RoR: Forum

"We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist...We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth."
Hmm...

Something to be applauded, but at the same time its the same old crap. Two different forms of truth? I wonder what Galt would have said to a clergyman that spouted that off (contradictions do not exist.)

Post 1

Monday, April 3, 2006 - 5:04pm

Wrong - is NOT something to be applauded.... they, by their nature, cannot co-exist - one is reality oriented, the other is [despite the believing] fantasy oriented....

Post 2

Monday, April 3, 2006 - 7:22pm

We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

Replace "forms of truth" with "learning methods". Replace "complementary" with "contradictory".

Science:
1. A life form can predict the state of a part of Reality, make an observation, and compare the prediction to the observation to determine how consistent the prediction is with the observation. If the prediction is the same as the observation, one can be confident that one has discovered information that is True (consistent with Reality), and add the prediction to one's collection of ideas with a high positive confidence tag. If the prediction is not the same as the observation, one can be confident that one has discovered information that is False (inconsistent with Reality), and add the prediction to one's collection of ideas with a negative confidence tag.

Faith:
2. A life form can add ideas with True and False tags to their own knowledge base arbitrarily (skipping the observation or comparison step in #1).

Learning by Science reveals contradictions between the observations and ideas learned through Faith. Learning by Faith (rejecting the observation and comparison steps) makes it impossible to learn through science on a particular idea.

(I'm working on my definitions of science and faith, if anyone has a suggestion please RoR mail or post etc.)
(Edited by Dean Michael Gores
on 4/03, 7:36pm)

Post 3

Tuesday, April 4, 2006 - 8:14am

I stumbled across the "Letter Project" by accident and was surprised and encouraged by it. I was especially delighted by the declarations:

We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as �one theory among others� is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God�s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

I had no idea that so many leaders of Christianity in America have this attitude towards modern science. When I was a child, people used those big old fossils of ancient nautili for doorstops. They would get plowed up in the fields and brought to the house for pleasant employment. Everyone would say that those were fossils somehow created during the Great Flood. Their conception of the world was still just like Mellville's when he wrote: "and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." No Christians I knew supported the conclusions of modern science as to the geological age of the earth and the evolution of life here. The book of Genesis was right, and science was wrong about the history of life on earth.

[I should mention that Ed Hudgins has recently written an excellent article pertinent to this intellectual conflict in America. If you go to the TOC website, you will easily find it.]

It is possible that my childhood Catholic friends were holding out on me. When I visited the Vatican in 1992, I opened a book in their gift shop and was pleased to learn that they officially accept evolution. (I knew already that they had long ago accepted the results of the Scientific Revolution concerning the motion of the earth, etc.) I noticed in "The Clergy Letter Project" that no Catholic clergy signed the letter. Does anyone here know why that is? Does anyone know if they teach evolution in the biology classes of Catholic high schools?

Post 4

Friday, April 7, 2006 - 6:59pm

Stephen, I'm certainly no expert on the Catholic church, but the way I've always heard it is that they accept "micro-evolution" not "macro-evolution". In other words, we didn't come from apes...we came from Adam and Eve. But evolution still causes changes over time. They accept the mechanism, just not the conclusion. No idea whether that's right or not, but would explain your own experience.

Post 5

Saturday, May 31, 2008 - 2:44pm

Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design

This recent book evidently draws out the history of the strain of Christianity that would be celebrating Evolution Sunday.

Peter J. Bowler

Harvard University Press (2007)

Bowler . . . aims to show that "the renewed state of war between fundamentalists and atheistic Darwinists is not the only game in town," because "there have always been religious thinkers looking for a middle way" to integrate Christian and evolutionary ideas. While not himself an advocate of any "middle way"�Bowler is a religious skeptic�he believes this stream of thought deserves more attention. Alongside outbreaks of controversy such as the Huxley-Wilberforce debates, the Scopes trial or contemporary battles over science education, Bowler portrays a broad movement, spearheaded by liberal Christians and religiously inclined evolutionists, to interpret evolution as God's plan. �Ray Olson, Booklist

Other works by Peter Bowler are these:

Evolution: The History of an Idea

University of California Press (3^rd ed., 2003)

Life's Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry, 1860-1940

University of Chicago Press (1996)

Post 6

Saturday, May 31, 2008 - 5:20pm

Much of the problem here is that until you recognise that evolution is much more than just 'biological evolution', that is it an integral aspect of the universe, an actualizing of the cause/effect of the law of identity in motion, there will never be a conclusiveness to its manifestations....

Post 7

Thursday, October 23, 2008 - 11:42pm

The Jesuit and the Skull

Amir Aczel (2007)

From Kirkus Reviews:

Ordained in 1911, Teilhard de Chardin did not believe that his devout Catholicism required him to ignore the period's rapid advances in science. He had experienced those advances firsthand as a participant in exciting fossil discoveries in Egypt, in French caves and on digs in China with Rockefeller-funded fossil-hunter Davidson Black. The new field of paleoanthropology was emerging, Aczel shows, driven by discoveries of the fossils of three hominids inhabiting the world at overlapping periods: Homo sapiens (Cro-Magnon Man), Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal) and Homo erectus (Java Man). A spectacular example of erectus was discovered in 1929 by Chardin and the David crew in China's Zhoukoudian caves. There they unearthed the fossil dubbed Peking Man-"as typical a link between man and the apes as one could wish for," the priest wrote exultantly. (This vital find, along with many other fossils, vanished in 1941 during the Japanese occupation of China.) Chardin extensively considered the relationship of science and religion in his books, which attempted to prove that "God works through evolutionary processes to propel humanity ever forward." His ideas continually got him into trouble with his Jesuit superiors, who essentially exiled him to America.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

�The Christian Man's Evolution�
Francisco J. Ayala, evolutionary biologist, is an ordained Dominican priest.

(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 10/24, 11:30am)

Post 8

Friday, October 24, 2008 - 7:12pm

SB: The Jesuit and the Skull. Amir Aczel (2007)

Allow me just a word of caution about Amir Aczel as a writer and researcher and a popularizer of science. I read his book, Fermat's Last Theorem. Checking his Wikipedia biography, I see that he as a PhD in statistics and is known as a popular lecturer in mathematics. However, when I read Fermat's Last Theorem, much of it seemed to me to have been written second hand by someone who did not actually understand the theories he was describing. He was woeful when writing about ancient Greek mathematics.

I found Simon Singh's Fermat's Enigma more profitable. Though "merely" a BBC producer, Singh did not make the blunders (that's a technical term from surveying) that Aczel did. Singh's work was much better.

So, what Chardin did or did not, believed or believed not, would perhaps be best determined by getting closer to the source, rather than taking Amir Azcel's word for it. (I agree, however, with what Stephen Boydstun wrote -- perhaps a result of my own ignorance on this topic.)

Joseph Rowlands: "Stephen, I'm certainly no expert on the Catholic church, but ... we didn't come from apes...we came from Adam and Eve. But ... "

Catholicism is not so easily derailed -- realize that just about to the day that Galileo was told not to teach the heliocentric model, Jesuits were taking exactly that model to Japan and China to help them update their calendars. Ironic, isn't it? As kids, we learned that Adam and Eve are symbolic. They must have been real, of course, but whether this being or that received the Breath of Life from the Touch of God, is for science to determine. Is Neanderthal "human"? If so, there are Adam and Eve. If Neanderthal shows no sign of volition, then we must look elsewhere. Regardless, there must have been an Adam and Eve somewhere and somewhen for us to be here now. The reason that no Catholic priest signed the Letter is that none needed to: the ignorance on that issue is entirely Protestant.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 10/24, 7:28pm)

Post 9

Sunday, January 16, 2011 - 9:31am

This looks like a really helpful layout of the evidence:

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Richard Dawkins (Basic Books)

Post 10

Sunday, January 16, 2011 - 10:31am

A very interesting book to read, even if well knowledged on evolution...

Post 11

Friday, March 11, 2011 - 7:11am

The original link to the site for The Clergy Letter Project is obsolete. The new one is here.

An important complement to Bowler 2007 noted in post #5 is Nature Lost?
Natural Science and The German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century
Frederick Gregory (Harvard 1992)

Especially pertinent to the history of Protestant attempts to assimilate Darwinian evolution compatibly with continuing Christian faith is Chapter 5 �Rudolf Schmid and the Reconciliation of Science and Religion.� Works of Schmid in English translation are: 1876, 1906

Post 12

Thursday, October 30, 2014 - 2:42am

Supplement to #4 - Catholic View

Post 13

Friday, October 31, 2014 - 2:38pm