To the degree that they promote a philosophy of atheism, they are outside of science.
You think you know more about evolutionary science than William Provine and Richard Dawkins. They're the experts on the subject, though.
The analogy you should be looking at is if these individuals tried to get their atheistic views taught in Sunday School.
No, it should be wrong to promote atheism in taxpayer funded science classrooms. It isn't.
The political issue currently in the USA is whether or not a particular religious view of origins, for which science has no evidence for, and plenty against, can be taught in public schools AS SCIENCE. It certainly can be taught in classes on religion or philosophy. If the state does promote, as science, the particular views of a particular segment of Christians, why not promote the Hindu view of origins as well, and call that science?
No, first Id doesn't deal with the origin of life. Second, it is just as compatible with Deism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Stoicism, or any theistic religion.
They laid the foundations of philosophical materialism, even if they were unaware of what it would become.
No, the one who did that was Darwin. Contrary to the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, who has been largely obliberated from the historical record despite being the first to put the theory in writing. Wallace started out an agnostic but became a spirtualist and asserted that the origin of life and human consciousness could not be explained by naturalistic causes.
Re. science as being not a search for truth:
Nicolaus Copernicus - "My goal is to find the truth in God's majestic creation." (Not only was he searching for truth,
he wasn't a materialist. He used the "G" word and he was, gasp, a creationist. So he must not have been a scientist. Heh.)
Only a very few genomes have been sequenced, so it still remains a possibility that some life will be found on earth, which we will conclude is not descended from a common ancestor with us. If so, there will be Nobels handed out on that account.
I think you're the only one with that idea about common descent. Common descent and evolution are always associated. BTW I have no problem with common descent. In fact, I consider it evidence for divine intervention in re. to the origin of life.
"Common descent is a general descriptive theory that concerns the genetic origins of living organisms (though not the ultimate origin of life). The theory specifically postulates that all of the earth's known biota are genealogically related, much in the same way that siblings or cousins are related to one another. Thus, macroevolutionary history and processes necessarily entail the transformation of one species into another and, consequently, the origin of higher taxa. Because it is so well supported scientifically, common descent is often called the "fact of evolution" by biologists. For these reasons, proponents of special creation are especially hostile to the macroevolutionary foundation of the biological sciences. "
talkorigins.org
The one living today is not identical to the fossils.
I think you are wrong - the coelacanth is unchanged from what the species was hundreds of millions of years ago. That's what made it newsworthy.
HAve to go - will followup later. |
