Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Readings for Evolution Sunday I

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Here’s what atheist evolution gurus think of Christian Darwinists:

I, at least, think the NCSE shouldn’t take the theological position that faith is consistent with science. And the NCSE should limit its discussion about faith to saying that there are a variety of views about the consilience of science and faith and somebody in conflict should consult his/her minister. People like Larry Moran, P.Z., and I have been saying this for years, but it doesn’t seem to have penetrated Josh’s consciousness.

“Josh” is a professional Darwin lobbyist who carries out boss Eugenie Scott’s dictum that a dog collar is worth two white coats, when working the crowd.

The inimitable Jerry Coyne, attack by under-Darwin lobbyist Josh, roars back:

Having read my post from last Sunday, in which I discussed—civilly!—science and religion with a reading group at Chicago’s First United Methodist Church, Rosenau has somehow concluded that I’m an accommodationist!

But why are they all so upset? Does anyone imagine that the people who sit through Evolution Sunday and twiddle their cause-of-the-month buttons, placid and questionless, would be troubled by the idea that they are despised? Accommodationists expect to be despised when they join what they think is the winning side.

I don’t despise them; I am concerned for their future.

Comments
I am truly sick and tired of hearing that faith is incompatible with science. This certainly wasn't the mindset of the greatest scientists of the past, whose work provided the foundations for modern science and technology.Barb
February 3, 2011
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second opinion you state, 'I wonder whether it concerns you at all that the gnu atheist claim that religion and all of science are incompatible with religion and not just the ToE. That would be bad for theist scientists in general and ID in particularly.' Well since the possibility of doing science is rendered impossible if the Atheistic ideas of Materialism are embraced to be true, what do you think of being lied to yet again by the atheists? BRUCE GORDON: Hawking's irrational arguments - October 2010 Excerpt: The physical universe is causally incomplete and therefore neither self-originating nor self-sustaining. The world of space, time, matter and energy is dependent on a reality that transcends space, time, matter and energy. This transcendent reality cannot merely be a Platonic realm of mathematical descriptions, for such things are causally inert abstract entities that do not affect the material world. Neither is it the case that "nothing" is unstable, as Mr. Hawking and others maintain. Absolute nothing cannot have mathematical relationships predicated on it, not even quantum gravitational ones. Rather, the transcendent reality on which our universe depends must be something that can exhibit agency - a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them. This is what "breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.,,, the evidence for string theory and its extension, M-theory, is nonexistent; and the idea that conjoining them demonstrates that we live in a multiverse of bubble universes with different laws and constants is a mathematical fantasy. What is worse, multiplying without limit the opportunities for any event to happen in the context of a multiverse - where it is alleged that anything can spontaneously jump into existence without cause - produces a situation in which no absurdity is beyond the pale. For instance, we find multiverse cosmologists debating the "Boltzmann Brain" problem: In the most "reasonable" models for a multiverse, it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/hawking-irrational-arguments/bornagain77
February 3, 2011
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I wonder whether it concerns you at all that the gnu atheist claim that religion and all of science are incompatible with religion and not just the ToE. That would be bad for theist scientists in general and ID in particularly.second opinion
February 3, 2011
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I'm of the position that neither the gnus (Man, do they even think through these labels before happily accepting them?) nor most "Accommodationists" have much of value to say. The gnus are all rhetoric and have been on a downhill slide for a while now. But the accommodationists are all too often insincere. Transparent opportunists who explicitly say they are taking the side they are for fear of a backlash that would be a net loss for atheism, and whose "accommodation" often involves trying to sell theists on accepting an evolution that is expressly formulated so as to be so overladen with unscientific anti-theistic metaphysical and philosophical baggage. If you accept Darwinism as Michael Ruse puts it, for example, you literally cannot be an orthodox theist. He works a rejection of omniscience, omnipotence and even design right into his very definition. As for Shemp/Coyne, he's upset because he realizes that evolution, even relatively orthodox evolution, is - once that aforementioned philosophical and metaphysical baggage is stripped away - ridiculously friendly to teleological readings. He's in essence admitted that more people 'accepting evolution' means nothing to him if they reason God guided it. Evolution viewed through a design lens spooks the hell out of many "gnus", because it threatens to disarm them of their most favorite, possibly only, "scientific" talking point.nullasalus
February 2, 2011
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