| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Religious meetings at the Natural Cafe | |
| Posted by: | Roland Gilmore | |
| Date/Time: | 24/05/07 23:40:00 |
| Unfortunately atheists tend to resort to sneering, irrelevant claims, abuse, diversions and sarcasm, claiming to be tolerant while qualifying that claim. While more sober minds see a clear line between Darwin’s ideas and many of the horrible social experiments of the twentieth century, including Nazism and Communism, defenders of Darwin argue that at best there is no connection, or at worst any such episodes are aberrations or perversions of what Darwin believed. Most people are not even aware of the full title of Darwins 1859 masterwork: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." That last half of the title, often overlooked, sounds like it could come straight out of a Ku Klux Klan manual. THIS is the atheists bible! If ‘Darwin’s work is filled with references to the work of those involved in creating a radical new “scientific” justification for labeling races, classes, and individuals as “inferior”, Darwin writes in "The Descent of Man" that “a most important obstacle in civilized countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class” is the tendency of society’s “very poor and reckless”, who are “often degraded by vice”, to increase faster than “the provident and generally virtuous members”.’.Presumably placing the survival of the "virtuous" at risk. So what do these "anti-religious" know or are even aware of about the very thing they attack? Are they aware that Pope John Paul II stated that there is no conflict between evolutionary study of the body and the Catholic faith or that his successor, Benedict XV1, warned of the secularist trend causing Europe’s demographic suicide? What answers do they have to the big questions when not advised by morality? The fact of the matter is that for many, evolution is what they were taught; this is what they believe. Never mind the search for reason or truth by asking the why question. "In line with the modern scientific methodology, all recent theories regarding the emergence of life are mechanistic in their approach. All ask the mechanistic "how" question but not the ostensibly inappropriate teleological "why" question. The "why" question seems to take us back to that discredited methodological approach in which purpose played such a dominant role. But to refrain from asking "why" questions is to misunderstand the methodology of modern scientific inquiry. As Wicken* has cogently argued, asking the why question remains an essential component of scientific understanding and therefore a legitimate component of modern scientific methodology. A two tiered approach to causation is often crucial in obtaining a proper understanding of natural phenomena; understanding "whys" is no less important to discovering "hows" and in fact in many cases may be an important preliminary step before the mechanistic "how" can be Tackled." Addy Pross PhD Professor of Chemistry, Ben-Gurion University. He is the author of apprx. 100 research papers and a 1995 text, Theoretical and Physical Principles of Organic Reactivity. *J.S. Wicken, J. Theor. Biol. 117, 363-383 (1985). There is a considerable difference between asking how life actually did emerge, how life could have emerged and why life emerged. Of course believing that there had to be a creative force to bring about the Big Bang labels you as simplistic and a threat to society in the eyes of these people who have as their Gods the men who gave reason to the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Can we expect anything other than intolerence from them? Who is the greater threat? |