From: John W. Burgeson, 73531,1501
TO: Fred Phelps, INTERNET:Fred.Phelps@f7012.n2001.z12.telcom.lfa.com
DATE: 3/3/96 8:18 AM
RE: Copy of: old earth tract bibliography
Fred writes:
"1) Should I have Kitcher's "Abusing Science" listed as a fair secular
critique of the young earth position? Is it any good? Is the author
fair to Christianity?"
My own opinion is that it is probably pretty good at #1, fair at #2 and poor
at #3. But I will admit to not having read it in 6 or 7 years.
There is a review of it which appeared in my Compuserve forum
a few months ago. The author, Jonathon Woolf,
is not a Christian; he is generally
pretty perceptive (IMO). It is copyrighted, so I cannot
send a copy; here are a couple quotations from it:
"ABUSING SCIENCE has apparently become a classic rebuttal of creationist claims
in the twelve years since it was published, because I've seen it referenced in
bibliographies of a couple of more recent books on the subject. And not
without reason. The other books of this sort that I've read tend to focus
either on how strong the case for evolution is, or on the anti-evolution
arguments used by creationists and how to rebut them. A few consider the
question of whether or not creationism is science, but as t he creationists
have gotten better at concealing the religious basis for their claims, it's
become correspondingly harder to produce a simple argument as to why
creationism isn't science.
But Kitcher goes beyond these simple arguments. After giving a thumbnail
sketch of evolutionary theory and its history in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 he
points out that there is a much deeper issue involved in the creationism _vs_
evolution debate. That's the entire question of "what _is_ science?". Is
science huge collections of data, tables of numbers, etc.? Is it the process
of collecting that data? Is it a way of thinking about the world? Is it a
method of solving problems? Or what?"
The file is accessible on Compuserve's RELIGIOUS ISSUES forum, section
5, Science & Religion, under the file name KITCHER.TXT.
Burgy