Panel Discussion Faith Evolution
THEORY OF EVOLUTION
What Is Science?
Science
is a way of understanding the world, not a mountain of facts. Before anyone can
truly understand scientific information, they must know how science works.
Science does not prove anything absolutely -- all scientific ideas are open to
revision in the light of new evidence. The process of science, therefore,
involves making educated guesses (hypotheses) that are then rigorously and
repeatedly tested. For a better understanding of the nature and process of
science, check out these links, books, and articles. 
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/09/index.html 10/10/03
VICTORIAN SCIENCE IN 2004?
The Complete Writings of Charles Darwin
If the Origin of Species was 'one long argument' it
was also work of extended gestation. Darwin spent over 20 years
collecting information, reading, and reflecting on the problem of species, from
the time of his voyage on the Beagle (2 December 1831 - 29 October 1836)
through the last difficult years just before its publication. In a
certain sense the writing of the Origin took on a life of its own.
1837 - (July) Began first notebook,
'Transmutation of Species' There stated: 'In July opened first notebook on
transmutation of species. Had been greatly struck from about the previous March
on character of South American fossils, and species on Galapagos Archipelago.
These facts (especially latter), origin of all my views.'
1838 - (July) Reading of Thomas Malthus'
'Essay on Population.'
1842 - (May) 'Sketch of 1842' - 35 page
outline (in pencil).
1844 -- (May) 'Essay of 1844' - 231 page
essay (in ink).
1856 -- (May 14) Began 5 vol. work on
species.
1858 --(June 18) Received paper from
Wallace.
1858 -- (July 1) Published paper with
Wallace.
1858 -- (July 20) Began to write a larger
work, An Abstract, 'On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or
the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.'
1859 -- (November 24) Origin is
published; 1,250 copies all sold the first day.
1860 -- (January 7) 2nd ed. - 3,000 copies.
1861 -- (April) 3rd ed. - 2,000 copies.
1866 -- (December 15) 4th ed. - 1,250
copies.
1869 -- (August 7) 5th ed - 2,000 copies.
1872 -- (February 19) 6th ed. - 3,000
copies.
Thomas Henry Huxley
a biography of Darwin's Bulldog
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Charles Darwin had little appetite for involvement
in the growing controversy which he, and Alfred Russel Wallace, had initiated
by making their theories known to the public to the Linnaean Society in
London in June 1858. Thomas Henry Huxley was however a man of a different
mettle!!! He was known to be both intellectual brilliant and also to relish
intense debate and was to become remarkable as the foremost supporter in
England for the theory of Evolution. |
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/huxley_darwins_bulldog.html 10/13/03
THOMAS HUXLEY 1860
The Origin of Species
by Thomas H. Huxley
The Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently simple and
comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions may be stated in a
very few words: all species have been produced by the development of varieties
from common stocks; by the conversion of these, first into permanent races and
then into new species, by the process of natural selection, which
process is essentially identical with that artificial selection by which man
has originated the races of domestic animals—the struggle for existence
taking the place of man, and exerting, in the case of natural selection, that
selective action which he performs in artificial selection.
The evidence brought forward by Mr. Darwin in support of this
hypothesis is of three kinds. First, he endeavors to prove that species may be
originated by selection; secondly, he attempts to show that natural causes are
competent to exert selection; and thirdly, he tries to prove that the most
remarkable and apparently anomalous phenomena exhibited by the distribution,
development, and mutual relations of species, can be shown to be deducible from
the general doctrine of their origin, which he propounds, combined with the
known facts of geological change; and that, even if all these phenomena are not
at present explicable by it, none are necessarily inconsistent with it.
There cannot be a doubt that the method of inquiry which Mr. Darwin has
adopted is not only rigorously in accordance with the canons of scientific
logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in
classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in
their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about
Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough,
forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of
scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the perusal of Mr.
Mill's admirable chapter "On the Deductive Method," that there are
multitudes of scientific inquiries in which the method of pure induction helps
the investigator but a very little way.
"The mode of investigation," says Mr. Mill, "which, from
the proved inapplicability of direct methods of observation and experiment,
remains to us as the main source of the knowledge we possess, or can acquire,
respecting the conditions and laws of recurrence of the more complex phenomena,
is called, in its most general expression, the deductive method, and consists
of three operations: the first, one of direct induction; the second, of
ratiocination; and the third, of verification."
Now, the conditions which have determined the existence of species are
not only exceedingly complex, but, so far as the great majority of them are
concerned, are necessarily beyond our cognizance. But what Mr. Darwin has
attempted to do is in exact accordance with the rule laid down by Mr. Mill; he
has endeavored to determine certain great facts inductively, by observation and
experiment; he has then reasoned from the data thus furnished; and lastly, he
has tested the validity of his ratiocination by comparing his deductions with
the observed facts of Nature. Inductively, Mr. Darwin endeavors to prove that
species arise in a given way. Deductively, he desires to show that, if they
arise in that way, the facts of distribution, development, classification,
etc., may be accounted for, i.e. may be deduced from their mode of
origin, combined with admitted changes in physical geography and climate,
during an indefinite period. And this explanation, or coincidence of observed
with deduced facts, is, so far as it extends, a verification of the Darwinian
view.
There is no fault to be found with Mr. Darwin's method, then; but it is
another question whether he has fulfilled all the conditions imposed by that
method. Is it satisfactorily proved, in fact, that species may be originated by
selection? that there is such a thing as natural selection? that none of the
phenomena exhibited by species is inconsistent with the origin of species in
this way? If these questions can be answered in the affirmative, Mr. Darwin's
view steps out of the rank of hypotheses into those of proved theories; but, so
long as the evidence at present adduced falls short of enforcing that
affirmation, so long, to our minds, must the new doctrine be content to remain
among the former—an extremely valuable, and in the highest degree probable,
doctrine, indeed the only extant hypothesis which is worth anything in a
scientific point of view; but still a hypothesis, and not yet the theory of
species.
After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias against Mr.
Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence stands, it is
not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters
exhibited by species in Nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether
artificial or natural. Groups having the morphological character of
species—distinct and permanent races in fact—have been so produced over and
over again; but there is no positive evidence, at present, that any group of
animals has, by variation and selective breeding, given rise to another group which
was, even in the least degree, infertile with the first. Mr. Darwin is
perfectly aware of this weak point, and brings forward a multitude of ingenious
and important arguments to diminish the force of the objection. We admit the
value of these arguments to their fullest extent; nay, we will go so far as to
express our belief that experiments, conducted by a skillful physiologist,
would very probably obtain the desired production of mutually more or less
infertile breeds from a common stock, in a comparatively few years; but still,
as the case stands at present, this "little rift within the lute" is
not to be disguised nor overlooked.
In the remainder of Mr. Darwin's argument our own private ingenuity has
not hitherto enabled us to pick holes of any great importance; and judging by
what we hear and read, other adventurers in the same field do not seem to have
been much more fortunate. It has been urged, for instance, that in his chapters
on the struggle for existence and on natural selection, Mr. Darwin does not so
much prove that natural selection does occur, as that it must occur; but, in
fact, no other sort of demonstration is attainable. A race does not attract our
attention in Nature until it has, in all probability, existed for a
considerable time, and then it is too late to inquire into the conditions of
its origin. Again, it is said that there is no real analogy between the
selection which takes place under domestication, by human influence, and any
operation which can be effected by Nature, for man interferes intelligently.
Reduced to its elements, this argument implies that an effect produced with
trouble by an intelligent agent must, à fortiori, be more troublesome,
if not impossible, to an unintelligent agent. Even putting aside the question
whether Nature, acting as she does according to definite and invariable laws,
can be rightly called an unintelligent agent, such a position as this is wholly
untenable. Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his
mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains
of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes. And
so, while man may find it tax all his intelligence to separate any variety
which arises, and to breed selectively from it, the destructive agencies
incessantly at work in Nature, if they find one variety to be more soluble in
circumstances than the other, will inevitably, in the long run, eliminate it.
A frequent and a just objection to the Lamarckian hypothesis of the
transmutation of species is based upon the absence of transitional forms
between many species. But against the Darwinian hypothesis this argument has no
force. Indeed, one of the most valuable and suggestive parts of Mr. Darwin's
work is that in which he proves, that the frequent absence of transitions is a
necessary consequence of his doctrine, and that the stock whence two or more
species have sprung, need in no respect be intermediate between these species.
If any two species have arisen from a common stock in the same way as the
carrier and the pouter, say, have arisen from the rock-pigeon, then the common
stock of these two species need be no more intermediate between the two than
the rock-pigeon is between the carrier and pouter. Clearly appreciate the force
of this analogy, and all the arguments against the origin of species by
selection, based on the absence of transitional forms, fall to the ground. And
Mr. Darwin's position might, we think, have been even stronger than it is if he
had not embarrassed himself with the aphorism, "Natura non facit saltum,"
which turns up so often in his pages. We believe, as we have said above, that
Nature does make jumps now and then, and a recognition of the fact is of no
small importance in disposing of many minor objections to the doctrine of
transmutation.
But we must pause. The discussion of Mr. Darwin's arguments in detail
would lead us far beyond the limits within which we proposed, at starting, to
confine this article. Our object has been attained if we have given an intelligible,
however brief, account of the established facts connected with species, and of
the relation of the explanation of those facts offered by Mr. Darwin to the
theoretical views held by his predecessors and his contemporaries, and, above
all, to the requirements of scientific logic. We have ventured to point out
that it does not, as yet, satisfy all those experiments; but we do not hesitate
to assert that it is as superior to any preceding or contemporary hypothesis,
in the extent of observational and experimental basis on which it rests, in its
rigorously scientific method, and in its power of explaining biological
phenomena, as was the hypothesis of Copernicus to the speculations of Ptolemy.
But the planetary orbits turned out to be not quite circular after all, and,
grand as was the service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and Newton had
to come after him. What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too
circular? What if species should offer residual phenomena, here and there, not
explicable by natural selection? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a
position to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they
will owe the author of "The Origin of Species" an immense debt of
gratitude.
We should leave a very wrong impression on the reader's mind if we
permitted him to suppose that the value of that work depends wholly on the
ultimate justification of the theoretical views which it contains. On the
contrary, if they were disproved tomorrow, the book would still be the best of
its kind—the most compendious statement of well-sifted facts bearing on the
doctrine of species that has ever appeared. The chapters on Variation, on the
Struggle for Existence, on Instinct, on Hybridism, on the Imperfection of the
Geological Record, on Geographical Distribution, have not only no equals, but,
so far as our knowledge goes, no competitors, within the range of biological
literature. And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the
publication of Von Baer's "Researches on Development," thirty years
ago, any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only
on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over
regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated.
[ Thomas H. Huxley, "The Origin of Species," from Collected
Essays, vol. 2, Darwiniana, London: Macmillan, 1860, pp. 71-79;
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/huxley_selection.html 10/13/03
In
the Name of Darwin
Dr. Daniel Kevles
Introduction
Some supporters of Darwin's theory of
evolution have misapplied the biological principles of natural selection --
"survival of the fittest" -- to the social, political, and economic
realms.
The idea of "social
Darwinism" originated in the class stratification of England, and has
often been used as a general term for any evolutionary argument about the
biological basis of human differences. Drawing on social Darwinism, supporters
of the 20th-century eugenics movement sought to "improve" human
genetic stock, much as farmers do in agriculture.
This essay
examines the history of eugenics and considers modern genetic research in the
same light, so that the lessons of history are not forgotten.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel J. Kevles, a historian of science and society, is the Stanley
Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. He has written extensively
about the social and political relations of science. His works include In the
Name of Eugenics (1995), The Physicists: The History of a Scientific
Community in Modern America (1995), and The Baltimore Case: A Trial of
Politics, Science, and Character (2000).
ABOUT THE ESSAY
Adapted with permission of Harvard University
Press from the 1995 Preface to In the Name of Eugenics, Daniel Kevles,
ix-xiii. Copyright © 1995 by Daniel J. Kevles. (Boldface added.)
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The specter of
eugenics hovers over virtually all contemporary developments in human genetics. Eugenics was
rooted in the social Darwinism of the late 19th century, a period in which notions
of fitness, competition, and biological rationalizations of inequality were
popular. At the time, a growing number of theorists introduced Darwinian
analogies of "survival of the fittest" into social argument.
Many social Darwinists insisted that biology was destiny, at least for
the unfit, and that a broad spectrum of socially deleterious traits, ranging
from "pauperism" to mental illness, resulted from heredity. |
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The word "eugenics" was
coined in 1883 by the English scientist Francis Galton, a
cousin of Charles Darwin, to promote the ideal of perfecting the human
race by, as he put it, getting rid of its "undesirables"
while multiplying its "desirables" -- that is, by encouraging
the procreation of the social Darwinian fit and discouraging that of the
unfit. In Galton's day, the science of genetics was not yet understood.
Nevertheless, Darwin's theory of evolution taught that species did change as
a result of natural selection, and it was well known that by artificial
selection a farmer could obtain permanent breeds of plants and animals strong
in particular characteristics. Galton wondered, "Could not the race of
men be similarly improved?" |
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The Bell
Curve sparks
controversy |
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These anxieties are
rooted in the social tensions that beset contemporary society. They
were heightened by the recent renewal of assertions -- notably in The Bell
Curve, Charles Murray and the
late Richard J. Herrnstein's
widely discussed book of 1994 -- that racial groups differ from each other in
their innate mental capacities. Murray and Herrnstein reported that the
principal difference lies between whites on the one side, and Latinos and,
especially, blacks on the other. Blacks on average score 15 points lower than
whites on IQ tests. Herrnstein
and Murray concluded that therefore blacks as a group are less intelligent
than whites. They held that genes place blacks, along with whites of
comparable test performance, disproportionately in poverty, in prison, on the
welfare rolls, and in the statistics of illegitimate births. They insisted
that the high maternity rate of low-income groups is fostering
"dysgenics," the increase of inadequate genes in the population. |
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Such claims are not new. They formed
part of the core of the eugenics movement that swept through the Anglo-American
world and many other countries during the first third of the 20th century. In
the United States, however, the biological distinctions that mainly obsessed
eugenicists were not those between whites and blacks, but those then believed
to divide whites -- differences between the old-stock white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant majority and the numerous Catholic and Jewish immigrants from
Eastern and Southern Europe.
Eugenicists, who were themselves
predominantly of the old majority, considered scholastic intelligence -- the
kind indicated in IQ tests -- a paramount measure of human merit, ignoring
other abilities such as business acumen and artistic creativity that such tests
did not capture. To them, IQ
tests appeared to determine that the newer immigrants were innately endowed
with low intelligence, while their high birth rates seemed to indicate that
they were spreading inferior genes into the population at a rapid rate. In
the interest of reducing the proportion of the "less fit" in society,
eugenicists in the United States helped restrict immigration from Eastern and
Southern Europe. They promoted the passage of eugenic sterilization laws
that disproportionately threatened lower-income groups. The laws and programs
they fostered supplied a model for the Nazis, who sterilized several
hundred thousand people and, brandishing their research into the genetics of
individual and racial differences, claimed scientific justifications for the
Holocaust.
DISTINCTIONS OF "RACE" DISCREDITED |
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The Nazi horrors
discredited eugenics as a social program. Studies in social and biological science repudiated its stigmatizing
theories of human difference, showing that what it took to be distinctions of
race were actually those of ethnicity. In the United States, the social
policies that reduced discrimination and expanded opportunity worked with the
passage of time to produce their salubrious effects among the newer
immigrants and their descendants, including socioeconomic improvement and,
eventually, par performance on IQ tests. Between the 1930s and the 1980s,
whites' scores on such tests rose some 14 points. Blacks' scores rose, too,
though not as much. Still, along with the change in whites' scores, the
increase indicates that test results are not rigidly fixed by genes, but
are also sensitive to changes in education, opportunity, and scholastic
ambition. |
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Blacks have resided on the American
continent for the better part of four centuries; nevertheless, it is mainly
since World War II -- but even more so since the 1960s -- that they have
passed on their migration to freedom from a United States that was legally
segregated and in countless ways racially oppressive to the contemporary
nation, where, although racism continues its poisonous work, new standards of
law and tolerance better protect dignity and beckon ambition. In a sense,
blacks as a community have only just embarked on the journey that many white
immigrant groups took several generations to complete. It is not
unreasonable to conceive that, as it was for those white minorities, so it
will be -- given enough time and good will -- for nonwhite minorities,
including the flood of recent newcomers to the United States. The roots of human behaviors and
capacities are complicated.
Attempts to probe them for the role of genes may try to allow for
contemporary environmental differences, but they tend to be blind to the
cultural and psychological impact of past experience. They rely on measures
that fail to capture attitudes, aspirations, expectations, and, above all,
social hope. In short, they can be blind to the legacy of history. |
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/nameof/page04.html 10/13/03
DR. MARK NOLL ~ PRESBYTERIAN VIEW
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Mark Noll is professor of Christian thought in the
History Department at Wheaton College, Illinois. He is the author of The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1995) and of A History of
Christianity in the United States and Canada (1994). |
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Some evangelical Christians have
trouble reconciling evolution and a traditional belief in God as creator and
sustainer of the world, but I do not. Within the evangelical tribe, I belong to the Calvinist wing, where a
long history exists of accepting that God speaks to humans through
"two books" (Scripture and nature), and since there is but one
author of the two books, there is in principle no real conflict possible
between what humans learn from solidly grounded science and solidly grounded
study of the Bible. Of course, if "evolution" is taken to mean
a grand philosophical Explanation of Everything based upon Pure Chance, then
I don't believe it at all. But as a scientific proposal for how species
develop through natural selection, I say let the scientists who know what
they are doing use their expertise and whatever theories help to find out as
much as they can. On the Bible side, I do not think it is necessary to
read everything in early Genesis as if it were written by a fact-checker at
the New York Times. But as a persuasive basis for believing 1)
that God made the original world stuff, 2) that he providentially sustains
all natural processes, and 3) that he used a special act of creation (perhaps
out of nothing, perhaps from apelike ancestors) to make humans in his own
image, the Bible is not threatened by responsible scientific
investigations. |
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As a historian I am
impressed by words of 19th-century conservative Presbyterian, Benjamin B.
Warfield: "if we condition the theory [of evolution] by allowing the
constant oversight of God in the whole process, and his occasional
supernatural interference for the production of new beginnings by an actual
output of creative force ... we may hold to the modified theory of evolution
and be Christians in the ordinary orthodox sense." These words still
hold true today. |
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/religion/faith/statement_02.html 10/10/03
DR. FRANCISCO AYALA ~ ROMAN CATHOLIC VIEW
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Francisco J.
Ayala is professor of
biological sciences and of philosophy at the University of California,
Irvine. His scientific research focuses on population and evolutionary
genetics; he also writes about the interface between religion and science. He
is the author of several books, including Genetics and The Origin of
Species (1997). |
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Well-informed Catholics do not see
conflict between their religious beliefs and the Darwinian theory of
biological evolution. In 1996, Pope John Paul II stated that the conclusions
reached by scientific disciplines cannot be in contradiction with divine
Revelation, then proceeded to accept the scientific conclusion that evolution
is a well-established theory. |
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The Pope went on to
point out that science deals with material reality, while questions of
"moral conscience, freedom, or … of aesthetic and religious experience,
fall within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while
theology brings out [their] ultimate meaning according to the Creator's plans." |
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For more than a
decade, I have taught the theory of evolution to freshmen. During the early
part of the course students come to me, year after year, to express their
reservations based on their perceived contradiction between Christian beliefs
and the theory of evolution. I treat these students with the great respect
they deserve, but respond to them with two considerations very similar to the
points made by John Paul II. One is that the evolution of organisms is
beyond reasonable doubt, so that the theory of evolution is accepted in
this respect with the same certainty that we attribute to Copernicus's
heliocentric theory or the molecular composition of matter. The second
consideration is that science is a very successful way of knowing, but not
the only way. We acquire knowledge in many other ways, such as through
literature, the arts, philosophical reflection, and religious experience.
A scientific view of the world is hopelessly incomplete. Science seeks
material explanations for material processes, but it has nothing definitive
to say about realities beyond its scope. Once science has had its say, there
remain questions of value, purpose, and meaning that are forever beyond
science's domain, but belong in the realm of philosophical reflection and
religious experience. |
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/religion/faith/statement_01.html 10/10/03
DR. ARTHUR PEACOCKE ~ A THEIST VIEW
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Arthur Peacocke is a physical biochemist and Anglican
priest who pioneered early research into the physical chemistry of DNA and
has since become a leading advocate for the creative interaction between
faith and science. The 2001 winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in
Religion, he is the author of Paths from Science Towards God: The End of
All Our Exploring (2001). |
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From my scientific background as a
physical biochemist who, for nearly three decades in the mid-20th century,
was much involved in unravelling the relation of the double-helical structure
of DNA to its solution properties, I have long had an interest in the
relation of genetics to biological evolution. The sequencing of DNA and
proteins in a large range of species from bacteria to Homo sapiens has
now crowned the previous strong evidence for the historical
interconnectedness and a common origin of all living organisms and for
evolution. The role of natural selection in this process is proven
dominant, though I do not exclude the possibility that other natural
factors*, widely discussed at the moment, may also be operative. The whole
process is entirely natural and explicable by the sciences without requiring
any special, non-natural, "lures" or influences. |
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As a theist -- one
who considers that the best explanation of the existence and lawfulness of
the natural world is that it depends for its existence and inbuilt
rationality on a self-existent Ultimate Reality (a Creator "God")
-- I find the epic of evolution, from the "Hot Big Bang" to Homo
sapiens, an illumination of how the Creator God is and has been creating.
Evolution enriches our insights into the nature and purposes of the divine
creation -- its fecundity, variety, its ability to manifest an increase in
complexity to the point where the physical stuff of the world acquires the
(holistic) capacity to be self-conscious, to think (in "mental"
activity), to instantiate values and to relate to its Creator (in
"spiritual" activity). I regard God as creating in, with, and
through the natural as unveiled by the sciences; hence I espouse a "theistic
naturalism." |
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*To name a few: the
possible operation of self-organising principles; how the evolution of an
organism can depend on its innovative behaviour; and "top-down
causation" through flow of information from the environment to the
organism. |
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/religion/faith/statement_03.html 10/10/03
DR. ROBERT POLLACK ~ A JEWISH VIEW
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Robert Pollack is professor of biological sciences,
lecturer in psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and
Research, and director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at
Columbia University. His latest book is The Faith of Biology and the
Biology of Faith (2000). |
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Evolution is interesting to me
because natural selection explains certain facts of life that touch on
matters of meaning and purpose, and because the vision of the natural world
these explanations produce is simply too terrifying and depressing to me to
be borne without the emotional buffer of my own religion. This buffer is simple to describe: a
Jewish understanding of our appearance by evolution through natural selection
introduces an irrational certainty of meaning and purpose to a set of data
that otherwise show no sign of supporting any meaning to our lives on Earth,
beyond that of being numbers in a cosmic lottery with no paymaster. |
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I acknowledge there
is a wholly consistent alternative description of the natural world and our
place in it, which can lead one to exactly the actions I may wish to take or
encourage others to take, all without any belief in God. Nothing is wrong
with that position. It used to be my own, but as I have gotten older, I find
I no longer can honestly hold to it. When I asked my teacher Rabbi Adin
Steinsaltz how to respond to this criticism of my position by non-believing
friends, he said, "If you know someone who says the Throne of God is
empty, and lives with that, then you should cling to that person as a good,
strong friend. But be careful: Almost everyone who says that, has already
placed something or someone else on that Throne, usually themselves." |
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I find myself
accepting the God of my ancestors in part because it is my way of discovering
meaning and purpose without denying or distorting the data of science, and in part because otherwise I might put
some person, some ideology, some dream of completed science in God's place. |
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/religion/faith/statement_04.html 10/10/03
PANEL DISCUSSION
MODERATOR DR. JOE LEVINE
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Joe Levine, science editor for the Evolution
project, earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University, where he studied the
physiology and evolution of color vision. With Ken Miller, he has written
widely acclaimed biology textbooks for high school and college. Since 1987,
he has served as advisor to the Science Unit at WGBH, working on NOVA
programs and numerous special projects. |
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Q: Several people
have written that they have thoroughly studied both creation and evolution
and find that both are forms of faith in that they assume events that
occurred before the time of man. They both have an element of trust needed to
believe that either are correct or incorrect. Please comment. |
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Francisco Ayala |
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First, the way in
which the word "faith" is used by the person who poses the question
is quite different in science and in religious beliefs. All scientific
constructs or so-called theories are constructs of the mind. In that sense,
we accept them just in terms of whatever evidence we can gather in their
favor or against them. In the case of scientific theories, what we do is to
formulate them in such a way that they can be used to make predictions about
the states of affairs in the real world. And then we do confirm or
corroborate the theories by making those observations or experiments that
deal with predictions derived from the theories. |
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Robert Pollack |
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As a scientist I
would argue that, as Ronald Reagan said famously about dealing with the
Soviet Union, "trust but verify." It is necessary to trust in both
cases, but in the case of science it is possible to verify what one trusts is
so, by the accumulation of predictions tested by experiments which generate
results predicted by the model. This notion that your faith can be buttressed
by evidence is the difference between science as a human enterprise, a
"faith," if you will, and other faiths, which depend on equally
strong certainty emerging from within, but not testable by evidence. |
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Mark Noll |
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The question as
posed is probably too simple. Most of the issues concerning origin of life,
creation, evolution, have a long history that makes simple discussion in
public today quite difficult. The element of faith is certainly present in
both scientific endeavor related to origin and also in relationship to God
and the world. But it's a different kind of faith. |
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