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Charles Darwin Online
eldavojohn writes "The entire works of Charles Darwin have been made available online. It includes scanned works that were owned by his family — many of which were signed by the author. The University of Cambridge hopes to have this completed by 2009 and is only estimated to be about half way done. If you have any love for books whatsoever, I suggest you take a look at how they present the user with each book. Take the very first edition of On the Origin of Species, for example, where they use frames to display the text on the left with the original image on the right. From the Reuters article: 'Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.'"
Better yet, maybe somebody will actually *read* the theory before attacking it (now if we could only get some theories of theistic evolution and atheistic evolution published online for comparison, since Darwin's version wasn't partial either way).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Contrariwise: Darwin's theory made no mention whatever of God, as he felt it unnecessary to postulate the involvement of such an entity. What more do you ask of atheistic evolution?
... I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent."
Absolute proof that the base laws of the universe are random rather than intelligently ordered, of course.
It's evolution happening without the involvement of a god. That's the whole point. If you're going to allow for evolution 'helped over the jumps', in Dawkins' phrase, by some magician, then why bother at all?
Because it's a damned interesting engineering method; one that could prove highly useful in the sciences of Artificial Intelligence, biology, robotics, and maybe best of all, environmental cleanups.
An intellgently guided environment for mutations to live or die in is a highly powerful idea.
Why not have the magician create the universe last Thursday? It's just as scientific.
Oh, that's a different quetion. THAT is the difference between beliving in a rational, dependable God whose thought process can be discerned by science and who never breaks his own law, vs the God of the Christian Fundamentalists and Islamic Fascists who changes his mind at random and says "Thou shalt not kill" one day and "Blow up the Infidel" the next. A scientist can choose to believe in the first and disbelieve in quantum mechanics, it makes no difference to the science in the macro world. The second is merely a form of insanity. But I'd say the athiest falls into the same insanity by *not* believing in an ordered universe.
"If I were convinced that I needed such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish
The descent for a theistic evolutionist comes *after* the miraculous additions. Without the miraculous addition, there'd be no life because the Big Bang itself would have collapsed back in under it's own gravity and chaos. The descent Darwin wrote about happened at least 15 billion years later by what we now know- the physical laws that govern it were already in place by then, having been decided during that strange injection of information and energy during the Big Bang. When we figure that out (if we ever can) we will know the face of God that was the original reason for scientific research to begin with.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Actually, there have been many, many so-called transitional fossils discovered. So I guess now you can buy into all this macroevolution stuff, hey kid?
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
He, in the face of tremendous religious and scientific adversity, put forth an astounding scientific theory worked out through great diligence.
I would actually contest that. The theory he put forth was overly simple and lacked the microbiological understanding of genetics we have today, which is infinitely more interesting. His reliance on "selection" - which is almost intuitive - as opposed to the actual induction of genetic features is a good example. Just because he had the balls to say something like:"humans could have come from monkeys" does not mean he is one of the greatest people who have ever lived.
I believe that given time, scientific advance would have made it necessary to make such postulations whether or not they are well recieved, since science took a very secular approach in the West due to the Galileo ordeal & others.
The guys who gave us DNA are far more important in my opinion.
May I direct your attention here: "*Which* Ten Commandments?"
:)
The Protestant, Catholic and Hebrew versions all say "Thou shalt not kill."
But, that's not nearly as interesting as the fact that the original tablets ("which moses did break," Exodus 20) are entirely different from the second set ("the words that were on the first," Exodus 34).
Nevermind that the Protestant and Hebrew versions are different (some subtley, some majorly) from the Catholic version.
But, you go ahead and believe whatever you need to, to be able to sleep at night.
Come hear me sing!
Consider that this was written about 300 years ago, some 200 years before Darwin: THE superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant. Further, the superstitious man is governed by the fanatic and becomes fanatic. Superstition born in Paganism, adopted by Judaism, infested the Christian Church from the earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil. To-day one half of Europe thinks that the other half has long been and still is superstitious. The Protestants regard the relics, the indulgences, the mortifications, the prayers for the dead, the holy water, and almost all the rites of the Roman Church, as a superstitious dementia. Superstition, according to them, consists in taking useless practices for necessary practices. Among the Roman Catholics there are some more enlightened than their ancestors, who have renounced many of these usages formerly considered sacred; and they defend themselves against the others who have retained them, by saying: " They are indifferent, and what is merely indifferent cannot be an evil." It is difficult to mark the limits of superstition. A Frenchman travelling in Italy finds almost everything superstitious, and is hardly mistaken. The Archbishop of Canterbury maintains that the Archbishop of Paris is superstitious; the Presbyterians make the same reproach against His Grace of Canterbury, and are in their turn treated as superstitious by the Quakers, who are the most superstitious of all in the eyes of other Christians. In Christian societies, therefore, no one agrees as to what superstition is. The sect which seems to be the least attacked by this malady of the intelligence is that which has the fewest rites. But if with few ceremonies it is still strongly attached to an absurd belief, this absurd belief is equivalent alone to all the superstitious practices observed from the time of Simon the magician to that of Father Gauffridi. It is therefore clear that it is the fundamentals of the religion of one sect which is considered as superstition by another sect. The Moslems accuse all Christian societies of it, and are themselves accused. Who will judge this great matter? Will it be reason? But each sect claims to have reason on its side. It will therefore be force which will judge, while awaiting the time when reason will penetrate a sufficient number of heads to disarm force. Up to what point does statecraft permit superstition to be destroyed? This is a very thorny question; it is like asking up to what point one should make an incision in a dropsical person, who may die under the operation. It is a matter for the doctor's discretion. Can there exist a people free from all superstitious prejudices? That is to ask-Can there exist a nation of philosophers? It is said that there is no superstition in the magistrature of China. It is probable that none will remain in the magistrature of a few towns of Europe. Then the magistrates will stop the superstition of the people from being dangerous. These magistrates' example will not enlighten the mob, but the principal persons of the middle-classes will hold the mob in check. There is not perhaps a single riot, a single religious outrage in which the middle-classes were not formerly imbrued, because these middle-classes were then the mob; but reason and time will have changed them. Their softened manners will soften those of the lowest and most savage populace; it is a thing of which we have striking examples in more than one country. In a word, less superstition, less fanaticism; and less fanaticism, less misery.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"Darwin was not a Christian. That claim demonstrates a lack of understanding of what a Christian is. Now I understand the reasons why someone might think that, as people generally broadly classify anyone associated with a Church that involves the Bible as being Christian, which isn't so. Society doesn't define what "Christian" is. Christ defined what Christian is. And one cannot reject the Word of God, and claim to be Christian. While it may seem uninstinctive or untraditional to do so, instinct and tradition don't define truth. According to the Bible, Catholocism isn't Christian either. You cannot reject the Bible, or any portion of it, and claim to be Christian. That isn't my opinion or religious belief -- its merely an accounting of the definition of what Christianity is and what it is not. "
:rolleyes: Again, you could apply the same to Martin Luther and Hitler and Christianity. Ever heard of "On the Jews and their Lies"? It's virtually the blueprint for the holocaust... and the final major work of the founder of the school of Biblical exegesis that you hold to.
Did you think this through at all? The Bible didn't EXIST during the time of Christ: how could Christ have endorsed a full literal reading of the Bible, including the NT, when it didn't even exist yet? How can Catholicism not be Christian according to the Bible when it was Catholicism that compiled the Bible in the first place? Good grief. Most of the traditions that Catholics hold that are extra-Biblical existed even before the Bible existed.
The view of of the Bible you are pushing didn't even emerge until just a few hundred years ago, and you want to pretend that it's the Original Gangsta Christian view? Come on: that's ridiculous.
Of course that's your opinion and religious belief. You don't get to personally define what Christianity is.
"I was saying that for those who have already accepted Darwinism, then they ought to examine the consequences of those beliefs and their contemporaries, and that is that regardless of their perceived (or hoped for) differences, Darwinianism puts them in the same philosophical category as those who committed those atrocities."
"It is unimportant whether Hitler and Stalin professed Darwiniianism, as their actions were consistent with the consequential philosophy, which is "whatever goes"."
Look, I really hope this gets through to you somehow: evolution is not a philosophy of "Darwinism." By and large, the only people who ever talk about Darwinism are creationists trying to make evolution sound big and bad. But evolution is NOT A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. It's a scientific description of how life developed on this planet.
"My interest is in intellectual honesty"
Well, you aren't doing a very good job of it, I'm afraid.
There is a more rigorous form of 'theistic evolution' which takes into account quantum mechanics. From quantum theory we know that the world we live in is one of many possible worlds and that there are many possible futures. There are three possible explanations for this. The first is that the universe if fundamentally stochastic and governed by chance this is essentially Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation. The second approach is that all possible universes are physically real which is the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The third approach is that God chooses which of the possible worlds is made manifest.
The third position is quite rational and consistent with modern science and does give rise to a 'theistic evolution'. It is quite different from intelligent design which is the last refuge of those that have a primitive and fundamentalist theology but who are sophisticated enough to try to pass it of as "science".
By the way there is a combination of the last two interpretations that leads to a modern form of Bishop Berkeley,s idealist philosophy and can be summed up in popular terms that we are living in God's matrix. The interesting question is are these different approaches mere metaphysics or do they ultimately lead to experimental tests. In which case an experiment to determine the existence of God would be possible.
What are you talking about? English has no future tense.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Show me an experiment or a prediction or anything really that would prove ID wrong.
Oddly enough, it's the same thing that would prove Evolution itself (and just about every other scientific theory that has risen to the predictability of a law) wrong: ID is incompatible with a random universe. If you can show me a commonly accepted physical law changing at random, say the gravitational constant of the universe or agrivado's number, or some such thing; that would prove ID wrong because it would postulate *either* an irrational God or a universe that had lost any sembalance of guiding order or principle. In other words- if you can prove the non-existance of God OR the non-intelligence of God, without being anthromorphic in fallacy, you can prove ID wrong. Evolution would fall as well, and the entire study of physics and biology, but you will have proven ID wrong.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.