Reflectorites
On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 00:31:09 +0100, Richard Wein wrote:
[...]
>SJ>Bill Dembski is hardly alone in reading Daniel Dennett as advising the
>>"quarantine" of those who dissent from Darwinian naturalism. What
>>follows is a passage from Ron Numbers's _Darwinism Comes to America_
>>(Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 13). Note that Numbers understands
>>Dennett exactly as Bill did:
[...]
RW>This is the same extract quoted by Mike earlier. I find it rather odd that
>supporters of Dembski try to justify his misquotation by showing another
>anti-evolutionist also misquoting Dennett!
It is interesting that Richard automatically assumes that anyone who
criticises an evolutionist must be an "anti-evolutionist"?
Numbers is the Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is an evolutionist who was brought
up a Seventh-Day Adventist, and therefore he has an unusual sympathy and
understanding of young-Earth creationism. To his credit he has at times
defended YECs from unwarranted and unfair attacks by evolutionists:
"Born and reared in a fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist family of
ministers, I learned Price's version of earth history at my parents' knees. I
subsequently attended Adventist church schools from first grade through
college, and though I majored in science, I saw no reason to question the
claims of strict creationism. In fact, I do not recall ever doubting the recent
appearance of life on the earth until the late 1960s, while studying the
history of science at the University of California at Berkeley. I vividly
remember the evening I attended an illustrated lecture on the famous
sequence of fossil forests in Yellowstone National Park and then stayed up
much of the night with a biologist friend of like mind, Joe Willey, first
agonizing over, then finally accepting, the disturbing likelihood that the
earth was at least thirty thousand years old. Having thus decided to follow
science rather than Scripture on the subject of origins, I quickly, though
not painlessly, slid down the proverbial slippery slope toward unbelief. In
1982, when attorneys for both sides in the Louisiana-creation-evolution
trial requested my services as a possible expert witness, I elected to join the
ACLU team in defending the constitutional wall separating church and
state. In taking my pretrial deposition, Wendell R. Bird, the creationist
lawyer who had tried to recruit me for his side, devoted two lengthy
sessions to probing the limits of my historical knowledge and the thinness
of my religious beliefs. On the basis of this inquisition Bird publicly labeled
me an ''Agnostic.'' The tag still feels foreign and uncomfortable, but it
accurately reflects my theological uncertainty.
Although I no longer believe in creationism of any kind, I am strongly
committed to treating its advocates with the same respect I might accord
evolutionists. (As a constant reminder to do so, I have kept above my desk
a framed handbill from the early 1940s announcing a public lecture on
"God's Answer to Evolution: Are Men and Monkeys Relatives?" The
featured speaker was my father, Raymond W. Numbers, then holding a
series of evangelistic meetings in the Kansas City Canvas Tabernacle.) For
too long now students of science and religion have tended to grant the
former a privileged position, often writing more as partisans than historians
and grading religious "beliefs" by how much they encouraged or retarded
the growth of scientific "knowledge." Recently we have heard persuasive
calls for a more even-handed treatment. 12 But even academics who would
have no trouble empathetically studying fifteenth-century astrology,
seventeenth-century alchemy, or nineteenth-century phrenology seem to
lose their nerve when they approach twentieth-century creationism and its
fundamentalist proponents. The prevailing attitude, colorfully expressed at
one professional meeting I attended, is that "we've got to stop the
bastards." In other words, although many scholars seem to have no trouble
respecting the unconventional beliefs and behaviors of peoples
chronologically or geographically removed from us, they substitute
condemnation for comprehension when scrutinizing their own neighbors. I
think it is profitable to get acquainted with the neighbors, especially so if
we find them threatening."
(Numbers R.L., "The Creationists: the Evolution of Scientific
Creationism," 1993, pp.xvi-xvii)
[...]
RW>I wonder if we can expect a partial retraction from Numbers too.
I wonder if Richard wants a retraction from Numbers now that he knows
that he is a fellow evolutionist?
Steve
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"The primary problem with the [modern evolutionary] synthesis is that
its makers established natural selection as the director of adaptive
evolution by eliminating competing explanations, not by providing
evidence that natural selection among 'random' mutations could, or did,
account for observed adaptation (Box 2). Mayr remarked, 'As these
non-Darwinian explanations were refuted during the synthesis ...
natural selection automatically became the universal explanation of
evolutionary change (together with chance factors).' Depriving the
synthesis of plausible alternatives, which seemed such a triumph, in fact
sowed the seeds of its faults." (Leigh E.G., Jr, "The modern synthesis,
Ronald Fisher and creationism," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol.
14, no. 12, pp.495-498, December 1999, p.495)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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