As this is the only post mentioning Catholics specifically, it’s probably the nicest place to drop a comment on the Catholic view on the matter, which really cuts to the heart of the comments on literalism and fundamentalist faith.
As laid out in Fides et Ratio, faith and reason – in this case Catholicism as revealed through the Bible and other sources and evolutionary biology – are two different epistemologies (methods of coming to knowledge) and as such cannot directly contradict each other.
It’s like there’s a Truth out there – imagine it like a cube – and we can only come to comprehend it imperfectly. Religion comes along and slices the cube one way and says “the cross-section is a square”. Science comes along and slices another way, stating “the cross-section is a hexagon”. Neither is more or less right; they’re both right in different ways.
N.B.: this is not to espouse relativism. The Catholic position is still that to reject the truths revealed by the epistemology of Catholic faith is wrong.
To explain it requires a better knowledge than I have. Not a great answer I know.
The best I can recall is this and it is inexact. Cells/DNA/Mitochrondia contain a ‘record’ of the organism’s history. In that record you can see a biological history of people that is full of digressions and dead-ends and a memory of inherited but unused and useless biological information.
Intelligent Design would predict evidence purposeful changes in moving towards an ultimate designed person. Instead the evidence suggests a haphazard and inelegant history.
Someone more able than I may be along to correct my attempt.
If you ask me, the purpose of science is understanding the thoughts of the One who causes the universe to exist. Some people may think that some of the findings of some branches of science imply that man is just meat, but that doesn’t make their philosophical opinions scientific facts.
As the Catholics say, truth can’t contradict truth. If we are more than just meat, science isn’t going to disprove it.
You really believe that is one of the goals of science? To destroy religion? Religion is irrelevant to science; and fundies hate to be ignored. They are just demanding the spotlight be returned to them. They know that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is more than just an old saying. Without the fear of God or Satan or Death or Pain, fundies have nothing, so they demonize that which threatens them, even if it is unintentional. Fundies fear that science will render their message of control through fear impotent; that is why they are fighting any form of critical thinking so vociferously.
I guess it depends on what you mean by Intelligent Design.
If you simply mean theistic evolution, in which the natural processes occur under potential divine guidance, there can never be evidence for or against it. (See the “what is supernatural?” discussions that have popped up around here in the last couple of weeks.)
If you mean the “god of the gaps” proposed by Dembski, Behe, and others, (which is what capitalizing the phrase generally indicates) there are two specific problems with it, neither of which provide evidence against it, but both of which make an adherence to ID rather problematic. The first problem is that it is not yet science and may never be science. It provides no method of falsification and actually provides no way to identify when it may have occurred. If some Intelligence stepped in to make something happen, how would we idenitify that Intelligence’s fingerprints? How does one demonstrate something in nature that occurred outside of nature? The second problem is that the events that the proponents of ID have offered (the “gaps” into which they are wedging their “god”), keep getting smaller as real scientists continue to find more natural events explaining the actual process in which the ID proponenets originally claimed to have found an event that could not occur naturally. It is not a very strong position the ID people find themselves defending when, within ten years of their initial bold declarations, the naturalist scientists have taken away 90% of their original claims.
There is simply no evidence for Intelligent Design; none has been presented by its proponents.
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This, of course, is simply the extreme version of the second point I mentioned in post #13, in which some fearful believer, threatened by the a-theistic (not atheistic) nature of science and ignorant of any actual scientific efforts, goes on to invent lies that there is actually a plot by scientists to destroy G/god. This lie gets repeated often enough that some people are actually willing to ignore the fact that the majority of scientists are actually believers, themselves, making their conspiracy rather futile.
In this case, it is simply a matter of willfull self-deception.
To answer that one would need to have a better definition of ID. For example, if ID means that god put in place the basic conditions under which life developed from simple organisms to more complex ones, then there is no evidence against it.
If ID means that man was created from mud 6,000 years ago, then there is radiologcal, genetic, and fossil evidence aplenty to show that it is wrong.
To clarify, by Intelligent Design, I afford that term the most credit it can have.
That is, it amounts to a scientific theory which makes predictions and is able to be falsified. In other words the scientific theory of intelligent design.
Where such a theory makes predictions, those turn out to be wrong. Where that theory admits of possible falsification, the evidence does tend to falsify it.
On the other hand if by Intelligent Design, you understand the undetectable agency of the divine, then predicting results and the possibility of falsification are excluded. The action of supernatural agencies is a matter in which science has nothing to say.
If there is intelligent design, then there is (or was) an intelligent being out there doing all this designing and creating. So a scientist would want to know what we can find out about this being, including the obvious question: “Who designed and created the intelligent designer?”
Intelligent design in principle isn’t possible, we’re doing it all the time. Behe claims that there are structures for which no non-design explanation is possible. That can never be disproven, each case must be examined. Behe accepts evolution, by the way, and I believe he accepts an old earth.
The YECs have latched on to ID since it is the closest thing to science they can get. There seems to be a major disconnect between their beliefs and those of the IDers. This gets papered over because they need each other - the YECers need a fig leaf of an actual scientist, and Behe needs someone to listen to him and buy his books.
As for lekatt - don’t believe him about how wonderful things used to be. There was a school shooting in my high school 37 years ago. It was a city school, but not a bad one, and we had the highest test scores of any regular high school in NYC. It was just a pistol, aimed at one person, since we didn’t have the right to carry assault weapons in those days. 45 years ago everyone thought the country was going to hell because of all the juvenile delinquents.
And it’s too bad that unbiased science doesn’t come out the way you want it to. Deal with it.
Saying that ‘Science is trying to destroy religion’ is way too strong a statement. If Lekatt said It seems to Fundies that… then ok maybe.
But the fact is, Scientists are just reporting what they find… If some people are interpreting it to mean that a deity does not exist thats not the scientists problem or intention.
Fundies will eventually have to acept this. Yes it sees that they are ‘fighting back’ in the southern US but they are doomed to fail. The rest fo the world is marching forward with our knowledge of the way the world works, despite the fundies.
On ID, Behe’s claim that components such as the eye are irreducibly(sp? lol. dont feel like looking it up)… complex is easily proven wrong. Therefore his version of ID is easily proven wrong.
This says nothing of the possibility that a ‘designer’ set the ball of evolution rolling or has tweaked certain things along the way. this cannot be proven or disproven by sience or anything else
Well, while lekatt is not a Fundamentalist Christian, he shares many of their beliefs. What he has provided, here, is a real life example of a person who has confused what they fear from science with an actual (anthropomorphized) intent of science.
In order to do this, of course, he has to ignore that fact that so many scientists are believers–even Christians. He has to pretend that his distorted view of the teaching of science (which he admits he has not even observed) has in some magical way changed all of society (and has to distort history in order to pretend that this magical change was not only coincident with but causal to the teaching of real science in schools–and he has failed to demonstrate even coincidence, much less causality).
(Here is a hint for lekatt: your claims about there being no bullying in the good old days are sheer nonsense. My Dad was born in 1914 and had plenty of tales of bullying. Bullying is a standard theme in stories written about schools going back over a hundred years, so it is not something that just erupted since schools began teaching evolutionary science. Beyond that, there is the clear case that many schools have continued to avoid the actual teaching of evolution, yet the students in those schools turn out just the same (good or bad) as students from schools where evolution has been taught–differing only in their level of ignorance regarding biology.)
Very gently: If some higher intelligence created this universe, it would be impossible for us to say we know how He would have created it. What may look haphazard and inelegant to us may be beautiful to Him. Assuming a He, but who knows for sure, no one.
That’s how the religious people see it. Saying religion is irrelevant to science is a lot like saying the rest of the world is irrelevant to America. Fear has been a great motivator, but it is now time to look at love.
