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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."
Christian theistic evolutionists have got some very hairy questions to answer....
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i3/q
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/0112reje
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i4/t
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v20/i1/t
I'm glad to see there's some people out there that don't think religion and science are mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world. To each his own, but IHMO, both religion and science have productive places in society.
After all, a true person of faith would encourage science because it will only prove what he/she already believes to be true, right?
This sig rocks the casbah.
I'm not a christian, but I'm glad there's some active stance among religious people against the fundamentalists who seem to have taken over any kind of discussion of religion in this country.
I'm not religious, and I find, on the whole, that fundamentalists hijacking a religion can be a good thing in the long run. Probably nothing else could turn as many people away from the whole idea of religion so much as a generation of frothing-at-the-mouth zealots fighting each other and anyone disagreeing with their inflexible, warped view of the world.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I DON'T claim to believe in Scripture. I claim to believe in God.
I don't need you, or Sam Harris, or my pastor, or the Pope to approve of my relationship with God. Thanks for asking, though.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
As a Christian, and someone who's interested in science, how things work, biology and the like, I've never really had a problem with evolution and religion conflicting with each other. Equally, almost all other Christians I've met - and a lot of them are scientists or engineers, people that deal with fact - have likeminded views. In a lot of cases, many of us are baffled as to how this viewpoint that evolution is just 'wrong' came about.
It's nice to see people giving the issue some thought and prving that we're not all religious crackpots. I certainly don't believe the Bible to be 100% literal in its explanation of things to us. While my faith tells me that my God is a powerful force, I'm pretty sure that using the notion of 7 days of creation was a mechanism to get the idea across to people of that time. Do you really think people thousands of years ago would be able to grasp the notion of evolution? The book of Genesis would certainly be a few chapters longer...
The important point here though is that evolution is not creation. Both can co-exist quite happily.
This whole "it's only a few thousand rioting" business doesn't hold much water. Hamas, ie. a bunch of terrorists, have just been voted in democratically in Palestine. Ahmadinejad was voted in democratically in Iran. Extremist Islamic view represent popular opinion across the Middle East and are not solely the beliefs of a minority.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Can a man live inside of a fish for three days? Was Eve fashioned out of Adam's rib?
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.
Now, ask yourself these questions: Which bible do you read, and why? Do you think the Romans (who cannonized the Bible with their selected bishops in 313) were answering the call of God or politics? 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?
If you're a Trinitarian, are non-trinitarians going to hell? What if you aren't baptised? Why do you think there are so many sects of Christianity if the bible is so crystal clear?
Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought and belief. To think otherwise is to ignore the very scripture one claims to believe in.
How funny, the papal Encyclica "Fides et Ratio" says otherwise.
I think your friend Harris is misunderstanding at least one point of christianity.
The premise of science is that everything should be investigated
And therefore, we have the science called Theology, whose subject of study is God.
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 attitude is a religion in itself - and your generalizations are basically based on observations of religion based purely on the media or by listening to others like yourself. Instead of going to the real sources, you're using the very tools that religious fanatics blame for being the downfall of our society. Ironic.
Many, MANY forms of christianity encourage the questioning of the divinity of Jesus - the hope is obviously that you'll ultimately agree, but many believe you don't have true faith unless you can truly question it, and still believe. I won't even get into Judaism of Islam.
What I find the most disappointing about this whole debate is the rash generalizations people use to describe the "other side" - like saying "Christians are against evolution" and so forth.
It's like saying that all geeks are hackers, or that all hackers are criminals, or even that all geeks prefer C++. None of these statements are valid. And it is not because there is some small exception to some general rule. I'm guessing that most programmers do not in fact prefer C++ and instead have a great variation in language preference.
Depends what you mean by evolutionary theory. Creatures evolve, sure, you won't find many science "believers" disagreeing with you there. What's a lot less obvious is that evolution occurs solely due to natural selection/sexual selection, crossover and mutation or any other explanation that "evolutionary theory" has so far come up with.
I used to think natural selection was a sufficient explanation for life. What cured me was I worked fulltime for two years using genetic algorithms to solve a hard problem [it was about efficiently scheduling orders through a large metal rolling factory to optimize throughput]. I had several previous years experience in all kinds of optimization problems - [I had used GA's before in toy situations, but also had extensive experience with simulated annealing and numerous types of numerical optimization problems].
I was successful in this project, ie I eventually produced a program that produced better schedules than the (intelligent) fulltime, experienced humans who used to produce the weeks schedule using their own knowledge and experience along with various supporting computer tools. The heart of the solution was a GA coupled with various tricks used whereever beneficial. It helped that I had an Origin 2000 at my disposal. GAs really do work, and not wishing to sound arrogant, I understand that process and what they're capable of (from a computational potential perspective) better than all but a handful of people on this planet.
But... as a result of all this, I don't understand evolution anymore. It doesn't add up. From an optimization perspective, the problems I was solving where something like 10^100 times less difficult than the problems solved by evolution. Genetic algorithms run into a bit of a wall beyond a certain point.
Now, I'll grant you that I didnt have several hundred million years to work on the problem. However, I did experiment with population sizes in the 100'000s and I did evolve them for 10,000s of generations. Those are small numbers when considering evolution of bacteria, but they're pretty realistic numbers when considering evolution from an Ape to a human (or some equally fit alternative). Remember, according to evolutionary theory, the life events of an individual are irrelevent.All that matters is whether it produces offspring (also some evolutionary advantage to protecting close relatives, but even that can be simulated quite easily), and supposedly the mechanism is crossover and mutation, ie in a GA, life experience is equivalent to the evaluation function.
Based on my experience, I dont believe you could solve a problem such as the development of an equivalent to an F16 starting with a sopwith camel using GAs unless you used [at least] tens of millions of individuals over millions of generations. It seems to me that evolutionary problems are solved *much* faster than one has any right to expect. Apes evolved into modern humans with populations in the hundred thousands over tens of thousands of generations. 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.
So, anyway.. I dont believe in "evolutionary theory" as a sufficent explanation anymore. I don't believe in intelligent design either, but I dont blame people who do
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
For larger bridges, at least, the engineers go out and measure gravity at several points along the length of the proposed bridge, so that it isn't weakened by overlooking a gravity anomaly. They will also do stuff like put up weather stations, looking for anomalies and microweather patterns that ordinary weather reporting misses.
This is the difference between engineers and scientists. If an engineer screws up, people die (and often on the spot). You can go out and knock on most of the stuff an engineer does. Engineers believe in working with error bars and well-defined uncertainties. Scientists often have no such assurance, and surprisingly few scientific disciplines treat uncertainties as rigorously as engineers routinely do.
The canonical scientific reaction to uncertainty is either rejection of the whole concept ("burn the heretics!"), or to ride roughshod over the uncertainty because certain key items look to be in about the right places ("only an heretic would question that!", in this case evolution). Neither approach is particularly rational.
The creation scientists might well be totally wrong (although it's likely that even if the majority of their ideas are wrong, a few will be pure gold), but so far they have typically been more rational in their approach than elephant-hurlers like the parent poster.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Unfortuantely, this idea of a "hidden determinism" is simply logically impossible, given what we currently know about quantum mechanics. Hidden variables simply don't work. And if you believe God can do the logically impossible, then there's really no reason to debate further, since you can literally believe anything.
But for those who believe that God, if he exists, must be constrained by logic, then hidden variable determinism is simply not possible.
2) God could act via influencing things in ways that, due to quantum outcomes, would indeed be like magic to us, and undetectable or testable (hence we can still believe in a God that does miracles)
Again, see above, but I suppose if one believes God's own actions are not deterministic, then he could influence everything via QM. But it's unclear how God could actually achieve any particular outcome; ultimately he'd be violating statistical properties that could be measured with enough sensitivity. But if we're talking about very small changes over eons, then it might be impossible to distinguish a God-influenced universe from simply a "luckier" one. See the Anthropic Principle for more thoughts along these lines. :)
3) Evolution itself has plenty of room for a valid new theology based on the idea that God would WANT life to be free of God's direct design. This is known as "liberation theology" and though many Catholics disdain it, it's perfectly plausible.
Actually, I don't think you meant "liberation" or "libertarian" theology, but simply so-called "liberal" theology, which is more of a fuzzy notion about God and theology where every viewpoint is potentially valid and all persons must engage in their own spiritual journey to find truths they and their community find seem to work for them within the context in which they live. In some ways, it's Protestantism to the extreme, although the irony is that modern Christian fundamentalism has Protestant roots, where the authority of the majority simply substitutes for that of the Pope when interpreting scripture. But I digress...
To get back to the notion that God has a teleological purpose in mind for man, well, I'm sure you know that's well-explored territory in postmodern Christianity (a form of liberal theology itself). But I feel it necessary to point out the conflict between God's omnipotence, Free Will, and the Existance of Evil. Unless one believes in the Actual Choice conception of Free Will (which seems unpalatable, if not illogical), then one of the above three has to give, and we know it's not Evil. And given that Free Will is an essential element to Liberal theology, it would seem that God's omnipotence, even within the logical realm, must be discarded, and in that case one has to question just to what extent God can influence the universe teleologically.
In retrospect, I got way more out of the Philosophy of Religion classes in college than I did from Calculus...
Bruce