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Post by merkavah12 on Feb 1, 2009 0:33:22 GMT
Miller's response was quite brilliant.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Feb 1, 2009 9:57:02 GMT
Humphrey, in order to avoid long URLs that stretch a topic literally to such width as here, I recommend compressing them with: www.snipurl.com/ Thanks, will do.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Feb 1, 2009 10:12:25 GMT
Thanks for these and the other references. I am afraid though that you have misread Gould's opinion here. The article by David King that you cite presents Gould's opinion as: "Increased complexity in some species arises randomly, because of the statistical effect of the "drunkard's walk". Because it is impossible to get less complex than bacteria, random motion will, over time, always produce an expansion at the other end of the the complexity distribution. But we should always remember that we are produced by random motion; we are not an inevitable result of natural selection operating in favour of increased complexity. For Gould this is the completion of Darwin's revolution, the dethronement of humanity from its self-centred view of its own importance." Thus, according to Gould (if King represents him correctly), something like human intelligence was not inevitable. Sorry, I probably overstated that. I was going on Michael Ruse who argues in 'Purpose in a Darwinian World' that: 'Even Stephen Jay Gould allows some kind of progress simulation. He argues that life's history is like a drunken man on a sidewalk, bounded on one side by a wall and the other by a ditch. Eventually, the man will fall into the ditch because he cannot go through the wall and his random path will take him to and over the other edge. So similarly simple organisms cannot get simpler, but they can get more complex, ending ultimately in intelligence.' In other words he is acknowledging that progress occurs but maintaining that this is illusionary due to the underlying randomness. Of course its not to much of a leap to say that selection keeps up a pressure to invade new niches and that, although not inevitable, you would expect such niches to be filled. Is cells to consciousness progress?. Fraid so.
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Post by merkavah12 on Feb 4, 2009 5:59:57 GMT
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28675668/This article seems to agree with much of what Quodlibeta team have been saying all along about the true nature of the conflict thesis.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Feb 4, 2009 10:23:47 GMT
It is singularly frustrating when you have a historical thesis which has worked its way into the popular imagination, one which has been decisively refuted by major historians of science since the mid twentieth century, and it defies eradication. People just think you are being 'revisionist' when in fact you are just regurgitating what has become the orthodoxy in scholarship. All the hard work of people like Numbers, Hedley Brooke, Lindburg and Grant, and it all goes to waste because of the present day conflict between extreme forms of Christianity and the scientific community who insist on projecting their squabble back into the past. There comes a point when you read the 1000th idiotic post on the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' page and think, 'why am I even bothering?', but the important thing is to try.
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Post by James Hannam on Feb 12, 2009 15:04:37 GMT
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Post by jamierobertson on Feb 12, 2009 22:57:18 GMT
Hmm. I actually kind of like that review. I mean, true, he does frequently talk about Thor and other myths with the undertone of "I'm lumping every branch of Christianity that's more conservative that Richard Holloway into this pile"; he does seem to think "creationist" equals "Theist"; and even I can spot one point where he misrepresents YECs quite badly, making them out as dafter than they would consent to be. These, coupled with the near-orgasmic excitement that seems to overcome him at regular intervals (<i>"Evolutionary theory pilots us around biology reliably and predictively, with a detailed and unblemished success that rivals anything in science!"</i>, he pants in the fourth paragraph) are pretty much a given for anything that comes from his keyboard these days. So why do I like it? Well, it's the first thing I've read from Dawkins for a long time that hasn't mentioned atheism explicitly. Nowhere does he explicitly mention how neo-darwinism dispenses with God. I suppose he does kindof hint at it in the opening statements, but the lack of a direct "positive atheist" volley is quite noticable in this review. Who knows - maybe the old boy's mellowing in his retirement
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Post by humphreyclarke on Feb 13, 2009 13:17:49 GMT
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Post by sandwiches on Feb 14, 2009 16:22:25 GMT
"It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell.
"It's a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse"
says Dawkins. There is a lot of fruit in that cake.
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syzygy
Master of the Arts
Posts: 103
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Post by syzygy on Apr 9, 2009 4:05:01 GMT
Thankfully Coyne's paper has a lot less vitriol than Dawkins' "God Illusion." I think most of his criticisms of Gilberson and Miller are correct, but I don't conclude from that there there's no reconciling religion and science.
On the issue of the inevitability of evolution of intelligence. First, I don't think it's a theological requirement. Second, given the number of planets in the universe, the probability of intelligence's evolving is greatly increased (Dawkins' planetary anthropic principle). Maybe that's good enough for God.
Coyne wonders if we reject creation in 7 days and Noah's ark for scientific reasons why we don't do the same for the virgin birth and the resurrection. But Bible scholars don't reject the former for scientific reasons. Rather they use some scientific techniques to identify the type of literature of various biblical texts and from that draw conclusions about the texts' purpose and meaning. And that's a very shorthand way of describing the work of biblical exegesis.
Coyne questions whether there is such a thing as theological truth since people don't agree. Hasn't he noticed that the same thing occurs in science or in any difficult field. He claims "there is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths." Why he uses the word "truths" is beyond me, but there is a way. It's called theology and it's been practiced among Christians with many agreed upon results for 2000 years. Questioning never stops, but that's how progress is made in science and theology.
The spiritual soul is a lousy example of irreducible complexity. If it exists (Jesus didn't believe in it) it's one of the two principles of a material animate being, the other being matter (vide Thomas Aquinas). It isn't a thing at all. God isn't complex either. Dawkins can't understand this, and theologians know enough not to expect to. That's not an abdication of scientific responsibility because it's not science. Contrary to what Dawkins and Coyne think, recognizing the essential, not just practical, limits of understanding does not prevent believers from pushing on into the theological or scientific unknown. New studies on the Trinity are coming out all the time, even though Augustine said trying to understand the Trinity is like trying to empty the ocean into a hole in the sand.
Not scientific is not the same as irrational. There is no scientific proof that science is the only kind of rationality. I am aware of several that humans practice regularly. Dawkins practices one of them, not all that well, when he says that God is a hypothesis.
Science and some forms of religion may be irreconcilable. But the same is true of religion and some forms of science--or science and some forms of science. If you're going to be serious about the relationship between science and religion, you need to consider the best of each. Coyne tries to excuse Dawkins for not knowing theology. I suspect neither of them would excuse a theologian writing on the same subject for not knowing science.
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