Re: [asa] Can biology do better than faith?

 Say, Michael, was
Aristotle a barbarian?? If we survive the coming madness and a "more
perfect"-ly evolved man is produced, he will look back on Darwin as an
intuitive giant among his peers.

-Mike (Friend of ASA)

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Roberts <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk>
To: David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>; John Walley <john_walley@yahoo.com>
Cc: AmericanScientificAffiliation <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 1:14 pm
Subject: Re: [asa] Can biology do better than faith?

In? History Humanity and Evolution (CUP 1989) p37 John G Greene
says;

?

the account of man's fall from grace in Genesis despite its historical
inaccuracy gives a better and truer picture of the human condition that Darwin's
idea that? ... a more perfect man is being produced who will look back on
Darwin as a mere barbarian.

?

Here's an answer from the father of modern Darwin studies

?

Michael

?

  
----- Original Message -----

  
From:
  David
  Opderbeck

  
To: John Walley

  
Cc: AmericanScientificAffiliation

  
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 6:53
  PM

  
Subject: Re: [asa] Can biology do better
  than faith?

Query:? is methodological naturalism an appropriate tool
  for understanding human behavior, or do Biblical presuppositions about the
  image of God and sin have to be present for true understanding?

  
On Nov 26, 2007 1:38 PM, John Walley <john_walley@yahoo.com> wrote:

    
?

    
?

    
Can
    biology do better than faith?

    
19:00
    02 November 2005

    
NewScientist.com news service

    
Edward
    O. Wilson

    
Darwin's On the Origin of Species was
    published 150 years ago, but evolution by natural selection is still under
    attack from those wedded to a human-centred or theistic world view.
    Edward O. Wilson, who was raised a creationist, ponders why this
    should be, and whether science and religion can ever be
    reconciled.

    
IT IS
    surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only
    do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in
    evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with
    rock-like conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the
    60 per cent that accept the prophecies of the Bible's Book of
    Revelation as truth, and in yet more evidence is the weight that
    faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious right
    opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright
    ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as
    "only a theory" rather than a "fact".

    
Yet
    biologists are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The
    evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls
    together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples
    range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real
    time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the
    fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably strong evidence, natural
    selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.
    

    
Many
    who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds,
    accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose
    implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of
    intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on
    the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument
    advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: there
    are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (most
    importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained;
    therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work. The designer is
    seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most
    certainly not Satan and his angels, nor any god or gods conspicuously
    different from those accepted in the believer's faith.

    
Flipping the scientific argument upside down, the
    intelligent designers join the strict creationists (who insist that no
    evolution ever occurred) by arguing that scientists resist the supernatural
    theory because it is counter to their own personal secular beliefs. This may
    have a kernel of truth; everybody suffers from some amount of bias. But in
    this case bias is easily overcome. The critics forget how the reward system
    in science works. Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent
    design within the accepted framework of science will make history and
    achieve eternal fame. They will prove at last that science and religious
    dogma are compatible. Even a combined Nobel prize and Templeton prize (the
    latter designed to encourage the search for just such harmony) would fall
    short as proper recognition. Every scientist would like to accomplish such a
    epoch-making advance. But no one has even come close, because unfortunately
    there is no evidence, no theory and no criteria for proof that even
    marginally might pass for science.

    
In all
    of the history of science, only one other disparity of comparable magnitude
    to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has
    had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth, and
    therefore humanity, is not the centre of the universe, and the universe is
    not a closed spherical bubble. Copernicus delayed publication of his master
    work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until the year of his
    death (1543). For his extension of the idea, Bruno was burned at the stake,
    and for its documentation Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and
    remained under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

    
Today
    we live in a less barbaric age, but an otherwise comparable disjunction
    between science and religion still roils the public mind. Why does such
    intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the
    publication of On The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the
    overwhelming accumulated evidence favouring it? The answer is simply that
    the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution,
    challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity.
    Evolution by natural selection, to be as concise as possible, has changed
    everything.

    
In the
    more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global
    culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition. The
    dominant one, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic
    monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - sees humanity as
    a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as
    father, judge and friend. We interpret His will from sacred scriptures and
    the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities.

    
The
    second world view is that of political behaviourism. Still beloved by the
    now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is
    largely a blank state devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and
    primitive bodily urges. As a consequence, the mind originates almost wholly
    as a product of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself
    evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based
    "human nature", people can be moulded to the best possible political and
    economic system, namely communism. In practical politics, this belief has
    been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of
    deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure.
    

    
Both of
    these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed
    by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism.
    Still held by only a tiny minority of the world's population, it considers
    humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a
    biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by
    complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature
    exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far
    simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of
    its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of
    Man, Darwin called "the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin".
    

    
So,
    will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide
    the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning
    scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A
    few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the
    same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The
    inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the
    tectonic gap between science and faithbased religion.

    
Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable.
    There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and
    amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has
    become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view,
    that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the
    way at last placed before us.

    
Religions continue both to render their special
    services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well
    or better, at a lower cost? Surely that ranks as one of the great unanswered
    questions of philosophy. It is the noble yet troubling legacy that Charles
    Darwin left us.

    
Edward O. Wilson is a professor of entomology at
    Harvard University . He has written 20 books and received many awards,
    including two Pulitzer prizes and the 1976 National Medal of Science. This
    is an extract of the afterword to From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin 's
    four great books, published next week by W.W.
    Norton.

    
?

    
?

________________________________________________________________________
Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! - http://mail.aol.com

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Nov 26 15:47:55 2007