Gup20
Active Member
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/0930religion.asp
Here is a snippet from the above link to wet your pallate. Instead of arguing the merrits of different scientific or biblical evidences - lets keep this topic STRICTLY on DOES or DOES NOT evolution follow the pattern of a religion. We can argue facts and figures till blue in the face, but we should try to address this without getting into arguing the details of evolution or creationism themselves.
Here is a snippet from the above link to wet your pallate. Instead of arguing the merrits of different scientific or biblical evidences - lets keep this topic STRICTLY on DOES or DOES NOT evolution follow the pattern of a religion. We can argue facts and figures till blue in the face, but we should try to address this without getting into arguing the details of evolution or creationism themselves.
See the link for the rest of the article. Here is the article's CONCLUSION:Michael Ruse, professor of history and philosophy and author of The Darwinian Revolution (1979), Darwinism Defended (1982), and Taking Darwin Seriously (1986), acknowledges that evolution is religious:
‘Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit in this one complaint. . . the literalists [i.e., creationists] are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.’4
Ruse didn’t always espouse the religious foundation of evolution. But since evolution asks the same questions as religion—telling us where we came from, where we’re going, and what we should do on the way—he had to admit the religious nature of his chosen materialistic worldview. For Ruse, and he is correct, ‘evolution is a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity.’ If evolution is a ‘substitute for Christianity,’ and Christianity is religious, then evolution, as Christianity’s substitute, is religious. The distinction in this debate, therefore, is not between religion and science, as so many claim, but between one religion and science (materialistic evolution) and another religion and science (creation science).
Is it any wonder that Darwin’s most vocal defender, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), in addition to being called ‘Darwin’s Bulldog,’ was also known as ‘Pope Huxley’? ‘Huxley personalized “nature,” referring to it as “fair, just and patient,” “a strong angel who is playing for love.”’5 How can this be when evolution is described as ‘blind’?6 Huxley’s great-grandson, Julian Huxley (1887-1975), ‘conceded that his beliefs are “something in the nature of a religion,”’7 and described his humanist beliefs as ‘The New Divinity.’ Ruse and the Huxleys are not alone in their contention that evolution is a materialistic religion that is founded on metaphysical assumptions:
The distinguished biologist Lynn Margulis has rather scathingly referred to new-Darwinism as ‘a minor twentieth century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.’ Stuart Kauffman observes that ‘natural selection’ has become so central an explanatory force in neo-Darwinism that ‘we might as well capitalise [it] as though it were the new deity.’8
Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and author of a number of books on Darwinian theory, illustrates the implicit metaphysical starting point of the evolutionary dogma. Even when the facts point away from a certain scientific explanation for a given theory, evolution must be followed because the materialistic religion of Darwin must be protected against any Divine intrusion:
‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’9
Ms Lucey is under the false impression that science is an objective enterprise, neutral in face of the facts. ‘Science,’ she says, ‘is an intellectual pursuit; it’s being able to let go of ideas that don’t pan out.’ Now go back and read Lewontin again. As a self-professed materialist, Lewontin, by his own admission, is ‘forced by [his] a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive’ Lewontin’s new-found religion, bordering on irrationalism, has nothing in common with Christianity which calls for rational investigation based on known physical properties.
Robert Jastrow, an internationally known astronomer, founder and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Professor of Astronomy and Geology at Columbia University, and Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College, describes science as ‘religion’ in the chapter where the following quotation is taken:
‘Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the Universe? Was the Universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion. An entire world, rich in structure and history, may have existed before our Universe appeared; but if it did, science cannot tell what kind of world it was. A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our Universe; but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is.’10
Jastrow is correct about science having a metaphysical starting point. Science asks ultimate questions to which it has no scientifically substantiated answers. According to Jastrow, no evidence exists for the scientist to study on the subject of origins, since it was destroyed at the moment of creation (an idea that is based on the unbiblical ‘big bang’ hypothesis, which even many non-Christian scientists reject). In his book Until the Sun Dies, Jastrow outlines two origin options, both of which he describes as a ‘miracle’: ‘The first theory places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith. The act of faith consists in assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief.’11 These aren’t the words of a ‘Christian fundamentalist’ who is ‘anti-intellectual and where ‘logic takes a holiday,’ to use Ms Lucey’s description of biblical creationists. Jastrow is a well-respected scientist, described as ‘the greatest writer of science living today.’
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/0930religion.aspConclusion
Ms Lucey’s deepest wound is made when she pronounces that ‘Fundamentalism tends to be literal, not figurative. Hence, it’s anti-intellectual. Logic takes a holiday.’ Who is she describing? No doubt there are Christians who are anti-intellectual. But lots of people are anti-intellectual, including many non-Christians. Lots of smart people hold to some ridiculous beliefs. Some of them are Nobel prize winning scientists like Francis Crick. Who’s defining ‘anti-intellectual’? I find it amazing, illogical, and anti-intellectual that an atheist and evolutionist like Richard Dawkins can deny a designed creation when everything he touches and uses in his life has been designed. The only thing that hasn’t been designed, according to Dawkins and other ‘intellectuals,’ is a marvelously constructed cosmos that got the way it is by chance. To borrow a phrase from Ms Lucey, the notion of random, chance, and undirected evolution is ‘magical thinking,’ and, if evolutionists have anything to say about it, ultimately religious.
Ms Lucey and other Darwinian religionists could take a lesson from Isaac Newton who had no problem mixing his Biblical religion and science: ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. . . . He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space.’23
