God vs. Science

[Fade the Butcher]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-1,00.html

Posted Sunday, Nov. 5, 2006

There are two great debates under the broad heading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of "intelligent design" (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.

But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor's role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines' increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates--in color!--the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention. (If the probabilities were 1 in a billion, and you've got 300 billion universes, why not?)

Roman Catholicism's Christoph Cardinal Schönborn has dubbed the most fervent of faith-challenging scientists followers of "scientism" or "evolutionism," since they hope science, beyond being a measure, can replace religion as a worldview and a touchstone. It is not an epithet that fits everyone wielding a test tube. But a growing proportion of the profession is experiencing what one major researcher calls "unprecedented outrage" at perceived insults to research and rationality, ranging from the alleged influence of the Christian right on Bush Administration science policy to the fanatic faith of the 9/11 terrorists to intelligent design's ongoing claims. Some are radicalized enough to publicly pick an ancient scab: the idea that science and religion, far from being complementary responses to the unknown, are at utter odds--or, as Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written bluntly, "Religion and science will always clash." The market seems flooded with books by scientists describing a caged death match between science and God--with science winning, or at least chipping away at faith's underlying verities.

Finding a spokesman for this side of the question was not hard, since Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins' expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena.

If Dennett and Harris are almost-scientists (Dennett runs a multidisciplinary scientific-philosophic program), the authors of half a dozen aggressively secular volumes are card carriers: In Moral Minds, Harvard biologist Marc Hauser explores the--nondivine--origins of our sense of right and wrong (September); in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (due in January) by self-described "atheist-reductionist-materialist" biologist Lewis Wolpert, religion is one of those impossible things; Victor Stenger, a physicist-astronomer, has a book coming out titled God: The Failed Hypothesis. Meanwhile, Ann Druyan, widow of archskeptical astrophysicist Carl Sagan, has edited Sagan's unpublished lectures on God and his absence into a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, out this month.

Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents, of course. But the most ardent of these don't really care very much about science, and an argument in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table doesn't get anyone very far. Most Americans occupy the middle ground: we want it all. We want to cheer on science's strides and still humble ourselves on the Sabbath. We want access to both MRIs and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically inimical as to make discussion fruitless. And to balance formidable standard bearers like Dawkins, we seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony--that, indeed, science is of God.

Informed conciliators have recently become more vocal. Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a "strong Christian defense" of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline's major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation. But foremost of those arguing for common ground is Francis Collins.

Collins' devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins'. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, comparing the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis' map of his fateful continental exploration. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs.

He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science's largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate TIME arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30. Some excerpts from their spirited exchange:

TIME: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you believe that science is compatible with Christian faith.

COLLINS: Yes. God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

TIME: Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, famously argued that religion and science can coexist, because they occupy separate, airtight boxes. You both seem to disagree.

COLLINS: Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life. Because I do believe in God's creative power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.

DAWKINS: I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

TIME: Professor Dawkins, you think Darwin's theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story.

[Fade the Butcher]

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don't see that Professor Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.
TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

COLLINS: Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God--it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

TIME: The Book of Genesis has led many conservative Protestants to oppose evolution and some to insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

COLLINS: There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

DAWKINS: Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. However, what Dr. Collins has just been--may I call you Francis?

COLLINS: Oh, please, Richard, do so.

DAWKINS: What Francis was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues ...

COLLINS: It's not so private. It's rather public. [Laughs.]

DAWKINS: ... It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?

COLLINS: Richard, I think we don't do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position. Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn't it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?

[Fade the Butcher]

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you have described humanity's moral sense not only as a gift from God but as a signpost that he exists.

COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years--some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology--relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing? Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God--especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible--not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

COLLINS: I think that is a fundamental difference between us. I'm glad we identified it.

TIME: Dr. Collins, I know you favor the opening of new stem-cell lines for experimentation. But doesn't the fact that faith has caused some people to rule this out risk creating a perception that religion is preventing science from saving lives?

COLLINS: Let me first say as a disclaimer that I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach.

TIME: But to the extent that a person argues on the basis of faith or Scripture rather than reason, how can scientists respond?

COLLINS: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment." Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

We slaughter nonhuman animals in factory farms, and they do have nervous systems and do suffer. People of faith are not very interested in their suffering.

COLLINS: Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?

DAWKINS: Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

TIME: Do the two of you have any concluding thoughts?

COLLINS: I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world--the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

With reporting by With reporting by David Bjerklie, Alice Park/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Jeff Israely/Rome

[Fade the Butcher]

Wasn't Petr endorsing Collins the other day?

[Petr]

Wasn't Petr endorsing Collins the other day?
Strictly speaking, I wasn't. I merely pointed out that Dawkins was pushing the stupid multiverse idea in his debate with Collins.

Collins is too much a compromiser for my taste.


Petr

[Jimbo Gomez]

Post your crap intended for nothing more than trolling Petr all you want Fade, assuming your end doesn't come sudden, and you will be able to see it arrive, some of your last words will be prayer. I'm dead sure of it.

[Petr]

Post your crap intended for nothing more than trolling Petr all you want Fade, assuming your end doesn't come sudden, and you will be able to see it arrive, some of your last words will be prayer. I'm dead sure of it.
Fade doesn't seem to have had much to say recently besides bashing religion.


Petr

[Ambrosio Spinola]

I like very much this part:

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.


Btw...since this is being brought up and talking about Spaming. The very same can be said about Petr and his, for me, spaming religious drivel threads outside of the religion subforum. If Petr can then so can the other side refute it.

[Petr]

The very same can be said about Petr and his, for me, spaming religious drivel threads outside of the religion subforum. If Petr can then so can the other side refute it.
Seriously - what exactly qualifies as "religious drivel"? Any material that threatens the paradigm of materialistic reductionism?


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Post your crap intended for nothing more than trolling Petr all you want Fade, assuming your end doesn't come sudden, and you will be able to see it arrive, some of your last words will be prayer. I'm dead sure of it.

I was actually hoping to broaden this discussion. Say, why don't you tell us how your know your god is the right one out of the infinite number of conceivable gods? Why are you skeptical to the point of atheism about the existence of all gods but one? How do you know YHVH exists, but Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't? Petr hasn't been able to answer these questions to my satisfaction.

[Fade the Butcher]

Strictly speaking, I wasn't. I merely pointed out that Dawkins was pushing the stupid multiverse idea in his debate with Collins. Collins is too much a compromiser for my taste.


Petr

Your triumphant headline in the Science forum was "Collins Whups Dawkins in TIME Debate, opines evolutionist writer." I tracked down the article and posted it here for your benefit. I see nothing of the sort. Indeed, Collins says that Dawkins is right about everything he says about the natural world, evolution included.

His major argument is that science can say nothing about religion because God exists outside of the natural world. What sense does that make though? We can imagine an infinite number of make-believe worlds. I can say that science can't address the question of the existence of the Borg because the fictional Star Trek universe exists outside of our own.

[Petr]

I was actually hoping to broaden this discussion. Say, why don't you tell us how your know your god is the right one out of the infinite number of conceivable gods? Why are you skeptical to the point of atheism about the existence of all gods but one? How do you know YHVH exists, but Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't? Petr hasn't been able to answer these questions to my satisfaction.
The Christian religion has many very committed and competent apologists just itching to debate the representatives of other religions about the historical evidence. Here is a very small sample of them:

http://www.aomin.org/

http://www.christian-thinktank.com/

http://www.tektonics.org/

Besides, as even you have indirectly formerly admitted, Christianity has been able to co-exist more fruitfully with science than any other religion.


But we know all too well that you don't really want to know how superior the claims of Christianity really are compared to other religions, for you subscribe to a form of ideological egalitarianism - "all religions are, deep down, of equal worth."


Petr

[Petr]

Your triumphant headline in the Science forum was "Collins Whups Dawkins in TIME Debate, opines evolutionist writer."
That headline was written by evolutionist writer John Horgan, and it reflected his opinions. :rolleyes:

http://discovermagazine.typepad.com/horganism/2006/11/collins_whups_d.html

Once again cocky Fade jumped to conclusions.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

The Christian religion has many very committed and competent apologists just itching to debate the representatives of other religions about the historical evidence. Here is a very small sample of them:

I'm itching to hear your explanation of why your god is the true one and all others are fictitious. You have ducked the question several times now.

Besides, as even you have indirectly formerly admitted, Christianity has been able to co-exist more fruitfully with science than any other religion.

You are distorting my comments on the subject. The tension between Christianity and science has waxed and waned throughout history. In some periods, the Church was generally supportive of science. In others, it was not.


But we know all too well that you don't really want to know how superior the claims of Christianity really are compared to other religions, for you subscribe to a form of ideological egalitarianism - "all religions are, deep down, of equal worth."

I want to know why you are an atheist with respect to all other gods but the one you worship. Let's hear it.

[Fade the Butcher]

That headline was written by evolutionist writer John Horgan, and it reflected his opinions. Once again cocky Fade jumped to conclusions.


Petr

I don't see Collins whupping Dawkins in the debate at all. That's like saying because water is plentiful on earth, and humans require water in order to sustain their lives, Flying Spaghetti Monster must have put the water there for us.

[Petr]

I'm itching to hear your explanation of why your god is the true one and all others are fictitious. You have ducked the question several times now.
Why should I waste my time with a clown who has no sincere intentions and whose grasp of philosophy (not even mentioning theology) is as shallow as his science? Pearls before a swine it would be.


You could give me very exact reasons what exactly is the "White race" and what makes it superior.

This is the current scholarly consensus, bow down to it:

http://www.physanth.org/positions/race.html


Petr

[Petr]

I don't see Collins whupping Dawkins in the debate at all. That's like saying because water is plentiful on earth, and humans require water in order to sustain their lives, Flying Spaghetti Monster must have put the water there for us.
Who cares? Not me.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Why should I waste my time with a clown who has no sincere intentions and whose grasp of philosophy (not even mentioning theology) is as shallow as his science? Pearls before a swine it would be.

Babelfish: I have no answer!

You could give me very exact reasons what exactly is the "White race" and what makes it superior.

I don't recall saying anywhere that the white race is superior.

This is the current scholarly consensus, bow down to it:

http://www.physanth.org/positions/race.html

This "statement" on race is worded to be intentionally misleading and runs through a list of straw man arguments that no one uses. No one argues that races are discrete categories, that human races are not interfertile, that human populations are not in a state of genetic flux, that we are not members of the same species, that heredity and environment do not interact to produce phenotype, that we did not evolve from the same ancestral population, that there are pure races, that miscegenation doesn't exist, that human populations haven't migrated in the past, that nineteenth century racial classifications were not erroneous, and so on.

[Fade the Butcher]

Who cares? Not me.


Petr

You were making much of this in the other thread.

[Boleslaw]

Religion vs. science is a false opposite. But Fade no longer seems to understand that, and Im not wasting my time repeating myself for nth time.

[Fade the Butcher]

Religion vs. science is a false opposite. But Fade no longer seems to understand that, and Im not wasting my time repeating myself for nth time.

You're right. I'm just not getting that. Modern science is based upon methodological naturalism. There are also numerous claims made in the Bible about the material world that fall within the scope of science.

[Boleslaw]

You're right. I'm just not getting that.
Well it's not like you're completely incapable of such.

[Fade the Butcher]

Well it's not like you're completely incapable of such.

You dodged my question in the other thread. Do you believe in the "miracle" of transubstantiation?

[Boleslaw]

You dodged my question in the other thread. Do you believe in the "miracle" of transubstantiation?
I already answered you Fade in an old thread, yes I do believe in transubstantiation.

[Fade the Butcher]

I already answered you Fade in an old thread, yes I do believe in transubstantiation.

Explain. What exactly happens, in your words, when the priest administers the Eucharist?

[Boleslaw]

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=75728&postcount=84

[Fade the Butcher]

Largely I simply take the view that how that occurs is beyond human reasonining, since it's a divine occurance. This is a common position taken by many Eastern Christians like myself.

Now does it literally become Christ's blood and body? Of course not. My view is that the spirit of Christ's blood and body entered into the wine and bread of the eucharist.

But again, it should be noted that this is not an issue Ive spent much time pondering on. Sadly nowadays many theological discussions center around what really amount to trival issues.

One pathetic example Ive read concerning the Christological issue of whether or not Mary had to teach baby Jesus how to use a spoon.

Is it fair to say that you believe priests have magic powers?

[Boleslaw]

You can interpret it however you feel Fade. I really dont care anymore.

[Fade the Butcher]

You can interpret it however you feel Fade. I really dont care anymore.

This seems about right.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/magic

magic - the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature.

[Boleslaw]

Whatever makes you happy Fade.

[Insidium]

If religion would stay confined to its place - that is, the "spiritual" realm, no scientist would honestly give a shit about it. However, religion is, at this very moment, hampering science (as it has in the past) through its propagandistic ID movement.

Note: if a debate between two intellectuals/scientists is considered spam, then we most certainly should eliminate Petr's fallacious threads. He leaves them after being sufficiently refuted and then starts new ones, usually with the same, or similar claims.

[Fade the Butcher]

Whatever makes you happy Fade.

Do you have any evidence that the substance of the bread and wine, presumably at the molecular level, is changed when the priest casts his spell?

[Boleslaw]

If religion would stay confined to its place - that is, the "spiritual" realm, no scientist would honestly give a shit about it. However, religion is, at this very moment, hampering science (as it has in the past) through its propagandistic ID movement.

When exactly did religion hamper science? And dont give me Galileo, he got in trouble because he decided to delve into theological issues, as opposed to concentrating on scientific matters. He had the full support of the Pope for his research.

As even Fade himself admitted once upon a time, the Catholic Church was the greatest patron of scientific research that has ever existed.

[Fade the Butcher]

As even Fade himself admitted once upon a time, the Catholic Church was the greatest patron of scientific research that has ever existed.

Why was that?

[Fade the Butcher]

If religion would stay confined to its place - that is, the "spiritual" realm, no scientist would honestly give a shit about it.

The proper realm of religion is make-believe. :)

[Fade the Butcher]

When exactly did religion hamper science?

Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages.

[Petr]

Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages.
The most ahead-of-his-time scientist of that era, John Philoponus, specifically argued against the fundamental pagan concept of eternal universe. He first made the gravity experiments that Galileo would later repeat.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

The most ahead-of-his-time scientist of that era, John Philoponus, specifically argued against the fundamental pagan concept of eternal universe. He first made the gravity experiments that Galileo would later repeat.

We ran through this a few months ago. Christianity played a major role in launching Europe into the Dark Ages.

[Petr]

We ran through this a few months ago.
No we didn't. You didn't deal with Philoponus at all, and all your info on early Christianity came from one biased book.


Petr

[Insidium]

When exactly did religion hamper science? And dont give me Galileo, he got in trouble because he decided to delve into theological issues, as opposed to concentrating on scientific matters. He had the full support of the Pope for his research.

As even Fade himself admitted once upon a time, the Catholic Church was the greatest patron of scientific research that has ever existed.

Religion has hampered the theory of evolution whenever it could. Any honest person should realize that the ID/creationist movements are mere propaganda. They do not do any scientific research. Galileo was persecuted because of a mistake he made, but he was originally forbidden from holding or defending the heliocentric theory. I guess he should be thankful for that.

[Petr]

Any honest person should realize that the ID/creationist movements are mere propaganda. They do not do any scientific research.
Darwinists "didn't do any real research" until the 1930s.

http://telicthoughts.com/?p=502


Big ideas take time

by Krauze


Prompted by Mike's recent comments about Michael Ruse's latest book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, I decided to read it. Having finished it, I can confirm that it is indeed very good. One of the things Ruse describes is how long it actually took from Darwin published Origin of the Species until evolution took off as a proper scientific research program.

In the chapter "Failure of a Professional Science", Ruse writes:

Evolutionary biology as a professional science was distinctly second-rate. It failed to be properly causal; its "laws" often failed to predict; and worst of all it was riddled with cultural values, especially related to notions of progress. Deservedly, evolution was pushed out of the universities. [p. 101]
It wasn't as if research required some sophisticated technology that didn't exist at the time. "A professional science could surely have been started which looked not only at issues in the wild but also studied variation in the laboratory, by, for example, breeding generations of organisms to the point where reproductive barriers between the earlier and later variations arose. Not all of these experiments would have worked, but something would have succeeded and taken the issue a step further." (P. 88) Henry Walter Bates had done some work on mimicry in insects, but went on to become a secretary for the Royal Geographic Society (ironically, with Darwin's help), and no one took up his work.

It wasn't until the 1930's, more than 60 years after Darwin had published Origin of the Species, that an actual theory of evolution was proposed, dubbed "the synthetic theory". The mathematicians Ronald A. Fisher and Sewall Wright did the work necessary to make the effects of natural selection quantifiable, the journal Evolution was founded, and empiricists like Bernard Kettlewell and Ernst Mayr could carry out their field work, studying evolution in the wild.

In Ruse's terminology, evolution only gradually arose from pseudoscience, through popular science, before finally becoming a professional science in the 1930's. You could say that evolution evolved. Similarly, intelligent design has passed from being expressed in creationist pamphlets as a flimsy support for apologetics, to being expressed in popular science books. ID critcs often inquire as to why intelligent design still isn't doing any research, "10 years after Behe published Darwin's Black Box". However, they should remember the lesson taught to us by Darwin's followers: Big ideas take time.

[Fade the Butcher]

No we didn't. You didn't deal with Philoponus at all, and all your info on early Christianity came from one biased book.


Petr

The argument of this books is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigour and disappear. (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is a testimony to that.) Rather, in the fourth and fifth century A.D. it was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire. There had been premonitions of this destruction in the earlier Christian theology. It had been the Apostle Paul who declared war on the Greek rational tradition through his attacks on "the wisdom of the wise" and "the empty logic of the philosophers," words which were to be quoted in the centuries to come. . .

The imposition of orthodoxy went hand in hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning. By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of "mystery, magic, and authority," a substitution which drew heavily on the irrational elements of pagan society that had never been extinguished. Pope Gregory the Great warned those with a rational turn of mind that, by looking for cause and effect in the natural world, they were ignoring the cause of all things, the will of God. This was a vital shift in perspective, and in effect a denial of the impressive intellectual advances made by the Greek philosophers.

Some who have found this argument too damning have stressed how it was Christians who preserved the great works of the Greek philosophers by copying them from decaying papryi, or parchment. The historian is indeed deeply indebted to these monks, the Byzantine civil servants and the Arab philosophers who preserved ancient texts, but the recording of earlier authorities is not the same as maintaining a tradition of rational thought. This can be done only if these authorities are then used as inspiration for further intellectual progress or as a bulwark against which to react. This happened in the Arab world (where, for instance, even the findings of a giant such as Galen were challenged and improved on) but not in the Byzantine empire or Christian west. The Athenian philosopher Proclus made the last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world in A.D. 475. It was not until the sixteenth century that Copernicus -- inspired by the surviving works of Ptolemy but aware that they would make more sense, and in fact would be simpler, if the sun was placed at the centre of the universe -- set in hand the renewel of the scientific tradition. The struggle between religion and science had now entered a new phase, one which is beyond the scope of this book. What cannot be doubted is how effectively the rational tradition had been eradicated in the fourth and fifth centuries. The "closing of the Western mind" has been ignored for all too long. I hope this book reinvigorates debate on this turning point in European history."

Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p.xv-xix

"The most important text, however, must be that which Thomas has selected to hold in his left hand; it is from the Apostle Paul: SAPIENTIAM SAPIENTUM PERDAM, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise." As this book will suggest, the phrase, supported by the other texts of Paul which condemn the "empty logic of the philosophers," was the opening shot in the enduring war between Christianity and science."

Ibid., p.4

"In the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., however, faith in this last sense achieved prominence over reason. The principles of empirical observation or logic were overruled in the conviction that all knowledge comes from God and even, in the writings of Augustine, that the human mind, burdened with Adam's original sin, is diminished in its ability to think for itself. For centuries any form of independent scientific thinking was suppressed. Yet, and this is the paradox of the Carafa fresco, it was actually Thomas, through reviving the works of Aristotle, who brought reason back into theology and hence into western thought. Once again it was possible for rational thought and faith to coexist. We will meet the other Thomas, the Thomas who champions reason alongside faith, in the final chapter of this book.

We begin by returning to ancient Greece and exploring in particular how reason became established as an intellectual force in western culture. Then we can see how Christianity, under the influential banner of Paul's denunciation of Greek philosophy, began to create the barrier between science -- and rational thought in general -- and religion that appaers to be unique to Christianity. Far from the rise of science challenging the Christian concept of God (as is often assumed by protagonists in the debate), it was Christianity that actively challenged a well-established and sophisticated tradition of scientific thinking."

Ibid., pp.5-6

[Petr]

The argument of this books is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigour and disappear.[B] (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is a testimony to that.)
As I said, Freeman makes his biasedness (or perhaps sheer ignorance) clear from the start - you yourself formerly emphasized that the Arabs had unprogressive and sterile philosophy. This includes non-religious Muslims like Averroes.

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2911&highlight=avicenna

In other words, Freeman is full of shit. I already showed how he anachronistically mis-interpreted Apostle Paul's condemnation of the occult "wisdom" (sophia) of Gnostics.

(Many supposedly anti-intellectual passages from Augustine are similarly aimed at "science" that in reality had more in common with Christian Science.)

The Athenian philosopher Proclus made the last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world in A.D. 475. It was not until the sixteenth century that Copernicus -- inspired by the surviving works of Ptolemy but aware that they would make more sense, and in fact would be simpler, if the sun was placed at the centre of the universe -- set in hand the renewel of the scientific tradition.
I am very suspicious about this claim, for in the 6th century, John Philoponus relied precisely on empirical astronomical observations to refute the rationalist pagan notion of unchanging celestial world, of stars being categorically different from earthly substances.


Petr