The Questioning Christian

Category: Evolution

  • “Show Me the Science” — Daniel Dennett in NY Times

    From Show Me the Science, by Daniel Dennett, in Sunday’s New York Times (paragraphing edited, emphasis added):

    The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design.

    If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

    Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

    Yup.  Read it all.

  • Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution — NY Times

    Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times editorial board points out that, in the debate over evolution versus creationism / intelligent design, we sometimes lose sight of how very, very, very long natural selection has had to do its work.  Excerpt (paragraphing edited):

    . . . [T]he difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary
    scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.

    It’s
    been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first
    originated on this planet.  That is not an unimaginable number in
    itself, if you’re thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or
    grains of sand.

    But 3.5 billion years of biological history is
    different.   All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by
    one.  They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all
    the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time. 

    That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in
    which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved.  It is time that
    has allowed the making of us.

    The idea of such quantities of
    time is extremely new.  Humans began to understand the true scale of
    geological time in the early 19th century.  . . .

    Read it all.

  • Intelligent Design, Meet “Intelligent Falling”

    Somehow I missed The Onion’s dead-on spoof of intelligent-design arguments last week, "Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity wth New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory."  Excerpt (paragraphing edited):

    . . .  Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are
    now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and
    they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

    "Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational
    force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing
    them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education,
    applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

    Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is
    founded on great gaps in understanding.  The laws predict the mutual
    force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force.

    Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend
    upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in
    vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

    *  *  *

    (more…)

  • “Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science” — NY Times

    The Times must be publishing a series about science and religion.  Today’s edition has a piece by Cornelia Dean, "Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science."  Excerpt (paragraphing added):

    Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace
    science as it has been defined for centuries.

    That is, they look to the
    natural world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and
    they recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional – capable of
    being overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation.

    This
    belief in science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or
    its doctrinal cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the
    existence of a supernatural force.

    Read it all.

  • Intelligent Design? Evolution? Whatever: It Is What It Is

    An article by Kenneth Chang in today’s NY Times, "In Explaining Life’s Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash," is one of the best general summaries I’ve yet seen about the controversy over intelligent design versus evolution.

    My beef with intelligent design is that too many IDers seem to be trying to affirmatively disprove evolution.  It’s as though their personal trust in God stands or falls depending on whether or not a particular scientific theory is valid.  That would be a pretty weak faith, if you ask me.  (I have a similar beef with radical evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins.)

    It seems to me that a far-healthier attitude would be, "it is what it is."  Assuming God exists (and personally I’m persuaded), then he has done what he has done, and he did it the way he did it.  In this area,

    • ours is not to declare that God must have done his work in such-and-such a way.  That attitude strikes me as prideful, and verging on blasphemy; 
    • instead (to paraphrase the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor), our job is humbly to seek the truth, whatever the truth turns out to be, about what God in fact has done, and about how in fact he has done it. 

    As the subtitle of this blog observes:  Putting God first requires facing the facts.  That goes for the dispute over intelligent design versus evolution, just as it does (IMHO) in every other area of life.

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  • Intelligent Design: Let’s All Lighten Up

    From William Safire’s column of this morning: 

    I will leave the last word on this old controversy with its new phraseology to
    the neuroscientist Leon Cooper, a Nobel laureate at Brown University. He tells
    all of today’s red-faced disputants: ”If we could all lighten up a bit perhaps,
    we could have some fun in the classroom discussing the evidence and the proposed
    explanations — just as we do at scientific conferences.”

  • Vatican Observatory Director Contradicts Cardinal’s Attack on “Random” Evolution

    Last month, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna published an op-ed piece in the New York Times claiming that "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution
    in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random
    variation and natural selection – is not.    "  (Emphasis added.) 

    The director of the Vatican Observatory disagrees, and rightly so.  The Rev. Dr. George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University Ph.D., muses that perhaps God is allowing the universe to develop largely on its own as part of a continuing process of creation:

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