A Dangerous Idea?

[MaxCathedral]

In 1844 he wrote a brief sketch of it, 1858 he writes and publishes the full book form...it sells like hotcakes. The title Origin of Species.

 

the ideas are bascially...

 

1. Descent with modification.

2. Populations remain the same, but food is sparce, thus struggle of the fittest.

2. Genectic passing on of admirable traits which allow higher chance of survival...or natural selection.

 

He pauses to catch his breath and further states that everything came from a common ancestor.

 

Countryside parsons and minsters, most of whom were amatuer naturalists, biologists, and geologists, have NO problems with Darwin's ideas. They see it all the time. For them God and evolution, no biggie and ask if its tea time.

 

but city people..don't like being compared to monkeys, and city ministers call it the Devil's book...

 

well...

 

a quaint tale..

 

talk to the Kansas Board of Eduction.....

 

is this really the worlds' most dangerous idea?

 

 

 

 

[The Peon]

In 1844 he wrote a brief sketch of it' date=' 1858 he writes and publishes the full book form...it sells like hotcakes. The title Origin of Species.

 

the ideas are bascially...

 

1. Descent with modification.

2. Populations remain the same, but food is sparce, thus struggle of the fittest.

2. Genectic passing on of admirable traits which allow higher chance of survival...or natural selection.

 

He pauses to catch his breath and further states that everything came from a common ancestor.

 

Countryside parsons and minsters, most of whom were amatuer naturalists, biologists, and geologists, have NO problems with Darwin's ideas. They see it all the time. For them God and evolution, no biggie and ask if its tea time.

 

but city people..don't like being compared to monkeys, and city ministers call it the Devil's book...

 

well...

 

a quaint tale..

 

talk to the Kansas Board of Eduction.....

 

is this really the worlds' most dangerous idea?

 

 

 

 

[/b']

 

No. God is.

[smommer]

I dont believe this is a dangerous idea at all, without wishing to get into a creationism debate, there is observable evidence that lends credit to Darwins theories. As for religeon, people can believe what they want. I dont believe its the work of Darwin that is dangerous.

[Xyph]

Denial of it is a dangerous idea.

[MaxCathedral]

Denial of it is a dangerous idea.

 

 

Max: one of best one sentence answers I have ever read....YES, I agree.

[Stumblebum]

No. God is.

 

Likewise....great answer

[akcapr]

wat exactly is the creationists idea

[Mot]

wat exactly is the creationists idea

That the world was created by some mythical entity a short while ago. I always try to one up them when they spew their tripe near me. I say the world didn't start 6k years ago, rather it started 15 seconds ago. They say something to the effect that that is impossible because they were talking to me then. I calmly reply that they are mistaken because God put those memories in their head and we have all just been created. Any argument they put against it, I calmly reply that God made the conditions that way and the evidence is indisputable. They usually give up after a while, but they rarely notice that my argument is the same and just as sound as what they give for the 6k year answer.

[Hellbender]

is this really the worlds' most dangerous idea?

 

 

 

 

It is certainly the scientific theory that has endured the most controversy and reactionary movements over the years. But I can't see it as being "dangerous", any more than cell theory would be dangerous.

[Hellbender]

wat exactly is the creationists idea

It also depends on exactly what subgroup of creationists we are talking here. Virtually all, however, think that evolution is wrong or insufficient, and that a supernatural diety definitely had something to do with creating life and the universe.

[lucaspa]

No. God is.

Why do you say that? It was desire to understand how God created that motivated Darwin to study nature and discover evolution. It was belief in the Christian God that provided the necessary assumptions about the physical universe for modern science to exist.

[lucaspa]

wat exactly is the creationists idea

As one poster pointed out, there are several versions of creationism.

http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/1593_the_creationevolution_continu_12_7_2000.asp

 

However, all versions seem to have some elements in common.

1. They all agree that God directly manufactures either whole organisms or parts of them. That is, the organism or part was not there one minute, and the next it was.

2. All agree that humans do not share a common ancestor with apes. Humans were specially manufactured by God.

[PhDP]

Why do you say that? It was desire to understand how God created that motivated Darwin to study nature and discover evolution. It was belief in the Christian God that provided the necessary assumptions about the physical universe for modern science to exist.

 

Lamarck wasn't very interested in religion while working on evolution and Darwin lost a lot of faith because of evolution. Also, science predate christianity and you certainly don't need god as an assumption to do science. Faith, any faith, is in contradiction with the spirit of science, how could faith in the christian god a necessary assumptions ?

[lucaspa]

Lamarck wasn't very interested in religion while working on evolution and Darwin lost a lot of faith because of evolution. Also, science predate christianity and you certainly don't need god as an assumption to do science. Faith, any faith, is in contradiction with the spirit of science, how could faith in the christian god a necessary assumptions ?

1. Darwin did not lose "a lot of faith" because of evolution. He lost his faith mainly on 2 personal issues. First, the tragic death of his favorite daughter. Darwin got caught up in a question that bothers many: how can God let bad things happen to good people -- Darwin's daughter in this case. Second, according to the Anglican Church at the time, both Darwin's father and grandfather were insured a place in hell because they did not believe in Christianity. Darwin could not understand how a loving God could condemn two such good men to hell. Now, in this case, Darwin was correct; the Anglican Church changed its views in the 20th century and dropped this particular belief.

 

2. Modern science arose in the 15th century. Science as we know it did not exist prior to this. Greek "science", Chinese "science", and Arabic "science all died stillborn. All lacked one or more of the assumptions about the universe necessary to do science. Those assumptions are that the universe is: rational, accessible, objective, contingent, and unified. I'll explain each of those if they are not clear. Just ask.

 

3. Several scholars have convincingly argued that modern science arose when and where (Western Europe) it did because the 5 assumptions about the universe necessary to do science are conclusions based on the characteristics of the Christian deity.

S Jaki The Road to Science and the Ways to God, University of Chicago Press, 1978

C Coulson Reclaiming the soul of science. Christianity Today 39:64, 1995.

 

That is,

a. Because God is rational He created a rational universe.

b. Because we are created in the image of God, we can understand the universe God created. (accessibility).

c. God created an objective universe for us to live in.

d. God, having choice, could have created the universe to be different than it is (contingency).

e. Because there is only one God, the universe has a unity to it.

 

So, this isn't about the necessity of having a belief in God in order to do science. Instead, it's about how a belief in God provided the necessary assumptions about the universe in order to do science.

 

Now, you don't have to have God in order to have these 5 assumptions. You can make those assumptions blindly and let them stand on their own. However, making exactly those 5 assumptions from scratch is unlikely, as is shown by all the still births of science over the centuries. What Christianity provided was those 5 assumptions as a conclusion of another belief. Christianity provided a shortcut, as it were, to the assumptions necessary to do science.

 

4. Faith is not "in contradiction" to the spirit of science. Science is a limited form of knowing. Most of our lives are lived outside the boundaries of science. Faith is not an obscenity. Nor is faith the opposite of evidence. Faith usually has evidence. Again, science is limited in the type of evidence it permits. Science accepts only a subset of the totality of evidence. This makes science very reliable in its sphere, but also limited in what it can comment on. So, faith and science are not contradictory, but basically use different types of evidence.

[lucaspa]

Lamarck wasn't very interested in religion while working on evolution and Darwin lost a lot of faith because of evolution.

I question your characterization of Lamarck:

"Lamarck saw spontaneous generation as being ongoing, with the simple organisms thus created being transmuted over time (by his mechanism) becoming more complex and closer to some notional idea of perfection. He thus believed in a teleological (goal-oriented) process where organisms became more perfect as they evolved. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Lamarck

 

Both spontaneous generation and goal-orientation were religious concepts.

 

Most scientists of the day were motivated to study science in order to determine the "secondary causes" by which God worked.

 

"But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this -- we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws" William Whewell: Bridgewater Treatise.

 

Whewell was one of the top 5 scientists of his day, a member of the Royal Society and President of the Geological Society. He expressed an idea common during his day (and which has been dropped by the Fundamentalists). God works thru secondary, material causes. IOW, God doesn't push planets around in orbits, but rather has gravity do it, with God sustaining gravity.

 

"A Law of Nature then is the rule and Law, according to which God resolved that certain Motions should always, that is, in all Cases be performed. Every Law does immediately depend upon the Will of God." Gravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, I, 2-3, 1726, quoted in CC Gillespie, Genesis and Geology, 1959.

 

Today, we tend to think of material causes excluding God. That is god-of-the-gaps theology (natural = without God and God is only where natural doesn't explain) and was rejected by scientists in the 15th-19th century.

 

Darwin was squarely in the camp of God using natural causes. First, the quote from Whewell comes from the Fontispiece of Origin of the Species. Second, Darwin was explicit later in Origin:

 

"To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual." pg. 449. [emphasis mine]

[The Peon]

Why do you say that? It was desire to understand how God created that motivated Darwin to study nature and discover evolution. It was belief in the Christian God that provided the necessary assumptions about the physical universe for modern science to exist.

 

 

You are making the presumption that Darwin or some other person would not have pondered evolution if the idea of God was not around. Well I will make this counterpoint... I think evolution would have been discovered earlier if God was not around. Assumptions assumptions...

 

And if you think God is not a dangerous idea, I suggest you tally the dead who fought for him in his vast pantheon. If you think God is not a dangerous idea, I suggest you go meet the terrorists who are securing nuclear weapons and other WMDs for use against the enemys of Allah.

 

I also think I have spent more then enough time on this.

[JTM³]

You are making the presumption that Darwin or some other person would not have pondered evolution if the idea of God was not around. Well I will make this counterpoint... I think evolution would have been discovered earlier if God was not around. Assumptions assumptions...

 

And if you think God is not a dangerous idea' date=' I suggest you tally the dead who fought for him in his vast pantheon. If you think God is not a dangerous idea, I suggest you go meet the terrorists who are securing nuclear weapons and other WMDs for use against the enemys of Allah.

 

I also think I have spent more then enough time on this. [/quote']

 

No matter what propagand you hear, Jehovah/Yahwhe is NOT the same as Allah. You lump all "gods" into one here.

 

In regards to the Baptists:

 

They probably have a lot of Calvinistic ideas in their theology.

 

I think one of the reasons you guys are angry is this fatalistic crap that came primarily from Calvinisim (John Calvin).

 

Some of them go from Predestination (God chooses the "destination" of humans), to fatalism and Predestination (God controls everything, rather than letting physical laws do the work, plus he chooses the fate of humans.

 

I believe neither...and hate both.

 

So, faith and science are not contradictory, but basically use different types of evidence.

 

Indeed, they are complimentary.

[AzurePhoenix]

No matter what propagand you hear, Jehovah/Yahwhe is NOT the same as Allah. You lump all "gods" into one here.

The different names for the christian, muslim and jewish God all refer to one deity from the same family tree of faith, the same deity, just different interpretations of "Him / It." Saying they aren't the same deity is just being absurdly picky (and for religios, possibly rather defensive).

[ecoli]

The different names for the christian, muslim and jewish God all refer to one deity from the same family tree of faith, the same deity, just different interpretations of "Him / It." Saying they aren't the same deity is just being absurdly picky (and for religios, possibly rather defensive).

It's hardly surprizing people would want to make a distinction between their God and another religion's God. Especially due to the level some Islams have corrupted His word.

 

It certainly makes you wonder though, if Muslims can corrupt the word of Allah, couldn't Christians and Jews just as easily corrupt there books as well (and they have before, they could again). It's a sobering thought, I think.

[AzurePhoenix]

It's hardly surprizing people would want to make a distinction between their God and another religion's God. Especially due to the level some Islams have corrupted His word.

Certainly not surprising at all considering the level of faith and... confidence(?) within the groups, and bias often between them.

[lucaspa]

is this really the worlds' most dangerous idea?

 

Does everyone realize that the idea that Darwin's theories are a "dangerous idea" is stolen from the title of a book by Daniel Dennett? The book is called Darwin's Dangerous Idea. The title refers to natural selection, not common ancestry. (BTW, Darwin did not advocate a single common ancestor, but rather several -- basically ancestors to the Classes seen in the Cambrian).

 

Dennett's thesis is that natural selection is a dangerous idea. Because natural selection is an algorithm to get design: follow the steps without the use of intelligence and design is guaranteed. This concept of design not requiring intelligence is, says Dennett, dangerous to EVERY aspect of human endeavor. Philosophy, engineering, politics, science, etc. Not just to religion. Dennett refers to it as a "universal acid" that eats away at our concept of ourselves and the universe.

 

Now, I don't agree that theism is a dangerous idea in and of itself. If you want to expand this to "beliefs masquerading as facts" and include militant atheism and the belief that religion is the most dangerous idea, then I could agree. "Beliefs masquerading as facts" is indeed a dangerous idea whenever it happens. But since most of theism, including Christianity, doesn't do that, it doesn't qualify. Fundamentalism does qualify.

 

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, The Religious Aspects of Evolution, 2d ed. 1890, pg 68.

[lucaspa]

You are making the presumption that Darwin or some other person would not have pondered evolution if the idea of God was not around. Well I will make this counterpoint... I think evolution would have been discovered earlier if God was not around. Assumptions assumptions...

 

And if you think God is not a dangerous idea' date=' I suggest you tally the dead who fought for him in his vast pantheon. If you think God is not a dangerous idea, I suggest you go meet the terrorists who are securing nuclear weapons and other WMDs for use against the enemys of Allah.[/quote']

 

1. You have a hypothesis in that first paragraph. Let's test it: History shows that modern science was not invented by other societies, including atheistic ones. Modern science does not appear until there is a stable Christian majority culture in the 1600s. Also, in an atheistic culture -- Stalin's Soviet Union -- Darwinian evolution was rejected. So, without God around, Darwinian evolution gets rejected. How then would it be discovered in such an atmosphere?

 

Without creationism as a hypothesis to be tested and falsified, would the alternative of evolution have been found?

 

In the 20th century, atheistic societies -- Soviet Union, Red China, Cambodia, etc -- have killed far more people than those killed in religious wars thru all of history. They have killed for their belief in atheism.

 

So, I would say that it is not theism or atheism that is the dangerous idea, but rather "intolerance" and "insisting that your beliefs are fact" that are the dangerous ideas.

 

Finally, the terrorists are not killing because of their religion. Instead, they are killing to protect their culture from the secular culture of the West. You have ascribed an incorrect motive.

[lucaspa]

The different names for the christian, muslim and jewish God all refer to one deity from the same family tree of faith, the same deity, just different interpretations of "Him / It." Saying they aren't the same deity is just being absurdly picky (and for religios, possibly rather defensive).

 

Not necessarily "picky". You can make a reasonable argument that the concept of Allah has strayed so far from the concept of Yahweh that the two now are separate, despite the common ancestry. What Allah wants from human beings is very different than what Yahweh wants in either Judaism or Christianity. Also, the very concept that the final revelation is a book instead of 1) intervention in history (Judaism) or 2) a person (Christianity) can be said to make Allah a different deity.

 

Think of it as "descent with modification" into an entirely new species.

[Steph]

 

And if you think God is not a dangerous idea' date=' I suggest you tally the dead who fought for him in his vast pantheon. If you think God is not a dangerous idea, I suggest you go meet the terrorists who are securing nuclear weapons and other WMDs for use against the enemys of Allah.

 

I also think I have spent more then enough time on this. [/quote']

 

You can't really tally deaths in wars like this. The Crusades were not religious expeditions. God was merely an excuse. really, if christianity didn't exist, such adventures would still have happened. Actually the Viking invasions bear resemblance to the Crusades up to a point. The 4th (i think) crusade did not even leave europe as the crusaders pillages villages on their own lands.

 

Then if you count the deads... shouldn't you also count the hospitals and scientific discoveries?