|
The author is an archconservative, with whom I might never find
agreement on political policy or strategy. I’m pleased that he has joined other
conservative pundits publicly separating themselves from the tomfoolery of the
science versus religion polemics. Traditional conservatives should have remembered the steep price the
Democrats paid for the public’s perception that their party had been perverted
by extremists. Republicans should have been more cautious about allowing their
party to be subverted by religious extremists who want a theocratic state, not
a democratic one. Instead, the
party infrastructure presumed that their personal virtues would compensate for
their political mischief, a classic sign of hubris, and so today find that the
public now sees their party leaders as dishonest and not relating to everyday
Americans. We have too many real problems on earth that need our attention and
resources. We should avoid revisiting the dark Middle Ages again. kwc Phony Theory, False Conflict OpEd by Charles
Krauthammer, Washington Post, Friday, November 18, 2005; A23 Newton's religion was traditional. He was
a staunch believer in Christianity and a member of the Church of England.
Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for
everything that occurs in the universe. Neither saw science as
an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's
work," James Gleick wrote in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw
his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an
attempt to understand the mind of God. Not a crude and
willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was
trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the
earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated
system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked upon the other every time some
wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so
crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical and
therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine. Which brings us to
Dover, Pa., Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education, and a fight
over evolution that is so anachronistic
and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment. Dover distinguished
itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board
who tried to impose "intelligent design" - today's tarted-up version
of creationism - on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called the wrath
of God down upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your
city." Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover,
mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent
design into the statewide biology curriculum. Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be
interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological
"theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific
knowledge
-- in this case, evolution -- they
are to be filled by God.
It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection
explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other
such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a
while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says,
"I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that
violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science --
that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the
proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion
of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together? In order to justify
the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very
definition of science, dropping the phrase " natural explanations for what we observe in the world around
us," thus unmistakably implying -- by fiat of definition, no less -- that
the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to
religion and science. The school board
thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process"
with no "discernible direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as
indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by
which Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose.
What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular
interactions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God
is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis? He may be, of course.
But that discussion
is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over
creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human
endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions --
arguably, the most important questions in life -- that lie beyond the material. How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy
of God. What could be
more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed
more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet
interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single
double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and
mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of
Education, too. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701304.html Evolution in the
bible, says Vatican
By Martin Penner, The Australian, Nov. 7,
2005 Cardinal Paul
Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis
description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution
were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly. His
statement was a clear attack on creationist campaigners in the US, who see
evolution and the Genesis account as mutually exclusive. "The
fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no
scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real
message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a
creator". This idea was part
of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the
development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was
important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to
"understand things better". His statements were
interpreted in Italy as a rejection of the "intelligent design" view,
which says the universe is so complex that some higher being must have designed
every detail. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17162341-13762,00.html Also See Intelligent Design @ Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design A Pope for our times: why Darwin is back on
the agenda at the Vatican http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1052-1860310,00.html |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
