Hello Silat,
Originally posted by Silat
At the heart of evolutionary theory is the basic idea that life has existed for billions of years and has changed over time.
Overwhelming evidence supports this fact. Scientists continue to argue about details of evolution, but the question of whether life has a long history or not was answered in the affirmative at least two centuries ago.
The history of living things is documented through multiple lines of evidence that converge to tell the story of life through time.
At the heart of FAITH is absolutely no evidence.............
I know that you an unshakeable belief in the truth of what you have written above Silat, but long
before I became a Christian, when I was still a pagan and a believer in Darwinianism I began to have serious doubts about evolution simply from reading what was being written by palentologists and biochemists in popular scientific journals. Stephen Jay Gould in particular had a profound effect on me, because while he was an atheist and a materialist, he wasn't afraid to face the fact that there are insurmountable problems with Darwinian theory and to propose new solutions such as punctuated equilibrium and to critique those who were doggedly maintaining the status quo in spite of mounting evidence, and even attacking them as being guilty of the same closed-mindedness the Medieval church is accused of by materialists.
In one of the best pieces he ever wrote, entitled "Darwinian Fundamentalism" (available online
here ) Gould wrote the following:
"In this light, especially given history's tendency to recycle great issues, I am amused by an irony that has recently ensnared evolutionary theory. A movement of strict constructionism, a self-styled form of Darwinian fundamentalism, has risen to some prominence in a variety of fields, from the English biological heartland of John Maynard Smith to the uncompromising ideology (albeit in graceful prose) of his compatriot Richard Dawkins, to the equally narrow and more ponderous writing of the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (who entitled his latest book Darwin's Dangerous Idea). Moreover, a larger group of strict constructionists are now engaged in an almost mordantly self-conscious effort to "revolutionize" the study of human behavior along a Darwinian straight and narrow under the name of "evolutionary psychology."
Some of these ideas have filtered into the general press, but the uniting theme of Darwinian fundamentalism has not been adequately stressed or identified. Professionals, on the other hand, are well aware of the connections. My colleague Niles Eldredge, for example, speaks of this coordinated movement as Ultra-Darwinism in his recent book, Reinventing Darwin. Amid the variety of their subject matter, the ultra-Darwinists share a conviction that natural selection regulates everything of any importance in evolution, and that adaptation emerges as a universal result and ultimate test of selection's ubiquity.
The irony of this situation is twofold. First, as illustrated by the quotation above, Darwin himself strongly opposed the ultras of his own day. (In one sense, this nicety of history should not be relevant to modern concerns; maybe Darwin was overcautious, and modern ultras therefore out-Darwin Darwin for good reason. But since the modern ultras push their line with an almost theological fervor, and since the views of founding fathers do matter in religion, though supposedly not in science, Darwin's own fierce opposition does become a factor in judgment.) Second, the invigoration of modern evolutionary biology with exciting nonselectionist and nonadaptationist data from the three central disciplines of population genetics, developmental biology, and paleontology (see examples below) makes our pre-millennial decade an especially unpropitious time for Darwinian fundamentalism—and seems only to reconfirm Darwin's own eminently sensible pluralism."
In other words Silat, even men like Gould and Eldridge, materialists to the core, identified the kind of ultra-darwinist fervor you are displaying as more theological and faith oriented than scientific. The unreasoning refusal to even consider, for the briefest moment, that neo-Darwinism and natural selection might not be right in light of rapidly developing evidence is hardly a hallmark of good science. To paraphrase Gould, we have moved from the era of observation to the era of anathematization.
I've read Dawkins and Darwin Silat, but ask yourself, why wouldn't you even consider reading Behe or Johnson?
- SEAGOON
