Scientists and religious leaders: End Darwin fight

[MacBeth]

Prominent scientists and leading religious figures have joined forces to call for an end to the fighting over Charles Darwin's legacy.

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:21PM GMT 09 Feb 2009


Ahead of the 200th anniversary of the pioneering naturalist's birth on Thursday, they warn that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it as a weapon with which to attack religion.

However, in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph, they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to back up Darwin's theory of how life on Earth has developed.

It comes after a survey of 2,000 people conducted by Theos, the religion think tank, found that half believe the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of the natural world. One in three said they thought God created the Earth within the past 10,000 years.

The influential signatories of the letter include two Church of England bishops, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain and a member of the Evangelical Alliance, as well as Professor Lord Winston, the fertility pioneer, and Professor Sir Martin Evans, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

They write: "Evolution, we believe, has become caught in the crossfire of a religious battle in which Darwin himself had little personal interest.

"We respectfully encourage those who reject evolution to weigh the now overwhelming evidence, hugely strengthened by recent advances in genetics, which testifies to the theory's validity.

"At the same time, we respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin's theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.

"In this year of all years, we should be celebrating Darwin's great biological achievements and not fighting over his legacy as some kind of anti-theologian."




www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/4560028/Scientists-and-religious-leaders-call-for-end-to-fighting-over-Darwins-legacy.html

[joethree56]

That the Telegraph is reporting the views of a religious think tank and some clerics in frocks, tells me this is the yapping of a minority who picked a fight 200 years ago and has lost every battle since. So now they want a truce based upon the surrender of the other side in the name of the memory of a man they treated shamefully in their zeal to preserve their fairy stories. Well it's different!
Ah the good old Right wing Telegraph, the non thinking mans favourite source of more prejudice

[Pax]

Actually I'd love to see the feud end. Evolution's only really a problem for people who insist that the Bible be interpreted asbolutely literally. Evolution is NOT incompatible with a less stringent interpretation, and this is a position that even the Catholic Pope has adopted. Evolution can be seen as the process by which God brought us into existence. No conflict at all.

Atheists who use evolution as a bludgeon against religion pick a fight with all believers everywhere, rather than just the relatively small subset who insist on literal intepretation. It's factually unnecessary and unnecessarily divisive.

[joethree56]

This is the central point. Evolution won the intellectual battle over 150 years ago and it was a battle which the churches sought, not the evolutionists so it is no good the church bellyaching now. Certainly it is possible to believe in some sort of supreme being and to believe in evolution but this is insufficient for the church. Having painted itself into a corner with their rearguard defence of a literal interpretation of the bible in the past, they are fully aware that if you ditch Adam and Eve and the Flood then there is no firm foundation for the rest being divinely inspired. Atheists are not bashing religion with evolution, they have no need to do so as the inherent philosophical paradoxes become apparent just as soon as anyone examines science and religion in the same frame of reference. Non of this started with Darwin in fact Darwin trod the same path as the one trod by Copernicus and others.

[MacBeth]

Because someone, or some group, took a position in the past means that a new position should never be entertained.

Personally, I am sick of the strict interpretation of some of the faithful and their anti-science positions....and I am equally sick of the same from some of those who sit on the other side of the fence who feel compelled to attack anything concerning religion.

All who take those positions IMO have shown themselves to be so very alike - intolerant, inflexible and with unearned feelings of being superior over the other.

[Rob]

For many, perhaps most, of the people who've engaged on both sides of that "fight" for generations now, it's been a fake fight, each side insisting that the other holds positions that they do not actually hold. I don't know why that polarisation is so dear to so many, but it's ridiculous.

[joethree56]

Atheists are not the ones with the problem here as they are perfectly content with science and its explanations. They find no conflict between the said science and their core beliefs

[Pax]

For the religious, I wouldn't be surprised if there's money in keeping the fight up. It translates into donations. I don't see where that works for hardcore atheists, aside from a need for attention or just to be annoying.

Joe -- which "church" are you referring to when you say "the church?" There's many different religions, and many different sects of those religions, and many of them have no problem with evolution.

As for philosophical paradoxes, I will say that the Christian religion seems to actually take some pride in it. In fact, I have a pet theory about why the father, the son, and the holy ghost are all considered to be aspects of the same deity... I think, at least as far as Jesus is concerned, the only way to reconcile the belief in a "God on Earth" (Jesus) in addition to a God in Heaven (Jesus' father) in a MONOtheistic religion is to make them into some kind of extradimensional "individual and separate beings, yet one and the same." But I digress.

Back to what I was saying -- the Christian religion, as far as I understand it, requires faith for belief, and faith, as I understand it, by definition is belief in something for which there is no proof. That incidentally nullifies any "intellectual battle" between science and religion -- science is pointedly based on fact; religion pointedly isn't; there is no basis for comparison at any level. It's literal-interpretationists with their endlessly creative capacity for generating the kind of ignorant fear that leads to barrows of donations that try to force faith-based religion into some kind of fact-based rationalization.

Anyway, I don't have a problem with religion, even organized religion, though my main problem with organized religion is that the temptation and the risk is so high for dogmatic thought. Religion is, at the end of the day, a purely personal thing. I have no problem with people getting guidance on their lives from others with similar views. It's when this becomes at across-purposes that I have a problem... people berating other people for not "believing enough, or the right things," and the like.

[Rob]

And I don't have a problem with science, at the end of the day or at any other time.

One of the interesting aspects of this "fight" is the way it's fought. Most (although there are exceptions) of the self-avowed creationists aren't attacking scientists so much as they're attacking one idea that conflicts with their own world view. They're mostly ok with, say, photosynthesis. When they attack a group of people, they attack atheists or antitheists, not scientists. When they do criticize people, it is generally for actions or proposed actions (cloning, abortion, etc.) rather than belief in the scientific system.

And on the other hand, most antitheists (and again, there are exceptions) who get involved in the debate seem to be attacking people for what they believe. Further, they seem to be lumping a lot of people into "the church," in a way that isn't statistically, or therefore scientifically, valid.

So there's a lot of talking past one another.

And there's a third group out there: People of faith who are active participants in the hard sciences. Whenever they disagree with one group, they get lumped in with the other, so frequently, scientists call them "religious" and religious people call them "scientists. We don't give religion much credit when it's religious people doing the science.

[joethree56]

We don't give religion much credit when it's religious people doing the science.

Why should we, what is the connection except in the mind of that individual and perhaps those of similar faith?

[Rob]

This is today's Washington Post column on Darwin:

Something Darwin Didn't Know

By Rick Weiss
Thursday, February 12, 2009; Page A17

Charles Darwin was nothing if not methodical. When the time came to consider marriage, he divided a sheet of paper into two sections, "Marry" and "Not Marry." Under the first heading he noted: "a friend in old age . . . better than a dog anyhow." In the second he tallied counterarguments: "perhaps quarreling," he fretted, and "less money for books."

Darwin's commitment to weighing the facts, even when the topic was an emotional one, would serve competing advocates of science and religion well as the world celebrates the great naturalist's 200th birthday today and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his "On the Origin of Species," with its groundbreaking explication of evolutionary theory. While Darwin himself never took his findings as definitive evidence against the existence of God, many people of faith have read that conclusion into his work. As a result, the man who first grasped biology's most unifying concept is today widely demonized as an enemy of the church, even as many scientists and others make a similar mistake and invoke Darwin in their rejection of everything theological.

Darwin was a mostly Anglican biblical literalist when he set sail on his famed voyage aboard the Beagle. Like many Americans today, he believed that God created the world as it is, with all its countless species intact from the start. But Darwin's studies of rocks and fossils opened his eyes to the immensity of geologic time. And his keen observation of life's variations and adaptations sowed the seeds of his eventual revelation that mutation and natural selection, acting on simpler forms of life, could account for all biological diversity.

Darwin's basic insight threatened some conventional religious beliefs, of course. If we humans shared a common ancestry with apes -- and if we got here by dint of the same trial-and-error slog as every other species on Earth -- then so much for our being God's favorites, lovingly crafted in his image. And, yes, over time Darwin rejected a literal reading of the Bible, concluding that, as a history text, it was "no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian."

But Darwin also recognized that his vaunted theory of evolution was dumb on the all-important question of creation -- the mystery of what set the universe in motion and what force or forces launched life on its magnificent, ever-branching trajectory. Was that God's work? Might He yet exist?

As with matrimony, Darwin rigorously considered the matter. On the positive side, it certainly felt like something divine was afoot. But he appreciated that this was a subjective and perhaps untrustworthy measure. The "immense amount of suffering through the world" -- not least of which his own, highlighted by the death of his 10-year-old daughter -- argued against a benevolent creator, he wrote (with Facebook-like fanaticism, he maintained a correspondence with some 2,000 friends, including 200 clergymen). At the same time, he hedged, it seemed foolish to reject the assertions of so many intellectually "able men" who "fully believed in God."

In the end, he did what any reasonable person might do: He punted. "The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect," Darwin concluded. Do heaven and hell exist, and does eternal life follow death? "Every man," he wrote, "must judge for himself, between conflicting vague probabilities."

Darwin's humility in the face of insufficient evidence -- his willingness to say "I don't know" -- is as important a lesson as any to be found in biology texts today. This is not about "teaching the controversy" -- Darwin had a slam-dunk in his explanation of the evolution of species, including humans, and every modern test of evolutionary theory has only strengthened his conclusions. But he also knew there is plenty of room for God at the top, upstream of the business of biology.

Soldiers in today's culture wars, whether in black collars or white lab coats, could take a tip from Darwin on his birthday bicentennial. He loved the natural world, "most beautiful and most wonderful." And he knew enough to not pick fights over what he did not know.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/11/AR2009021103201.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

[joethree56]

Rob a white lab coat in this context signifies someone in the pursuit of knowledge. What he/she believes as a matter of faith is a separate issue to the white coat. Now tell me about the ones in the black collars?

[Georgina]

I've read about and talked to more than one person who hold both theism and science in their practises and belief systems without conflict.

[Pax]

Rob, "And I don't have a problem with science, at the end of the day or at any other time," hope I didn't offend you. It wasn't my intent.

[joethree56]

The point is that the theists are the ones who, when their beliefs conflicted with empirical science made the thing 'either or'. I know of no atheist who would be so rash as to claim there is no Creator. What they will say is that there is no concrete evidence for such a creator. It has no relevance to anything anyway because even if it is conceded that such a supreme being exists there is not the slightest shred of evidence for Him/Her/IT being the God of any of the religions here on earth.
In a way the fundamentalists are the more honest in this as they realise that the baby goes out not with the bathwater but with the Flood.

[Pax]

Not to be argumentative, but...

1. Again, "theists" is far too general a term for the statement you made.
2. Actually, I think, by definition, atheists DO claim there is no Creator. The word itself means, "no god."

[Georgina]

Isn't it agnostics who claim middle ground on the existence of G-d? Atheism is declarative, is it not?

[joethree56]

I believe it is a reasonable general term as I know of no religion that is based upon empirical evidence (which would by definition put it outside of the term 'religion'). Atheism may literally mean no god but words are fluid anyway and agnostic has been hijacked from its original narrow meaning and is no longer available . To an atheist the question about a divine creator is not one they tend to waste much time thinking about if only because of the reasons I have already mentioned. One thing I will about is that this whole topic is artificial as I mentioned at the outset in my response to the lead post. A bunch of clerics with time on their hand, a few scientists and a religious think tank's report of a survey of a few hundred people on attitudes to questions they the think tank posed makes a right wing British newspaper. The context is that in this country of a state religion with compulsory religious instruction in our schools the impact of that religion and consequently the influence of its leaders is virtually nothing Except of course to the Colonel Blimps who read the Telegraph.

[Rob]

No offense, Pax. That was just a way into the subject. I'm remarkably hard to irritate (as a result of having many, many children) and am in a good mood because I actually got something done today, finished, completed. That happens very rarely, as there's no good way to be really done with a patient, and there's no way at all to be done with government paperwork.

Plus, I'm not made grumpy just by the existence of scientists in my world. I have no desire to argue with anyone about this, because there's no way to be done with that either, but I do grow tired of all the "you all believe ..." statements. It's so rare to be asked what one actually does believe.

It occurs to me that the language that now makes up the creation accounts in Genesis actually is a remarkably apt allegory for the current scientific theories about creation. It's a very sophisticated story that does seem to be describing concepts that the original storytellers cannot have understood, and that I, at least, still cannot understand.

[Pax]

Joe, the phrase I objected to was:

"The point is that the theists are the ones who, when their beliefs conflicted with empirical science made the thing 'either or'."

That statement is patently untrue. Catholics do not "make the thing 'either or'." They embrace evolution. So that accounts for a few hundred million theists for whom your statement above does not apply. Rob himself on this board, who is very religious, embraces evolution and likewise is a person to whom your statement does not apply.

There IS room for religion in people's lives, for those for whom it makes life make a little more sense. For those who don't 'need' religion to help them make sense of life, who are doing just fine without it, more power to them.

I would agree that in the struggle between faith and knowledge, knowledge must always win; observable truth must always trump belief. Those theists who do find that healthy balance, and there are many, by definition are not "either or."

Joe, you and I agree on many things. However, I strongly feel that you are making some very sweeping statements about "theists." They don't all lump into one bucket. While I'll be the first to agree with any statement that says that the United States has a very vocal and annoying minority among its theists that insists on biblical literalism, the empirical evidence is that it IS a minority, and nowhere close to "all."

[joethree56]

Pax, I well understand that people do hold religious beliefs alongside a belief in evolution and I thought I had made that clear in this thread. The total thrust of my argument stems from the original post and in particular this statement

"At the same time, we respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin's theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.

Now you and other here are taking me to task for generalising about theists Yet the very public statement above issued by a bunch of clerics and theist deliberately assembled to be representative of various denominations and even religions does exactly what you are calling foul on me for.
just who are these contemporary Darwinians that this statement refers to and just what evidence have they that these extreme Darwinians are being so counter productive? Not only have I have not noticed a great groundswell of outrage at their statements, I have not even been aware of the existence of this group of vocal evolutionists. And there certainly has not been even a squeak about any group returning to Creationism. As these clerics are based in England and had their statement publicised in the British press I assume that this is concerned with Britain rather than say the USA. As I have also pointed out this is a total non issue in England as the hard fact is, that the Christian religion is in decline across all denominations and has been for very many years. At a time when the results of a 700 year clash between religion and science is empty churches that these clerics raise an issue that is a long lost battle for them is puzzling in the extreme.
On the broader issue it would seem that there is an assumption that atheism somehow stems from the theory of evolution. This might be true in certain cases but is not true in my case or of several others I know. All of us find enough paradoxes in religious belief to dismiss it without reference to evolution which is in any case nothing at all to do with religious belief.

[Pax]

Regarding this statement...

"At the same time, we respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin's theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.

I interpret "those contemporary Darwinians" not as "all Darwinians" but as "that subset of Darwinians." I think it's 100% clear that that was what was intended in that statement, because the statement does go on to warn that such people are "turning people away from the theory," by which statement the author identifies himself as a Darwinian, and obviously is not including himself in the group of "those contemporary Darwninians" to which he was referring. He clearly can't have meant "all." So, I would not agree at all that he is "generalizing."

Anyway, however many "vocal darwinists" there are, it strikes me as a reasonable compromise. Actually it would be a fantastic and fantastically funny thing if there is in fact no such thing as a "vocal Darwinist," because in a compromise that involves silencing a group that doesn't exist in the first place as balance for silencing a group that clearly does, I'd call that a hell of a bargain for the side that has to give up nothing, and not complain about it.

I will say, though I can't think of a specific case where I've specifically heard of Darwin's theory being used to bludgeon theists, there are certainly cases where atheists have tried to use various scientific arguments to bludgeon theists, the most notable example I can think of being Richard Dawkins.

I agree, atheism does not stem from or even imply a belief in evolution. I haven't heard of cases where that accusation was made -- that atheism springs from a belief in evolution -- but there's a lot of ignorance out there, and I can definitely see where someone could say that. As Rob said, there's a lot of false assumptions being made by each side about each side... probably a lot of straw men.

[joethree56]

there are certainly cases where atheists have tried to use various scientific arguments to bludgeon theists, the most notable example I can think of being Richard Dawkins.
As soon as this topic comes up so does the name of Richard Dawkins yet Dawkins does no more than point out the very incompatibilities between science and religious belief as he takes the view that these are logically mutually exclusive. Irrespective of the tone in which states his view I am still waiting for a even half convincing attempt by some theist to pick holes in his logic.
The reason Dawkins draws blood is that in his writings is that he has posed the central question 'From where should we draw the basis of our ethics and morality, science or the other place?'