mightychurch.com

I must apologise for bringing Charles Darwin and his natural selection and Origin of Species up again. It has been done to death and then some.  Last Sunday on ABC tv an excellent series on Darwin and his friends and family has reignited my passion. Darwin wasn’t the first to think of the evolution of man, but he had the facts and figures to give it scientific worth. Most of the establishment and scientists at the time were literalists, if they thought about it at all.
  It took an unusual mix of factors to get his ideas into print. He was bitter towards God for letting two of his children die young. His own health was poor( cyclical vomiting) apparenly partly due to inbreeding. As with most successful men their women are often overlooked as the reason for success or death. Darwins wife Emma had much to put up with, but as a Wedgwood women, she had the money and skills needed to gather support. She was more deeply religious than Charles.
  I cannot understand , then or now,why there is so much antagonism between the concepts of creation and evolution. Evolution is evident in the creation story of Genesis. First the light, then ocean, sky,earth,plants, a bit more light, fish,birds animals and humans.
  Evolution is also evident in the Old Testament in the creation of the Jewish society.  First, as in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and numbers there is great emphasis on laws and rules. As the OT progresses the chapters deal with history,prophecy, beautiful poetry and songs about love and nature, fatherly advice (often stern) and aphorisms, many of which are on our desk calenders today.  So for me, evolution and creation go together. There is no conflick and in any case it is not for us to understand God .

  Using our God given brains we may work out how some things have occcured, but we are only nibling at eternity.
    Why Darwin is so important is also illustrated by good young Joe Hockey (a local boy to ) ,for being criticised by some clerics ( SMH Sat 14/11/09) for offering some of his religious beliefs to the electorate. He wasn’t preaching, just letting us know what he stands for and that IMO is a vital element in a democratic society.
After World WAr 2 we used to here the saying “I might not believe in what you say, but i will defend to the death your right to say it” Perhaps we should hear this more often.

Final part 3 of Darwin series is on next Sunday 7.30 pm.

  I cannot understand , then or now,why there is so much antagonism between the concepts of creation and evolution. Evolution is evident in the creation story of Genesis. First the light, then ocean, sky,earth,plants, a bit more light, fish,birds animals and humans.

How does evolution fit with the creation story when evolution has fish breeding birds, land animals and humans, when the creation story says each must breed strictly after their own “kind”? (Whatever that means)

  Evolution is also evident in the Old Testament in the creation of the Jewish society.  First, as in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and numbers there is great emphasis on laws and rules. As the OT progresses the chapters deal with history,prophecy, beautiful poetry and songs about love and nature, fatherly advice (often stern) and aphorisms, many of which are on our desk calenders today.  So for me, evolution and creation go together. There is no conflick and in any case it is not for us to understand God .

How does this fit with the random chaos of mutation?

I though that looking for evoultion in the Bible was interpreting our culture on to scripture?

The Bible says a lot of things that are still relevant despite whichever contemporary culture we belong to. We won’t ever find evolution itself in the Bible, as it is a theory about genetics they could have had no idea about. However I don’t think that looking for consistency (or inconsistency) with evolution in the Bible is a bad thing. But consistency is only that.

While I enjoyed the program for the most part I was frustrated with the final episode as they trotted out the now familiar tale of the debate between Thomas Huxley and bishop Samuel Wilberforce and identified it as the key moment where science gained the upper hand over faith. 

The dramatisation on Sunday depicted the doddering bishop parroting someone elses arguments then concluding with “Was it on your grandmother’s or grandfather’s side that you descended from a monkey”.  Huxley, eye’s shining with the light of truth, then rises and responds with “I am not ashamed to have a monkey from an ancestor but would be ashamed to use one’s gifts and intelect to obscure the truth…“blah, blah, blah.  In this version they also implied that the bishop had not even read “The Origin”. 

It’s a tale that’s been quoted ad nauseum by fundamentalist darwinians and almost all biographers of the key players from the period.  The problem is that it’s not true.

As Sociologist Rodney Stark points out in “For the Glory of God” this story first appeared 38 years after the event in the literary publication Mcmillan’s Magazine in an article entitled “A Grandmother’s Tales”.  Accounts from the time of the debate seem to call it more or less a draw and certainly no one cast aspersions on Wilberforce’s credentials.  In fact the bishop wrote an early reply to “The Origin” agreeing that natural selection explains the variation within species but rejected Darwin’s suggestion that one species can evolve into another.  Darwin himself wrote to Hooker saying that while Wilberforce was in error, his review was “uncommonly clever: it picks out with skill the most conjectural parts…it quizzes me splendidly.”

Why do stories like this persist?  Because fundamentalists on both sides have used Darwin’s theory as a stick to pound each other with and it’s acceptance or rejection has become a badge of orthodoxy in the manufactured war between science and religion. 

The conflict is not between religion and science it;s between “true believers” on both sides with little regard for actual truth.  As Stark details, modern science emerged only from the Christian west and is a result of a Christian world view that God is rational and all powerful.  Only belief in an unchanging rational God can inspire the search for unchanging laws or principles in creation.  The “enlightenment” was not an explosion of learning caused by a return to the classics and a shaking off of the shackles of faith.  Rather it was the blossoming of centuries of scientific investigation begun in the Medievil universities in Europe and founded in faith.

As for evolution in the bible, if God chose this way to create the world - great, but I certainly wouldn’t expect the bronze- age biblical writers to have any understanding of the process.  The point of the creation narratives is that God made the world, man is made in the image of God and as such has a unique position in creation - Exactly how God made the world never comes up nor would it be of interest to people back-in-the-day. 

As John Calvin suggests - the Author of genesis was “ordained to be a teacher of the unlearned and primative, as well as the learned; so could not achieve his goal without descending to crude means of instruction.”

Christopher Roe said:

As Stark details, modern science emerged only from the Christian west and is a result of a Christian world view that God is rational and all powerful.  Only belief in an unchanging rational God can inspire the search for unchanging laws or principles in creation.  The “enlightenment” was not an explosion of learning caused by a return to the classics and a shaking off of the shackles of faith.  Rather it was the blossoming of centuries of scientific investigation begun in the Medievil universities in Europe and founded in faith.

Islam, which still appears to be living in the medieval age, shows that it has failed to come to grips with evolution, in this link:
Rejection of Darwin and the Failure of Islam

Two hundred years after the birth of Charles Darwin, and one hundred and fifty years after the publication of “Origin of the Species”, many fundamentalist religious groups continue to deny the reality, and the factual nature, of evolution. However there is only one major religion that systematically rejects Darwin’s discovery, and that therefore fails to accept one of the major findings of science: Islam. The evidence of biological evolution exposes the contradictions of faith. It will be argued here that the failure within Islam to come to terms with these contradictions is symptomatic of a wider failure within Islamic society to come to terms with modernity.

....The Catholic Church and mainstream Protestant groups accept the reality of the science of evolution. They can accept that the Genesis story is not literal.
However Muslims cannot accept that the creationist statements in the Koran are not literal. There are no Imams, Muftis, Islamic leaders, or Islamic scholars who admit or accept that the Koran is flawed, is incorrect, and is not literally true.
To be a Muslim, one cannot do this. So Muslims must necessarily reject evolution, at least in the Darwinian sense, where no god is required or evident.

It appears true to me that Christianity is a rational view and does not need to become unbending, naive or illogical because of literal readings of certain sections of the Bible.

So Muslims must necessarily reject evolution, at least in the Darwinian sense, where no god is required or evident.
It appears true to me that Christianity is a rational view and does not need to become unbending

    A small point perhaps Ken, but I think it is worth mentioning that Darwin himself would not deny God. His “Descent of Man” merely says that his theory may be “irreligious”. Darwin ,the scientist would not deny something that he could not attempt to prove.

People may want to read Charles Darwin’s views on religion to actually know where he stood in relation to God, in view of his theories on evolution.

part of this history reads:

Following Darwin’s marriage to Emma in January 1839, they shared discussions about Christianity for several years. The theodicy of Paley and Thomas Malthus vindicated evils such as starvation as a result of a benevolent creator’s laws which had an overall good effect. To Darwin, Natural selection produced the good of adaptation but removed the need for design, and he could not see the work of an omnipotent deity in all the pain and suffering such as the ichneumon wasp paralysing caterpillars as live food for its eggs. Until 1844 he followed Paley in viewing organisms as perfectly adapted with only a few imperfections, and only partly modified that view by 1859. On the Origin of Species reflects theological views. Though he thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy, Darwin still believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver, and later recollected that at the time he was convinced of the existence of God as a First Cause and deserved to be called a theist. This view subsequently fluctuated, and he continued to explore conscientious doubts, without forming fixed opinions on certain religious matters.

Darwin continued to play a leading part in the parish work of the local church, but from around 1849 would go for a walk on Sundays while his family attended church. Though reticent about his religious views, in 1879 he responded that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, and that generally “an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.” He went as far as saying that “Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”

I think this is where to place this item. Interesting news… very interesting…

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/fossil-sheds-new-light-on-dino-bird-the-first-known-bird/story-e6freuyi-1225864871536

Fossil sheds new light on ‘dino-bird’, the first known bird

From correspondents in Washington     From:AFP     May 11, 2010     9:43AM

RESEARCHERS have located chemical remains of the oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, in a landmark development for paleontology while studying fossils recovered 150 years ago.

The discovery about the half-bird, half-dinosaur detailed in the May 10-15 journal Proceedings of National Academy of Science, shows “portions of the feathers are not merely impressions of long-decomposed organic material as was previously believed”.

“Instead, they include fossilised fragments of actual feathers containing phosphorous and sulfur, elements that compose modern bird feathers,” wrote researchers including lead author geochemist Dr Roy Wogelius from The University of Manchester, which worked with theDepartment of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US.

“We talk about the physical link between birds and dinosaurs, and now we have found a chemical link between them,” said Dr Wogelius.

“In the fields of paleontology and geology, people have studied bones for decades. But this whole idea of the preservation of trace metals and the chemical remains of soft tissue is quite exciting.”

British and US researchers found that trace amounts of copper and zinc were also found in the Dinobird’s bones: like modern birds, the Archaeopteryx may have needed them to flourish.

“Archaeopteryx is to paleontology what Tutankhamen is to archaeology. It’s simply one of the icons of our field,” said University of Manchester palaeontologist Dr Phil Manning said.

“You would think after 150 years of study, we’d know everything we need to know about this animal. But guess what - we were wrong.”

Dr Wogelius stressed: “We talk about the physical link between birds and dinosaurs, and now we have found a chemical link between them.

Researchers made the game-changing discovery by subjecting the Archaepteryx fossil to super-strong X-rays: the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, in California.

SLAC physicist Uwe Bergmann, who led the X-ray scanning experiment, said: “People have never used a technique this sensitive on Archaeopteryx before.

“Because the SSRL beam is so bright, we were able to see the teeniest chemical traces that nobody thought were there.”

And CMW Institute researcher Bob Morton said: “The discovery that certain fossils retain the detailed chemistry of the original organisms offers scientists a new avenue for learning about long-extinct creatures.”