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Christian Churches Celebrate Darwin's Birthday
kthejoker writes "Today is the 197th anniversary of the great biologist Charles Darwin's birth. In response, some 450 Christian churches are celebrating Darwin's birth, saying, 'Darwin`s theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science.' There's also an interesting perspective on Darwinism and Christianity in the San Jose Mercury News."
One could always believe that evolution is just a tool in God's hands. That way it's possible to believe in intelligent design without denying facts, that Earth is older than a few thousands years, etc.
Religion is about believing, science is about knowing. They are not mutually exclusive.
Many people don't really know anything about who he was or what he thought or how it applies to modern biology.
The guy was:
1) A careful and thoughtful scientist who spent countless hours studying tihngs most people would find incrediby boring. Darwin spent EIGHT YEARS studying BARNACLES.
2) Fairly shy.
3) A Christian for most of his life, and only an agnostic in later life (which had more to do historically with death in the family than with evolution, just ike Lincoln's rediscovering of Christianity)
The guy is/was NOT:
1) a guy who's ideas are a dogma. What Darwin thought is historically important in the development of evolution, but has no bearing on what and where that theory will lead.
2) 100% right about a LOT of things. He not only got the patterns of heredity completely wrong (he thought it was analog: by trait blending, when it was really digital), but was embarassingly forced to admit it when people with better arguments pointed out that blending was in contradiction with the evidence.
3) Someone that thought fossils had proved his case. To Darwin, fossils showed mainly the fact that past life was very different from present life: hence that most of species that existed in the past no longer existed in his day. This was one of the chief inspirations for his idea. The current creationist obsession with fossils overlooks the fact that Darwin put forward his theory, and was considered to be correct, long before we had anything like the fantastically rich fossil record of today. Darwin predicted that future fossils would all confirm his theory, but he NEVER expected that we'd find anywhere as many as we have, or that an entirely unimaginable field (genetics) would someday come to exist and provide an indepedent second check on the fossil record, allowing us to figure out actual lineages.
Darwin also didn't propose that the origins of life were part of evolution. The most he ever said on the subject was that maybe life had started in some warm little pool somewhere... in a private letter. He didn't publish this idea as scientific work.
There are so many misconceptions about the man that this otherwise fairly reserved guy is just buried under layers of legend. He was neither an exceptional genius and phropet, nor was he arrogant, careless about jumping to conclusions, or an atheist. He was a bright, studious man who worked hard, amassed tons of evidence, and hit upon a stunningly innovative realization about how evolution could have occured (one which was as much due to the new discoveries in geology and biology of his time as to his own thinking: as is obvious from the fact that no one in the history of earth had thought of it before... and then suddenly two guys did indepedently around the same time). He's worth remembering and learning about, not worshiping or demonizing.
How about the idiots who, for example, think Bush is comparable to Hitler? That's just as stupid as not believing in evolution, or believing the earth is flat, or whatever. We're surrounded every day by idiots who believe in bizarre things.
Well, Gandhi is comparable to Hitler. I'd say he compares rather favourably, of course, but comparable, still.
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I am a christian and a scientist, one who does not find the belief in a cunctipotent deity incompatible with understanding and accepting scientific discoveries, To tell the truth more I learn about cosmology (singularities, string theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal, and other crazy ideas) and evolution the more my belief in God is reinforced. To me the individuals who hinder scientific progress in the name of God are reserving a place for themselves in the afterlife (by which I mean, a not very nice one! or maybe they will come back as a worm in the next life!)
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
"Christians have no need to choose between religion and science."
I beg to differ. The premise of religion is to accept that certain things are mysterious and cannot be investigated, or that certain things are true whether there is evidence for them or not.
The premise of science is that everything should be investigated, and that things are accepted as generally true only after evidence emerges for them, and that new evidence can change our perceptions of what is true.
Some of the most vocal opponents of the current American regime are those who actually fought in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and other conflicts. They know the true horrors of war, and many of them know the actual smell of fascism. You can call them idiots of you want. However, I'll listen to them when they start putting out warnings.
You speak of discussing events one did not witness. Just like that man and his children may not have witnessed macroevolution, I take it you did not witness World War II. While I was young at the time, I did. I remember leaving London during the Blitz. It is hypocritical and ignorant for you to suggest that those who experienced it firsthand are incorrect when they correctly point out history repeating itself.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Is that what he really wants to be teaching the kids? To doubt what they can't see for themselves?
Actually, yes. We schould teach our children to doubt and question absolutely everything. To me, the need for a continuous search for answers is one of the greatest attributes a person can have.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Stephan
Because in order to discredit evolutionary theory, those who oppose it attempt to undermine science, reason, and even empirical observation as bases of belief. The heliocentric model of the solar system isn't all of science, either, but no one who honestly believes in science disbelieves it.
English is easier said than done.
Why is it that if you are against Darwin you are against science?
Well, of course in principle it doesn't automatically mean that.
However, evolution is one of the most well-established theories that science has to offer. It is supported by evidence extremely well and is validated by hundreds of new observations every day. And if you publicly come out against it and in favor of some alternative theory for which the only evidence is a religious text, chances are pretty damn good that you are incapable of holding a logical thought in your head to begin with.
Now maybe that's an unfair assessment to make about you, but to make a more accurate one requires too much time and energy to expend on every evolution-basher out there. Life is too short, and there are too many of them (especially in the United States of America) to interview every single one as to his feelings about science in general. And it's a simple fact that people who publicly oppose evolution tend to be quite vocal in not only bashing scientists as a group, but bashing science in general as an inferior source of knowledge as compared to religion- an apples to oranges comparison if there ever was one.
If I were some omniscient being with all the time and resources in the world to examine the innermost thoughts of every creationist and intelligent designer, perhaps I'd be able to develop a more accurate opinion. As a human being with limited years on this earth, please forgive me if I take a short cut and make what is a pretty accurate generalization to save time. If you are against Darwin, you are probably against science. You may think you're pro-science, but usually what that means is that you're pro-technology and view your toys as validation of the superiority of your culture and by extension the correctness of its religious views. Individuals opposed to Darwinism on the merits of the theory itself (and who may offer alternative theories equally unpalatable from religious viewpoints) are actually quite rare.
Actually, yes. We schould teach our children to doubt and question absolutely everything. To me, the need for a continuous search for answers is one of the greatest attributes a person can have.
I think such absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain in the face of how much there is in the world to understand. Very few people are in any position to vouch for the authenticity of much of the scientific experimentation that goes on. Another great attribute of humanity is the ability to pool a mass of knowledge much greater than any one individual could possibly hope to grasp on their own.
Direct away from face when opening.
If anything, Christianity is more like Linux:
1. It has a kernel (belief in Jesus and God) and you can put different forms on top of that (barring a few that go against the license), leading to different branches and forks.
2. Most of its followers are friendly, though there are a few loud zealots who give the rest a bad name.
3. It sprouted from an older, less "open", religion, many of the followers of which are still around today.
They probably have never seen *god* either; a rational response to this argument would be to disbelieve both evolution and creationism and all religion, to go live in a cave and eat berries and reject the notion of all civilization, including its mythology.
The logical outcome of his argument doesn't matter though. This stuff works on children only because children haven't been taught critical thinking; they've been taught to listen to authority. (Then it continues to work because adults haven't been taught critical thinking either.) And that's exactly what this guy wants. The specific argument doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that someone in a position of authority said it, and the people who believe it don't have the tools to defend themselves from authoritative statements.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
1) If God knows all causality, then he could have brought about everything into being originally AND have it, from science's view BE random and undetermined. The two are not mutally exclusive when God is the best pool player of all time, setting up the most elaborate shot of all time.
God as a conman. Good one.
You can't take the sky from me...
True enough, but it is obvious that science has limitations.
1. Science can only be reasonably applied the things that can be observed.
2. Science can only be meaningfully applied to things that can be measured and repeated.
3. Science can only be absolutely applied to things that can be understood by humans.
To presume that all knowledge and all truth must necessarily be confined by the above set of restrictions is ludicrous. And, of course, completely unprovable. If you honestly believe that science and humanity are capable of understanding and knowing everything, then you have trapped yourself by faith in science. That is, welcome to your pseudoreligion.
Ultimately, science is all about answers. Religion is all about questions.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Agreed — the thing is, though, that arguing against science with religion doesn't work on a rational level. Religion is a belief, the questions that can be asked of it are distinct to those of science — this debate gets messy because people are pitting two disparate systems against one another. Science does not aim to disprove religion, so arguing against religion with science doesn't work (except with extremely anal literal interpretations, where the parts that are decided are fairly mundane). Religion does not aim to prove itself, being based on faith, so arguing against science with it leads to problems from their contrasting bases.
There are plenty observations made "each day" that contradict evolutionary theories.
Name some. Before you post, please check talk.origins and the NCSE website to see debunkings of your claims; I can almost guarantee that any of the observations you're thinking of do not contradict evolution in the slightest, and have already been explained in short, simple sentences and words of few syllables so that even creationists can understand them.
There are also many established scientists who don't support it too.
No, there aren't. There are very, very few, and almost none of them are biologists. And their arguments are the same easily debunked nonsense, repeated over and over in increasingly obfuscatory language; they haven't brought anything new to the table in decades.
The theory of evolution is an attempt to find an absolute in a relativistic universe, it doesn't exist. It is based off age-old beliefs in simple cause and effect, and projecting those flawed beliefs over the span of millions of years. The universe does not operate this way. With our modern knowledge of relativism and quantum mechanics, evolution should be debunked.
Congratulations, you've managed to combine two of the most common types pseudo-scientific quackery (creationism and profound misinterpretation of quantum physics) into a single post! I suggest you stick to fare like "What the Bleep Do We Know?" -- it should be more at your level.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If you say something to yourself similar to, "Obviously that part was allegory," then you have no leg to stand on. Either every single thing in it is literal (and the earth has four corners) or everything must be interpreted. Once everything must be interpreted, you cannot claim any sort of non-relativism.
That's ridiculous! The Bible comes from a large number authors all who were in different time periods and different cultural contexts. And often we don't have the full context available to us.
For instance the story of Jonah is believed by biblical scholors to be a story that was told as an allegory. One of the reasons is because there's no other evidence that such a man even existed. The creation story is similar, there were no witnesses to the event, a primative culture with no modern scientific background drew upon existing stories to create their own. Notice that the creation stories of several civilizations at the time are very similar.
The Bible is first and foremost a guide on how to have a relationship with God and those parts are pretty clear IMHO. That's where the absolutes lie.
Which bible do you read, and why?
Any Bible that was translated from the original Greek and Hebrew which, believe it or not (for the "the Bible's been redone dozens of times!" camp) is most translations.
Do you think the Romans (who cannonized the Bible with their selected bishops in 313) were answering the call of God or politics?
I'm sure it was probably both.
Why do you go to church on Sunday instead of the Sabbath, or Saturday? Why do most of the Christian holidays coincide exactly with pagan holidays that are centuries older?
Same answer for both, they were Pagan traditions originally and used by the Catholic church. I've never really understood why in this day and time it even matters.
If you're a Trinitarian, are non-trinitarians going to hell? What if you aren't baptised?
Well I've read the Bible several times and I've never seen where it says non-trinitarians or people who aren't baptised are going to hell.
Why do you think there are so many sects of Christianity if the bible is so crystal clear?
I think there are lots of reasons, the rebellion against corruption, the twisting of scripture to gain power, just the ability to nit-pick. Ultimately religions are made up of people and people are far from perfect.
The Anti-Blog
Well, at a certain point you have to start addressing the problem. I think we're at that point.
Well put.
The notion that you can just ignore these nutjobs can lead to even bigger problems down the road. It is when average, everyday people fail allow spurious debates to take hold that the majority becomes hostage to a dimwitted but aggressive minority. Hostility to intellectualism has been with America since its founding, but when it becomes so pervasive that the nonsensical hurling of insults becomes a substitute for debate, the reasonable majority loses its ability to influence politics. I think we've already entered a very dangerous era, where style (angry rhetoric, appeals to symbology, character assassination) has far outstripped substance in the arena of public debate.
When is the last time you saw two people on television actually debate an idea for a full 40 minutes? I'm talking about locking intellectual horns and attempting to prove the merits of an idea to an audience through skillfully argued logic. No dodging the question, no shoehorning a question into a pre-generated answer. I think such debates are non-existent now because we have allowed them to become extinct. We allow the issues to be turned into lowest common denominator mudwrestling that shows how little we respect ourselves as citizens. We have not demanded a better process, one that pushes better ideas to the fore. So we wind up with a process that is driven by one liners and photos of politicians going duck hunting.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What most people fail to realize is that Darwin supported the idea of Microevolution, not Macroevolution. The idea that creatures could just suddenly change from one specia to the next is laughable. Christianity, in general, supports the idea of microevolution. On top of this, I would like to ask that people start clarifying what they mean when they say Evolution, becuase it is becoming rather bothersome, seeing all this talk of how evolution can be proven and is a fact, and not clarifying of which you are speaking. In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. -Stephen Jay Gould
Let me remind you that as widely-known and understood as evolution is, even Darwin himself admitted that the theory could be debunked if it could be proven that a system could not exist in an "intermediate" state such as that which evolution requires:
And thus far no such system has been observed. All theories are potentially falsifiable -- an explanation that has no falsification criteria is not scientific. Evolution stands strong for many reasons, including the total failure of any potential falsifying observations to come about despite ample opportunity.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Scientists don't support Darwin; they support evolutionary theory. In fact, Darwin's idea that evolution is gradual has been largely replaced by punctuated equilibria based on evidence. Scientists don't simply look for things to reinforce existing theory, but instead they seek to expand and revise it constantly. This is the sort of thing creationists don't want; they start from a given premise and discard all evidence that doesn't agree with it. You basically took an argument against creationism, replaced the word "creationist" with "scientist", and expect people to lend credence to your nonsense because you admit to uncertainty.
English is easier said than done.
You hear something from a friend, but you're skeptical, so you go look it up. You find ten other people that agree with what your friend said, but you're skeptical of them. Where does it end?
When people say absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain, they're not lying; it is impossible. Eventually you have to give in to trust.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Those christians (and radical muslims etc) will be in their own dark age. The rest of us will do alright.
Unless they manage to take the rest of us out with them in their infighting.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I think such absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain in the face of how much there is in the world to understand.
The general principle should be not "to doubt and question everything", but to be willing to doubt and question anything.
It is simply silly to actually doubt and question everything. It would be a huge and pointless mental burden.
But the willingness to question anything seems to me to be an essential attribute of a civilized, rational person. I know damned well I don't have all the answers, but it seems to me insane to suggest that there are some questions that ought not to be asked.
The opposite of this view is religion. All religions place some questions beyond the pale. Christians are not allowed to question the divinity of Jesus. Jews are not allowed to question their special relationship with God. Muslims are not allowed to question the unity of God. None of them are allowed to question the existence of God in the form of any serious doubt.
This kind of willful epistemological blindness will always be opposed to science, which holds that we should be willing to ask any meaningful question.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Where did you get your info about recycling paper? A quick google turned up this:
though of course I'm not an expert - your claim about recycled paper just sounds like one of those myths going around that have no basis in fact. References?
XML causes global warming.
I know that humans were just the design we ended up with, not the goal,
but.. think in terms of the creation of a creature as much more "fit" [from evolutionary perspsective] as a human to an ape.
I think the real question is "more 'fit' for what?", and until we have some semblance of an answer to that I think your concerns are awfully speculative. We really have no idea of what pressures or constraints led to humans developing. In contrast your example of and F16 from a Sopwith Camel there are some very well defined implicit constraints and specifications as to purpose and what constitutes "fitness" in this case. What led to humans may have been some fairly loose and easily satsified constraints with some of the particulars that we take for "fitness" simply being aberrations where the process spun on in an unconstrained direction.
Could evolutionary algorithms solve the Sopwith Camel to F16 problem in the required time? Maybe not. Evolution/Life doesn't always manage to solve the problems with which it is presented, particularly when the constraints are excessive. History is littered with examples of evolution failing to develop a satisfactory solution in time: it's called extinction. So even if humans are a remarkable solution to an incredibly difficult problem it may well be that we are just one of those few cases where an answer did turn up in the requisite time out of millions more cases where it didn't.
Jedidiah.
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2. Normal Iraqi people are not members of Al Qaeda. But they are the people being detained.
3. The idea of a "war" against such an amorphous and vague group is ridiculous. They should be targets of law enforcement. War is about nation-states and armies fighting one another. "War on Terror" is a misnomer.
4. If we are at war with Al Qaeda, then why doesn't the US treat them by Geneva conventions, and other standards for treating POWs? But the administration has denied that they are prisoners of war - they are "enemy combatants" - therefore, there must be no war, if they are not POWs.
... and then they built the supercollider.
There are a couple of things that you are either skipping for brevity or ignoring. In case you are ignoring them:
There are what, ~25,000 genes in the Human genome, made up of about 3 billion base pairs(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome).
I'm no expert on genetic algorithms, but I am willing to guess that you weren't working with anywhere near 25,000 variables per individual or that you did silly things like generate non working solutions(radical mutations) and the like. Did your system include a mechanism that coding for an individuals dna to control how genes were combined with each other, some of which might be intermixed with genes? How sophisticated was your recombination?
The evaluation for fitness in nature(natural selection) is an incredible process. It basically awards efficiency in energy gathering and conversion(survival and propogation depend directly on this). The interesting part is that bad genes can survive for much longer than would seem reasonable. See sickle-cell anemia. It's caused by a bad gene, but the mutation makes recessive carrier more resistant to malaria. How is a G-A method going to account for a situation like that?
Much of the cellular machinery in higher order mammals is also present in bacteria. The mammals get all the evolution that the bacteria did for free. Evolution is a continual struggle for resources. Multicellular organisms evolved because they are able to take advantage of certain resources more efficiently than a single cell, things like eating single cells and whatnot.
This leads to the sopwith camel->F16, how many parameters are you going to use and what mechanism is going to evaluate fitness? Those factors are going to be at least as important as the number of individuals and generations. If your fitness algorith doesn't say 'I want an F16', it isn't going to get one.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So that alone is not reason to discredit you. However, astrological dating is flawed; and the proofs used to validate it are too. We're just getting in data now showing that things aren't like we thought they were out in space, and the model's don't add up to what we thought either.
Not true. They wouldn't have it the way it is now - being so religiously intent on proving evolution true as to ignore the truth. (That doesn't mean I agree with ID. I may be a creationist, but I don't agree with ID.)
What's to say that we aren't already in one? A "dark age" only exists because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of accepting knowledge. Either one could be argued from any stand point on this issue today. Evolutionists refuse to accept that a God could have created; while Creationists refuse to accept that God did not create and it all came about by chance. Well...I guess in many respects that fact that we are having the debate shows that we're not in one; but if either party were to win outright without the community showing it by evidence, then yes, we would enter a dark age. Just remember, there are a lot of "scientists" out there that are purporting evolution that would like it to, though they don't exactly realize it.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Creation scientists do not deny evolution exists. They simply call it "microevolution" and claim that there are boundaries that cannot be crossed between different "kinds" of creature populations. You can show a creature evolving like fruitflies and bacteria and they say it remains within the same "kind", and that there is no common ancestry outside a creature's "kind" (other than God zapping it to life). That is where the debate lies.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
"Apes evolved into modern humans"
No, humans and the rest of the Homininae subfamily share a common ancestor. We didn't evolve from modern apes anymore than we evolved from a sitka spruce. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on apes for more information. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that a person who does not seem to understand this basic fact has expertise in the area of evolutionary theory.
Please don't take this as a personal attack; misunderstanding of the concept of common ancestors is just a pet pieve of mine.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda