As the latest legislative season wound down with a large number of creationist bills introduced around the country and as the latest Gallup poll came out showing that creationism continues to enthrall many Americans, there were a flurry of articles discussing how to apportion blame for this sorry state of affairs. Oddly enough all seem to have missed some critically important aspect and thus the explanations offered explain very little.
The discourse began with a piece in The Atlantic by Robert Wright. His hypothesis is as simple as it is wrong! He argues that creationists and scientists agreed to a détente two decades ago and all was well until the "new atheists" came along to upset the status quo.
A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology class, and otherwise Darwinians would leave creationists alone. The deal worked. ... A few years ago, such biologists as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers started violating the nonaggression pact. ... I don't just mean they professed atheism -- many Darwinians had long done that; I mean they started proselytizing, ridiculing the faithful, and talking as if religion was an inherently pernicious thing. They not only highlighted the previously subdued tension between Darwinism and creationism but depicted Darwinism as the enemy of religion more broadly.
Is Wright unaware of the many court cases in which creationists didn't let Darwinians reign in biology class? The National Center for Science Education lists ten major court cases in which creationists tried to insinuate their filthy camel noses into the public-school tent. All of those took place between 1968 and 2005.
This is a point that Coyne disputes both vehemently and graphically, if less than persuasively, when he says "Wright is talking out of his nether parts." He goes on, more reasonably, to say, "The reason people choose religion over evolution is not because New Atheists tell them they have to make that choice. It's because their faith tells them they have to make that choice."
As head of The Clergy Letter Project, an international collection of religious leaders and scientists who promote evolutionary teaching, I have good reason to believe that the rhetoric of people like Coyne, Dawkins and Myers have, in fact, moved people away from a pro-science, pro-evolution perspective and toward religious fundamentalism. I've interacted with tens of thousands of clergy members over the years and I've been depressed by how many of them have pointed to the position of the "new atheists" saying that if they're the spokespeople for evolution, they want nothing to do with it. Have these clergy members actively promoted creationism? I have no way of knowing, but what they haven't done is promote evolution as have the thousands of their colleagues who have joined The Clergy Letter Project.
More perniciously, the "new atheists" have aligned themselves with biblical fundamentalists by consistently arguing that people must choose between religion and science. In fact, however, the goal of The Clergy Letter Project has been to demonstrate to religious people around the world that no such choice is necessary. Religion serves a very different purpose than does science and when religion makes no scientific claims there is no conflict between the two. There's good reason to believe that if people feel they must choose between the two, religion will more often come out on top.
Michael Ruse, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, makes much the same point that I just did. He goes on, however, to lay some of the blame at the feet of mainstream, rather than fundamentalist, denominations.
But when did you last hear the Catholic hierarchy holding forth about the need to teach evolution in schools and to expel biblical literalism? And I am not sure that a lot of the Protestant Churches are much better.
We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. ... We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
Are the "new atheists" responsible for creationism in America as Wright argues? Of course not! But neither should they be immune from the criticism that their inflammatory language and derision of religion keeps many from more fully understanding science, in general, and evolution, in particular.
Are religious people responsible for promoting the continuing battle between evolution and creationism? Of course! But that does not mean that ALL religious people are playing this role. Religion is not synonymous with fundamentalism any more than Muslim is synonymous with terrorist. Indeed, thousands of religious leaders have become some of the most articulate and most outspoken supporters of evolution -- without compromising their religious faith.
Follow Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mzclergyletter
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In your article your quote from the Clergy Letter Project: "We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth."
Could you please provide examples of "two very different, but complementary, forms of truth?"
In an effort to better understand this assertion could you, as founder of the CLP, please provide a few examples of "biblical truths" in contradistinction to "scientific truths" both of which are referenced in the Clergy Letter Project.
Cheers and Regards,
DF Batchelder
Science is not a matter of faith or belief. There's no such thing as (or at least there's no need for) the "Church of Darwin" or "Darwinism" or any of the other things creationists often claim. Science doesn't need my faith. The earth is round(ish) whether I believe it or not. Plate tectonics does its thing whether I believe the earth is 4 billion years old or not. And the data and science for biological diversity and evolution is there and useful for all sorts of important things like genetic engineering, DNA nanotechnology, bioinformatics, forensics, biological studies whether I believe it or not.
Religious and superstitious folks usually frame their opposition to (and fear of) science with the language and concepts they understand. And they don't understand science, the scientific method, etc. Unfortunately, there are far too many (voting) people who believe evolution and science is from the devil.
I think it's an uncomfortable concept for very religious people, to feel uncertain.
In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."
The study of biology should be the most holy endeavor of every Christian and Jew and Muslim. They all have a closely related version of the Genesis story.
And God's first command to Adam was to go and give all the creatures and plants names. That is classification, one of the fundamentals of biology.
So, if you believe in God, don't be a priest, go study biology :)
Have you even read them?
This is gibberish.
No attempt is made to explain the difference between having mass and acting as if there is mass. But do photons interact with that background field? The story seems to change. –paraphrased from “The Daily Howler” 7/18/12
Organisms are mixtures, sometimes adventurous and sometimes timid, self-centered and altruistic, conforming and rebellious. However natural selection is even said to be capable of "evolving" opposite traits in the same organism - simultaneously! How might "premature death or fewer offspring" possibly accomplishe such a thing? The "natural selection” explanation for lactose tolerance, for instance. Before animals domestication,, many adults lost ability to digest milk. The Darwinian explanation for acquired lactose tolernce is that a random mutation accidentally occurrs in one adult, and everyone but the descendants of that “lucky accident” perish. I doubt many people, if anyone, died from drinking milk. Those with a lactose intolerance just found something else to drink. Oh, a few people drank milk, and gradually acquired tolerance.
Mutations are purposeful efforts by organisms to adapt to living conditions. Organisms sometimes change, rather than passively waiting around to be eliminated by natural selection.
Berthajane Vandegrift
A Few Autistic Questions about Freud, Marx and Darwin
http://30145.myauthorsite.com/
No they didn't. DNA was discovered in the 1870's by Meischer and that certainly didn't lead to anyone thinking that they had solved evolution.
"I haven’t seen any reasonable speculations about how DNA might translate into non-physical entities such as thoughts or personality traits"
You mean that you've rejected any such explanations.
In other words, you formulate a hypothesis and then go looking for the evidence that will *disprove* it. If your experiment/observations fail to disprove the hypothesis then the hypothesis is accepted.
The rest of your statement is unintelligible. There is no mechanism proposed for evolution that requires organisms to evolve in one way or the other. That's totally dependent on the environment in which the population of organisms finds itself.
I will only add that I became an atheist on purely metaphysical grounds and only AFTER becoming an atheist did I accept the fact of evolution. Upon learning more about evolutionary science, it was difficult indeed not to become angry at the many professors and apologists who had LIED to me about evoluton and creation while I was obtaining my biblical studies degree at an evangelical college.
Free at last from disreputable and fatuous nonsense. Free at last, free at last. The truth did finally set me free, and to the degree that I use the fact of evolution to begin doubting their religious faith, it is only to share the wealth. I do not hate religion or the religious, and my experience in Christianity was close to 100 percent positive. I just really, really like being right even more.
Darwin and Wallace did not really know much about either population or molecular genetics. Many brilliant people who advanced understanding in these fields along the way, also had limited understanding that has been revised on the basis of continually emerging evidence. More is now known about how evolution occurred than was ever previously known, and much remains to be learned.
I have no doubt that changes in complex systems within environmental contexts results in emergent properties gaining functional relevance, and that resulting adaptive functions are tested in the crucible of reality and the functions and those in which they exist either survive to reproduce or don't. But this also means that functional or adaptive "trajectories" exist--not in the sense of being goal directed, but in the sense that what exists places limits on the kinds of variation that can occur. That can create a pathway along which adaptation and refinement and further emergent properties can develop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability
I'm probably somewhere between a 6 and a 7. I certainly can't prove that no supernatural god exists but with science consistently whittling away at what the beings role could possibly be anyway, I'd be willing to bet against it.