from the jesus in a box thread: All right, let's hear it mountain man. Please enlighten the rest of us.
I think maybe he has failed to grasp the self-correcting nature of the scientific process. Piltdown Man and the like can fool some people for atime but science excels in debunking frauds and disproving even legitimate but insufficiently robust theories. Theology has no such self-correcting safeguard with regards to natural observations.
fan Actually, theology is profoundly impacted by philosophy, which is also tied to empirical evidence. If you are interested in the theological implications of evolution, almost anything by the Catholic philosopher / theologian / paleontologist (he was involved in the excavation of Peking man) Teilhard de Chardin is applicable. Teilhard draws upon Aristotelian and Kantian ideas to draft the theological implications of evolution. To understand him correctly, then, demands some philosophical background--otherwise he sounds a bit jargony. While reading his collected papers is the best approach, I just did a web-search and a basic introduction can be found at www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html You will find there that Chardin's later teachings were forbidden to be published by the Church. You will also find that Chardin is very influential among modern theologians. Official churches are a bit like the FDA--they like to test something very thoroughly before accepting that its OK, and as a result it takes an excessively long time for new approaches to be accepted.
Re: Re: Re: fan Because we all know the white Christian churches were on the on the forefront of the civil rights movement. Anyway, like I said, science is self-correcting. Racist nonsense tends not to fare too well when science examines it, as the authors of "The Bell Curve" found to their chagrin. I find it ironic that religious fundamentalism is so demoralized that it has to try to justify itself in scientific terms. The resulting desperate pseudoscience of creationism would be funny if it wasn't so pitiful.
Yet people who originate directly from Africa have much more diverse DNA if I'm not mistaken. Is that racist?
heliocentrism Heliocentrism is actually a very interesting topic. The official church was heavily involved in disseminating heliocentrism. The fifteenth-century astronomer, Copernicus, after whom the Copernican theory is of course named, was encouraged repeatedly to publish his findings, and was eventually persuaded, by Cardinal Schonberg, Archbishop of Capua. His treatise itself was dedicated to Pope Pius III, and was read regularly throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although mainstream science disagreed with its tenants. In the seventeenth century, church censors had nine sentences, that presented the theory as fact and not just theory, of Copernicus's treatise changed to allow for alternate viewpoints. After the changes, Copernicus was officially endorsed for public consumption once again for the rest of the century. It is true, though, that while the Catholic Church supported research into Copernicus's ideas in the sixteenth century, Luther and Melancthon were strongly opposed. Why was Galileo's Copernican work banned, then, while Copernicus's treatise did not have significant censure? If you read Galileo's heliocentric works you will find that he had a talent for sarcasm and name-dropping unrivalled on bigsoccer.com. He was punished mostly for making personal enemies. Sad, but true. With regard to civil rights, and much earlier, slavery, churches were involved on both sides of the issue. The Episcopalean church, including very many white pastors, was particularly active in civil rights issues. It is a very large misrepresentation to suggest that churches were not active in civil rights, especially considering that so many of the leaders were reverends and Islamic leaders. Edit: To add even more words to this long-winded post--"science" has been incredibly discriminatory in the 20th century. The Nazi geneticism that persecuted inferior races was not a Germanic quirk--it was widely accepted scientific theory throughout Europe and America in the early twentieth-century. Our textbooks have conveniently skipped over this, but the info is out there in numerous monographs. Not my field of speciality, though, so can't name the good ones off hand and don't feel like doing a web-search!
Even if true, so what? Does that make them "superior"? Or "inferior" for that matter? Science can say "It has been observed that black Africans have more diverse DNA attributes than other groups" if that is in fact an observable, quantifiable phenomenon that has been empirically tested. While individual scientists may infer some sort of ranking system from that, science itself as a process and a general body of knowledge does not leap from that one observation to saying "Ergo, blacks are superior to whites (or vice versa)". In fact, I would think that evolution would argue against racism because its definition of "fittest" is fluid and not static. Therefore, because of the necessary interplay between species and their environment, there is no objective and eternal definition of "superior". Today's "superior" group is tomorrow's extinct group as conditions change. Just ask the dinosaurs. Or ask the cockroaches. They've outlasted most species on the planet. Will they outlast us?
Re: heliocentrism It sure is, but the neither the Catholic Church nor the Protestants were exactly friends of science when it contradicted their beliefs. From http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Copernicus.html : A full account of Copernicus's theory was apparently slow to reach a state in which he wished to see it published, and this did not happen until the very end of Copernicus's life when he published his life's work under the title 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' (Nuremberg, 1543). In fact had it not been for Georg Joachim Rheticus, a young professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Wittenberg, Copernicus's masterpiece might never have been published. We should note that Rheticus was a Protestant, so in those troubled times of the Reformation he took somewhat of a risk visiting a Catholic stronghold. By 29 August 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' was ready for the printer. Rheticus took the manuscript with him when he returned to his teaching duties at Wittenberg, and gave it the printer Johann Petreius in Nürnberg. This was a leading centre for printing and Petreius was the best printer in town. However, since he was unable to stay to supervise the printing he asked Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian with considerable experience of printing mathematical texts, to undertake the task. What Osiander did was to write a letter to the reader, inserted in place of Copernicus's original Preface following the title page, in which he claimed that the results of the book were not intended as the truth, rather that they merely presented a simpler way to calculate the positions of the heavenly bodies. The letter was unsigned and the true author of the letter was not revealed publicly until Kepler did so 50 years later. Osiander also subtly changed the title to make it appear less like a claim of the real world. Some are appalled at this gigantic piece of deception by Osiander, as Rheticus was at the time, others feel that it was only because of Osiander's Preface that Copernicus's work was read and not immediately condemned. It wasn't just hypercritical fussiness that caused Copernicus to delay the publication of the full "De revolutionibus". Copernicus also did not dare print his book until he was sure he had little time remaining to him because he believed it would be attacked. Obviously, Osiander agreed with that assessment. In fact, it was on his deathbed that Copernicus received a copy of the printed copy of "De revolutionibus". The only reason Copernican theory was at all acceptable to the Church was because it was sold to them as a purely utlitarian device for making calculations and NOT as a description of physical reality. That was to change when scientists became bolder in the their claims, starting with Galileo... The Catholic Church was at this time engaged in a vigorous argument with the Protestant Churches. One of the major points of disagreement was whether an individual could form their own interpretation of the Holy Scripture (the Protestant view) or whether, as the Catholic Church argued and had stated clearly after the Council of Trent in 1546, everyone must accept the interpretation of the Holy Scripture made by the Catholic Church. Galileo's arguments came too close to this touchy issue for the Catholic Church to be able to take no action. Pope Paul V ordered Bellarmine to have the Sacred Congregation of the Index decide on the Copernican theory. The cardinals of the Inquisition met on 24 February 1616 and took evidence from theological experts. It may seem strange to reader today to here that an idea was being put on trial, but in the context of the times it was not unusual. It took the theologians only a few of days to reach their decision and, perhaps surprisingly, it seems to have been made more to defend Aristotle's physics than to defend the Holy Scripture. The Inquisition reported: "... all said that the proposition of a stationary Sun is foolish and absurd in natural philosophy." Only as a second reason did they quote that Copernicus' theory was contrary to Holy Scripture and they declared that:- "... the doctrine attributed to Copernicus ... cannot be defended or held." Bellarmine conveyed the decision of the Inquisition to Galileo who had not been personally involved in the trial. At Galileo's request Bellarmine gave him a written certificate which made clear Galileo's own position. It declared that he was forbidden to hold Copernican views but, strangely, an alternative version would be produced years 17 years later which also said that Galileo was forbidden to teach the Copernican theory. Various conjectures about the alternative version have been put forward, many believing that it was a forgery by Galileo's enemies within the Catholic Church. However these matters arose much later and the result of the 1616 decision of the Congregation of the Index was to forbid Catholics to read Copernicus' Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until it had been 'corrected'. No works of Galileo were put on the Index, however, and the version of the judgement given by Bellarmine to Galileo appeared to still allow him to discuss the merits of Aristotle's theory and the Copernican theory. It only prevented him from arguing that the Copernican theory was true. Shortly after publication of 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican', the Inquisition banned its sale and order Galileo to appear in Rome before them.When he did so he was confronted with the alternative version of the ruling of 1616, which was an unsigned document. Galileo still had in his possession the certificate Bellarmine had signed and given him in 1616, although Bellarmine had died in 1621 so could not clarify the difficulty of the two versions. By the legal standards of today one would expect the alternative version stating that Galileo was forbidden to teach the Copernican theory to be overruled. Galileo's accusation at the trial which followed was exactly that he had breached the conditions of this unsigned alternative version. Found guilty, Galileo was condemned to lifelong imprisonment, but the sentence was carried out somewhat sympathetically and it amounted to house arrest rather than a prison sentence. He was able to return to his home but had to spend the rest of his life watched over by officers from the Inquisition. Whatever other personal motives the Chruch had for slapping down Galileo, you can't explain his case as entirely a matter of personal revenge. The Church did not want their doctrines challenged any more than the Reformation already had. I will say that one of the first steps of John Paul II's papacy, which began in 1978, was to begin procedures leading to the rehabilitation in 1992 of Galileo, the Italian astronomer persecuted by the Church for teaching that the Earth revolved around the sun. Only took them 359 years. As you can see, the Church was hardly "heavily involved in disseminating heliocentrism" once it was claimed as a description of physical reality (ie., once the Church leaders actually understood what was happening in the scientific community). I'm sorry, fan, but overall the mainstream white churches were conspicuous by their absence in the civil rights struggle. Sure, a few white priests and ministers got involved but they usually did so as individuals, in some cases risking the wrath of their institutions who did not want to rock any boats. It is emphatically NOT a misrepresentation to say that the white Christian churches as institutions dropped the ball in that case. To be fair, it also doesn't invalidate their teachings as much as one may wish they had actually practiced what they were supposed to be preaching. First, what the Nazis were doing was pseudoscience that was in its methodology little different from any other pseudoscience, including creationism. Like creationsim, it desperately wanted to be seen as "science" but that does not make it science. Second, I'll say it until you understand - science is self-correcting. Until the late 19th century, scientists thought that there was an "ether" through which all things moved. Now they don't. Until Einstein, scientists thought of the universe in terms of absolute space and time. Now they don't, at least not when dealing with certani problem of physics. The idea of evolution is itself evolving as we learn more and more and inadequate and inaccurate ideas are dumped. That's the way it works. Also, there is a difference between "science" and "individual scientists". Scientists as people are still subject to the usual human foibles and limitations. Individual scientists can hold all sorts of wacky beliefs. Some of them are even Christian! I forget who pointed this out, but I remember reading a piece to this effect: 'Watch a scientist go bowling. See how after he releases the ball, he still twists his body while willing it to avoid the gutter. Does he really believe that his gestures and his willing will affect the path of the ball after he has released it? Old habits and superstitions die hard.' Science as a methodology and body of knowledge, on the other hand... Third, since you bring up the Nazis, the Christian churches pretty much sat that one out too. Again, there were courageous individuals but the churches as institutions failed another test. As much as I otherwise dislike JP2, at least he had the balls to admit as much: "VATICAN CITY (Reuters) September 1, 1999 - Pope John Paul said Wednesday the Catholic Church would start a new page of its history in 2000 by publicly seeking forgiveness for the errors, injustices and human rights offences it committed in the past. Speaking at his weekly general audience, the Pope did not specifically list the Church's past errors but previous Vatican documents have spoken of seeking forgiveness for its treatment of Jews, the Inquisition and human rights abuses. In a major document last year, the Vatican apologized for Catholics who failed to do enough to help Jews against Nazi persecution during the Holocaust and acknowledged centuries of Catholic preaching of contempt for Jews. In an apparent reference to the Holocaust, the Pope Wednesday spoke of "the failure of not a few Christians to be discerning regarding situations of violations of human rights." "The request for forgiveness is valid for what was not done or for the failure to speak out," he said." The problem here is that instead of being the leaders in morality, the churches have had to be shamed into even giving lip service to their founder's teachings, which are supposed to be valid eternally unlike the theories and hypotheses of science which are formally acknowledged to be temporary until something better comes along, let alone acting on them.
Re: fan The FDA sucks big hairy donkey balls too. Nice dissertation, Joe. Planning on getting it published?
Re: Re: fan Yeah, you could at least get POTM at talk.origins with that one I'd think... especially this part:
Re: Re: Re: Re: fan It is not near as funny as science latching onto evolution so hard it has created its own religion. And even to the point of justifying itself in the same manner as what any unbiased person would consider a cult... The resulting psuedoreligion of evolution would be funny if it weren't so pitiful...
Re: Re: heliocentrism Good post, Pakovits. I am not claiming that Galileo wasn't persecuted, and I already noted that Copernicus's work was censored in the seventeenth century, but only those sentences that made claims that the Copernican theory alone made sense were corrected. The book as a whole was unavailable only for about 20 years. (It seems like a long time, but the publishing industry moved a bit more slowly then, so corrections took time). As you imply, the Church objected to teaching that Copernican theory was the only viable scientific option. It did not object to the study of Copernican science per se. While the Catholic Church was generally neutral to Copernican theory, outside of the tendentious seventeenth century (during which time, England killed its king in addition to all manner of other upheavals), Lutherans were more strongly opposed--yet it was Lutherans who first printed the work as you point out. It is certainly not a case of: Churches hate science. The picture is much more diverse. Certain prelates dislike certain theories at certain times would be a more accurate appraisal. As you note in your post, the main objection to Copernicus in the seventeenth century was motivated not by religioius reasons, but by scientific reasons:
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: fan About as much as any of Darwin's beliefs have to do with a heliocentric solar system. Actually, science has debunked creationism. The only reason anyone reasonable bothers with creationism is because creationism's partisans are so noisy and occasionally mount campaigns to get their beliefs incorrectly recognized as "science" in public schools. Other than that political activity, the creationists are the same as flat earthers. Your attempt to bring your perceived opponent down to your level has no basis. Science justifies itself on the fact that no other method of operation or belief system has done as good a job of observing, describing and explaining natural phenomena. That's it. Science (but not all individual scientists, it must be noted) only reacts to religion when religion foolishly and noisily wanders into science's home turf of natural phenomena. As long as religion stays within its own boundaries, science ignores it. In that sense, "Science v. Creationism" is a one-sided rivalry. It's important to the fundamentalists to try to justify themselves scientifically. Science hasn't given a crap about justifiying itself Biblically for a few centuries now.
I know of no Christians who believe that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around it. Most even accept new math, provided it allows for the Trinity.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: fan Darwin wasn't a racist. He and his family were against slavery, for example. He did, however, believe that the English were the peak of human civilization and that other cultures were inferior. This did not come out of any of his theories - it was simply what any member of the gentry believed at the time. Heck, it isn't too far removed from our own trips into foreign lands to teach the ignorant locals how to run a government amenable to corporate exploitat.. er, I mean investment. People accept evolution because it is a useful theory that explains many facts we observe about living things. You have to resort to name-calling because you have no evidence that people accept evolution irrationally or that evolution is grossly incorrect.
Re: Re: Re: heliocentrism Wrong. It objected to Copernicus's work the instant it became clear that Copernicus's work was being used to debunk the inaccurate Aristotelian and Ptolemaic underpinnings of some of the Church's doctrines. The Church would have banned ANY other heliocentric theory as well as Copernicus's. Only as long as it was possible to pretend that Copernicus's heliocentrism was merely a mathematical tool (obligatory "He said 'tool'!" reference) for making astronomical calculations that had no bearing on the real world. The second that became impossible, the Church banned heliocentrism. True, Protestants were also not friends of science. But that doesn't excuse the Catholics either. The fact remains that for the churches, partisan ideological concerns took precendence over the truth. When dogma and truth clashed, the churches chose dogma for as long as they were able before being forced by outside pressures to accept what by then was the blindingly obvious. It was more a case of "The Church tolerates science as long as science tells the Church what the Church wants to hear." Of course, now that western civilization is secular and the Church has to compete with many possible belief systems, outside pressures force the Church to make concessions to reality. But such concessions are forced upon it from outside. They are not built into the internal process as they are with science. As long as religion has enough worldly power, history teaches us that it generally remains intolerant of all other views and choose dogma over truth. Even if there were some members of the secular scientific community who opposed the copernican revolution, it still took the Church to ban the idea as long as it could. Theoretically, it could still be banned today if the Church was still in power. That's not how science works, however. Assuming the absence of a dominant church to which the scientists must kowtow, once Galileo's observations were released, it would have been up to those scientists to either refute the observations themselves or the theory based on them or improve on the observations or theory. In fact, such attempts at criticism and correction would have been exactly their job as scientists! No idea or observation gets an automatic free pass in science the way it could in religion. The Aristotelian scientists couldn't simply ban the observations like a church could and still claim to be scientists. Is there "politics" in science? Yep, but when there is no church or corporate interest to which one must genuflect and to which the truth must be sacrificed (and most of the time even then!), by the very nature of the scientific process, the truth comes out, sooner rather than later. I refer you to the work of both Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper for more.
"Equal" does not mean "Identical". Unless you accept the possibility of Platonic forms or the idea that subatomic particles are truly identical, there are no "identical" items in reality. The mathematical abstraction of "2 = 2" is technically true only because it is an abstraction. Once you try to count two physical objects as identical, you are mistaken because there will always be tiny differences. "Identity" is a useful fiction because, for practical purposes, I can treat two apples as "the same" for, say, pricing purposes or as ingredients in a pie even though they're not really "identical" in the exact sense. The same goes for people. You and I may be "equal" but we're not identical. And it impossible to say who is "better" on an Absolute basis because there is no one, single, absolute scale by which to judge. For example, you may be physically stronger but I may be smarter. You may be better looking while I may be "nicer". [Yul Brynner]Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera[/Yul Brynner]
But such concessions are forced upon religion from outside. They are not built into the internal process as they are with science. As long as religion has enough worldly power, history teaches us that it generally remains intolerant of all other views and choose dogma over truth.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: fan Funny. If you really read my quote it was a "fixed your post" quote from someone addressing me. There is, by the way, plenty of people who have an irrational attachment to evolution (even Joe-Pak would admit this.) And so evolution has to be proven "grossly incorrect"? That's quite a high bar, eh?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: fan There are some atheist fundamentalists who like evolution because they think it "disproves the Bible". They are wrong. It disproves one way (the literal inerrantist way) of interrepting the Bible. That's all it does. Beyond that, my guess is that people rationally recognize that evolution does a better job of describing and explaining observations of natural phenomena than do creationism or any other belief system based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. It's the people who believe in Biblical literalism despite its obvious shortcomings compared with science who are "irrationally attached".
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: fan Creation (per the bible) really does nothing to EXPLAIN origin. Creationism as a "science" falls short. Evolution, for now, indeed does do a "better" job. I am of the thought, however, that evolution is not "good enough". Whether it will be one day, I dont know...