OMFG LOL ROFL no one said this yet!!!
BAND NAME!!!
Not unless they happen to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Does the separation of church and state mean that public schools can’t have a separate religious instruction class?
The schools I’ve been to in Australia and Canada all had those (optional and compulsory, respectively) and you’d think that would mollify the fundies that keep trying to push creationism where it doesn’t belong.
No they can’t. Public money cannot be used for any sort of religious education. And it wouldn’t mollify them - once they got their classes, they’d object to any for religions they don’t like. There are chaplains in the military, and some fundies objected to Wiccan chaplains - unsuccessfully I’m happy to say.
Well, you know how it is when every other kid was invited to the party and you weren’t…
tomndebb,
How unlike you to accuse someone of only ‘thinking’ they are making a point before at least asking for clarification. You normally aren’t so condescending.
Firstly, the point I was making, in my own misguided way, was in my earlier post. Evolution is not truly the issue, and making it so either misses the mark, or opens up the door to reversing scientific progress thousands of years instead of a mere century or so. John Mace made a similar comment, and must type faster, because I hadn’t seen his post when I decided to comment.
The post you take issue with was a reply to LMM who states that the church equates Natural Selection with God’s plan. Before I get to what the RCC actually says on the matter, I’d like to address the mechanics of your argument.
Quite so. Like any good scientist, Darwin wasn’t in the habit of trying to prove unbounded negatives. In fact, I’m not aware of a scientific theory that includes the clause “no God in the machine.” I could, for example, explain the concept of parasitic inductance to a group of people, and I’d have no comment if someone insisted that, in addition to my explanation, tiny flightless pixies made off with the lost signals and hid them in tulips. You are correct only in that science won’t argue if God gets credit for things well outside the scope of understanding. You are not correct if you are implying that it follows that science and the church are therefore in agreement.
I’m glad you feel qualified to make a judgment call between Gould and Diamond. I like both, though I think Gould is more thorough, and I’d be hesitant declare one more correct than the other. I’ll just point out that most of Gould’s essays were peer reviewed, and Discover, while a fine mainstream magazine, is not the same as a peer reviewed essay.
Like I said, scientists know enough to keep away from unbounded negatives, and if you want to interpret that silence as consent, be my guest. However, the RCC isn’t as prudent.
- Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.* – This statement was found to be consistent with catechism by Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004
“Impetus and guidance of God.” Natural selection can’t be the determining factor if God’s guidance is required. The argument that God uses natural selection as His tool is factitious. Natural selection involves random mutation and selection by reproduction. If you stick any being’s guidance in there, you have destroyed key points of the theory. You can’t water down natural selection, and then state it is consistent with church teachings. It’s dishonest. If natural selection required a God, programmers could not create evolving programs, botanists could not create new plants, etc.
Pope John Paul II, reiterating Pius XII’s Hamani Generis states that, “Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.” It’s clear to me that the RCC is agreeable to evolution, but is careful to divorce itself from any mechanism that could explain the emergence of human intellect. In pure natural selection, man is just another animal, one whose survival strategy depends more upon a capacity to learn than on more physical traits.
There’s room here for argument, but I believe I’ve backed up my statements. If you would like to discuss it civilly, I’m game. Thanks, W.
Waverly, you understqand the science, but I’m not sure you have a full appreciation of the Church’s intent here. It’s clearly not the RCC’s intent to suggest that the science of the matter involves guidance from an outside force; they are essentially trying to acquiesce to science and say “Okay, evolution is fact, but it’s all part of God’s grand design, since He is the big supervisor.” It’s a sheer God-works-in-mysterious-ways catch-all, which I freely admit is kind of bogus but it’s more honest than saying all the scientists in the world are wrong. There’s no intent on the part of the Church to genuinely question the scientific aspects of the theory. They are, rightly, concerned only with the spiritual implications.
Obviously, this is quite the opposite of the evangelical approach, which is to deny actual facts in favour of fantasy.
This can be rather easily gotten around by simply saying that God’s will is manifested in random mutation and selection, or that God at the moment of the creation of the Universe set into motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to where we are now - hardy a challenge for a supposedly omnipotent being.
I’m sorry, Waverly, but I still do not get your point. I won’t type out a complete response, because it would sound too much like a rehash of RickJay’s post, but the fact that you keep trying to imply that there is some sort of conflict between the RCC position and science has not been demonstrated by your arguments.
As to the differences between Gould and Diamond, there is no “peer review” sought or needed on this topic. Neither Gould’s comments nor Diamond’s response were placed in peer-reviewed articles (or publications). They were both expressing a philosophical point in popular journals. In this case, Diamond has the better argument: Gould proclaimed a necessary atheism to evolution while Diamond simply pointed out that an absence of evidence is not a valid evidence of absence.
My friend’s wife taught science and evolution at some kind of Christian school, probably Catholic. I was happily surprised when she told me about it.
tomndebb, RickJay,
Whaddaya know, revenge of the compound user names! I’m aware that there is a perception that the RCC has aligned itself with the science behind natural selection.
Without going into very much detail, what I’m saying is that they dumbed it down, pleaded a special case for man, and then agreed to it. To wit, no matter how unknowable, mysterious, or high level, there is no intelligent design in natural selection - and yes, there are implications involved if you include one. There is no special case for man. You can’t twist someone’s meaning prior prior to agreeing and truely be in agreement.
My post was a bit of a hasty one-liner, but tomndeb explained my point much better than I could myself.
The RCC says, essentialy, that it’s God’s will that the universe be as it is. We may seek to explain how it works, but we won’t find, as someone put it, the fingerprints of God. We won’t disprove the existence of God, either, or be able to show that the universe was not purposefully created.
If the RCC made a special Wallace-like pleading for human evolution, I would agree that you have made a point. However, that does not seem to be the case. The RCC does not posit that humanity must be an upright bipedal mammal of four appendages, binocular vision, and a sense of humor in order to further God’s plan. It does make the claim that all of creation encompasses God’s plan and that when humanity became humanity, God was responsble for the spiritual aspect of humanity. Since the spiritual aspect of humanity (if it is not a mirage created by misfring synapses in the brain) is outside the realm of science, I think you are reading into the church statements more than the church wrote into them.
Which brings us back to my theory that Dick Cheney is The Dark Lord. But anyway…
True. What moves this whole debate from ideal ‘pointing out that the theory is utterly without basis in fact’ and into ‘you’re an idiot’ territory is the insistence of the anti-evolution folks that they be given equal time they haven’t earned. I’m not sure whether the people who lead these charges are ignorant themselves, or if they are being dishonest and relying on the fact that the people who agree with them are also ignorant (of what ‘theory’ means, for example). Some of them probably don’t know how science works, others don’t care, some probably don’t care that they don’t know. 
If you don’t understand this kind of stuff, you shouldn’t be involved in a debate about science education in the first place. And not only do these folks get loudly involved, they refuse to fight on a level playing field. In addition to the ignorance of science, they’ll do what you’re doing: insist evolution advocates be reasonable and restrained, while they themselves argue that evolution is “atheistic” and evil and all the rest of it.
Courses in comparative religion are offered in some schools, but instruction that promotes one religion or branch of a religion over another if forbidden. Even though the law has remained the same, during my lifetime its interpretation has become more restrictive. That is, I believe, as it should be. Our schools are becoming more diverse. Multi-culltural and differing relgious teachings must be respected.
In looking back at my own experiences growing up and teaching, religious instruction did not belong in a public school. The parents should be responsible for that.
The way religious education classes in Sydney public schools was done is that once a week there’s a block for RE. Any denomonation that had a significant following (enough students and someone willing to come in and teach) had a separate class – eg, I went to the Jewish one at the request of my mum. There was also a separate class which was basically a free period for anyone who didn’t want to go to an RE class.
I just don’t see why a system like that wouldn’t please everybody, even the Fundies.
There’s no pleasing some people.
Then you need a naivetectomy, stat, because as is, you’re too sweet, trusting, friendly and innocent to survive in this world. For God’s sake, man, this thread started because Fundies are protesting that the schools are being run by servants of Satan who want children to learn about science and fact instead of Christ’s Truth.
Then they will protest even louder about other religions being taught, because everybody knows Christianity is the One True Religion. People of other “faiths” are God-benighted heathens who should go back where they came from if they want to rape babies for Satan, because America is a Christian country that will not stand for their perverted denial of God.
Lastly, they will damn you all to Hell for making (Christian) RE optional, thus tempting children into indolence and denying them the right to hear God’s Word.
And in any case, I think the chief stumbling-block would still be that the government is required to be neutral about religion. So if a public school were providing class time for spokespersons for particular religions to give religious instruction to students, rather than just teaching about religion as an academic subject, ISTM we’d have a SoCaS problem, no matter how many different religions we were promoting.
Free time and after-school time can be used by students on school premises for religious study groups and prayer rallies and the like, but that’s okay because it’s not being mandated by the gov’t.-supported school administration.
I guess I just haven’t had to deal with any hard core fundies yet. Thank god they’re still very much a fringe in Australia!
No matter how equitable you tried to make this, there is no way a plan like this would last ten minutes in the US before someone sued the school district. (And rightly so, as it would be unconstitutional.) Religion in the schools is so fraught with controversy, is it any wonder most districts prefer to ignore it completely? Which is sad, if you ask me - religion is a legitimate field of study, and important to know about if you’re going to try to understand other cultures.