics don’t know what they believe about Creation. Most reject basis tenets of the Faith also.from a poll by the Pew Research Center:
http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1105-1.png
It seems odd that among Christians we RCs and the Orthodox are the most accepting of evolution.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,* will no doubt be exterminated. **The break between man and his nearest allies **will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Apparently, it’s an evolutionary fact that “negroes and Australians” are closer to “the gorilla” than the “civilized races” of which Mr. Darwin is a member.– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, chapter 6
It was “clear that Darwin in this case” was talking about “races”.It is clear that Darwin in this case, irrespective of whether you agree with his theory, was comparing two scales of distance, not two colors of man, one of them to a hominid. He had set it up beforehand that he was talking about the consequences of civilzation.
Normally, I would ask why and how you missed that point, but I realize that your purpose is to defend Mr. Darwin of any possible criticism and to do this in the name of “science”. But I find your attack against me to be informative at any rate.At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised **races **of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, **the savage races **throughout the world.
While I appreciate your official interpretation of the Darwinian Sacred Text, I can’t see any reason to take your word for it, unless you are a certified and authorized expert in such matters.In other words, he was talking about a widening gap between man and hominids altogether.
The way Islam wiped out the Catholic culture in Eastern Europe? Or the Visigoths wiped out the civilization of Rome? Again, if this is supposed to be “science” of evolutionary theory I can see very good reason why many people do not accept it.Indeed, it can be seen in history that more technological cultures tend to wipe out or vastly diminish less advanced ones.
I’m sure there are many evolutionary-atheists who believe that “Catholic missionaryism” is a new kind of evil that needs to be wiped out. But apparently, they shouldn’t worry because evolution will naturally select Catholicism out of existence anyway.This is seen in empirialism and even missionaryism.
As above, evolution will bring forth a superior race of creatures to follow humanity so Darwinists should be quite happy about that. We’ve been genetically programmed to “consume” so we can thank our mutations that we’ve lasted this long.And it is most certainly seen in the devastation wrought on the planet as we consume it towards uselessness at our own expense.
Were you a Protestant fundamentalist at one time in your life? I’m just sincerely wondering.And please don’t tell me you are waiting for Jesus to come and magically correct our idiocy. That is plain irrisponsible, even if true.
If someone hates the faith because I pointed out Darwin’s crude racisim by quoting his text, then this says more about the haters than it does about me.Your post might well go as an exemplary answer in the thread titled “Help! Why do they hate the faith so very much?”
I would like to say that everything you said is clear evidence that you’ve been thinking clearly about these matters, but I can’t really do that. And “like some fundamentalists”, you read the Bible, believe in God, pray and go to church. Therefore, I think we can all draw a conclusion here.Maybe part of the reason it that like some other fundamentalists, some Catholics don’t think clearly on clear matters.
I try not to answer name-calling and personal insults.Once again, who was it that said “It is great luck for leaders that men don’t think!”? Oh, yes, it was der Feuhrer. Be a Catholic, not a catha-holic, for yours and all our sakes. Thank you.
What I find enormously striking about both of these (one from a famous, influential man and quasi-philosopher and the other from someone I don’t know) is that they each make a series of assertions while neither provides a single example of the “infinite anonymous chaos of objects” described as extant. Strange this. Are we structured to have blinders to said objects, or . . .Another passage on a similar subject occurs in the “Varieties of Religious Experience”, to the effect that nature is a plenum, & that we see design in it because we select from a great number of things those which appeal to us as supporting the idea of design, while we ignore the millions of others that don’t fit our idea:
- …When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral – so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things “unadapted” to each other in this world than there are things "adapted’; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopedias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention…
- http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1637&C=1632
BUT, the “end in mind” is always there. Even if you and I can’t see it instantaneously. Name a thing that has no final cause.As an atheist I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought, but here goes: Evolutionary theory explains the appearance of design and variation in nature through natural processes with no end in mind.
The only teology is a migration away from the mechanistic rigidity of physical laws rather than a teology toward the creation of intelligent lifeforms like ourselves.
“Theory” = might, not necessarily would. Perhaps we might get different results. Say we did, then the question is, how different? Still, we have not refuted God.As I understand the theory, if we could reboot the process, we would get different results.
In essence, outcomes were determined. You can’t, on the one hand, deny “free-will” due to absolute determinism, then, on the other hand, deny “design” due to absolute non-determinism. This is logical absurdity.This sounds like a problem for any religion that sees humanity as created in the image of God since evolution describes a process where no particular outcomes were determined at the beginning.
Well, you have failed to provide a proof for “the lack of a priveledged place for mankind in the creation process”.If you agree with my interpretation of evolution, how do you reconcile Catholicism and the lack of a priveledged place for mankind in the creation process?
plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/Darwinism designates a distinctive form of evolutionary explanation for the history and diversity of life on earth. Its original formulation is provided in the first edition of On the Origin of Species in 1859. This entry first formulates ‘Darwin’s Darwinism’ in terms of five philosophically distinctive themes: (i) probability and chance, (ii) the nature, power and scope of selection, (iii) adaptation and teleology, (iv) nominalism vs. essentialism about species and (v) the tempo and mode of evolutionary change. Both Darwin and his critics recognized that his approach to evolution was distinctive on each of these topics, and it remains true that, though Darwinism has developed in many ways unforeseen by Darwin, its proponents and critics continue to differentiate it from other approaches in evolutionary biology by focusing on these themes.
Could you enumerate and concisely describe the theories proposed by Darwin that are discredited and used to denigrate faith and the faithful, please?From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/
Darwin proposed theories based on evolution that are discredited but are still used today to denigrate faith and the faithful.