As I’ve noted before, I’m not particularly religious but I am quite interested in religion, especially as it relates to human biodiversity. What I find particularly disturbing about the current religious trajectory, especially among Christians, is the embracing of Intelligent Design (ID), which, as I related in a previous post, is a complete sham peddled by Trotskyites, and their front organizations like the Discovery Institute, who are disturbed by the politically incorrect nature of human evolution. (In a sense, this is nothing new, as the early Marxists rejected Darwinism for Lysenkoism since the latter better aligned with Marxist ideals.) As previously noted:
“Recently, it was discovered that the Discovery Institute fabricated its scientific labs and …the underlying motivation of the Discovery Institute seems to be Cultural Marxism. By this, I mean that the problem for many ID people is that evolution seems to violate the myth of universalism / egalitarianism. An overwhelming number of articles at the Discovery Institute decries evolution for being “racist”. When one looks at those funding the ID movement — Trotskyite neocons perennially worried that “evolution leads to fascism” — one can understand the unhinged obsession with “racism.” These neocons seem, from an allegedly religious perspective, to mirror the frauds Boas, Lewontin, and Gould always at war to defend “Liberal Creationism.””
If you are religious, especially if you are Christian, and you want to maintain your religious beliefs and have a worldview consistent with reality, then the answer is to reconcile religion and evolution. Argue:
As god (or the gods, if you’re pagan) set the laws of physics in motion, so he (or they) set the laws of evolution in motion. Current evolutionary theory is a valid scientific theory, should be embraced, and is in no way in conflict with (my) religion.
It’s really that simple. And then you’ll have an intelligent religion aligned with reality. Of course, if your main objective is to appeal to the low-IQ Third World hordes (which seems to be the game plan of many Christians) then, I guess, peddle Intelligent Design quackery and continue on with your war against scientific reality. Idiocracy cometh.
Updates:
Blowhard Mark Shea responds to this post.
Anti-evolution neocon David Klinghoffer calls Occam’s Razor “moronic” and then links to some mindless rant about Darwinism being racist, pretty much confirming my above assessment of the Trotskyite origins of the Discovery Institute.
Bruce G. Charlton puts up this essay: “Is the Christian evolutionist an oxymoron?”
Occam's Razor 
I love science. I constantly post scientific journal papers on my blog. But there are aspects of evolution that don’t sit right with me. We’ve never actually observed evolution only adaptive mutations, which are not the same. Sometimes the mutations are for the worse, thus causing devolution. There is still no sound reasoning for it other than “just because”. If they told me being bombarded with neutrinos caused it, it would be better than “just because”. That sort of answer is not science.
“Intelligent Design” is just remedial “science” for people with IQs below 85. Probably harmless all in all but scary if these clowns were ever to acquire political power.
Oh….To chicken shit to post my comments. Bye loser.
Pax J
James,
Take a deep breath and try to remember that your comment was posted to the other thread.
Regarding the typo above, I was quickly editing it, changing “you’re going to appeal” to “your main objective,” hence the typo, changing out “you’re” for “your.”
Update: Lawrence Auster calls this article “stupid” but agrees that the Discovery Institute seems primarily to be obsessed with “racism”:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/024335.html
“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems: and lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another”
Wow – who knew that Isaac Newton was a Troskey-ite Marxist neocon with an IQ below 85?
This new learning amazes me.
Tell me again how you know the earth is banana-shaped.
A little baffled by this when my post above argues that the religious can align their views with science (as did Newton, who, had he lived after the discovery of Darwinian evolution, most certainly would have accepted the reality of evolution — doubt he would have been hanging out with fundamentalist Young Earthers). What the above post objects to is the Cultural Marxism of Intelligent Design / the Discovery Institute.
“…Newton who, had he lived after the discovery of Darwinian evolution, most certainly would have accepted the reality of evolution…”
What makes you think so? Aren’t you presuming too much? I should think that he would have rejected it for lack of evidence and logical inconsistencies.
BTW, I am an atheist.
Exactly. The author of the article apparently doesn’t realize that over sixty individual scientific disciplines were founded by deeply religious Christian believers? For instance, all four fathers of modern chemistry were devout Christians: Sir Robert Boyle even set up a series of lectures designed to prove Christian faith against pagans and notorious atheists – the Boyle Lectures. Michael Faraday, the man responsible for the Second Great Synthesis, did the same thing, thus the Faraday Lectures.
Matthew Fontaine Mauray, the man who just about singlehandedly invented naval metereology and was a one-man clearing house for the world’s information on naval currents, did so because he was looking for “the paths of the sea” described in Psalm 8.
Both Sir William Herschel, the man who discovered Uranus, and Urbaine Le Verrier, the man who discovered Neptune – and the first man to discover a celestial object through mathematical calculations alone – were devout Christians. Le Verrier spent 20 years of his life doing the calculations necessary to characterizing the paths of the planets through the heavens and, when awarded a prize for the feat, declared that he never would have been able to finish the project if he had not been completely confidant that God had designed the universe according to a logical plan.
Modern science wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the motivating factor of Intelligent Design. Anyone who says different is ignorant of history or deliberately misrepresenting the facts.
Steve,
I don’t deny that many famous scientists were Christian nor that Christian European culture might have been favorable toward scientific discovery. However, it’s a big step to then add contemporary “intelligent design” into the equation, which is a bogus ideology invented by paranoid Trotskyites at some Seattle “think tank” around 1990.
“as did Newton, who, had he lived after the discovery of Darwinian evolution, most certainly would have accepted the reality of evolution — doubt he would have been hanging out with fundamentalist Young Earthers).”
And you know this how? Simply sounds like the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy.
I used to be religious. Conservative Christian of the ‘manospherian’ type in many ways (this was in the mid 80’s to early 90’s, obviously long before but this is how I would define most of my theological views looking back), and though I liked science and science fiction I truly brought the anti-evolution/ID spiel of places like Discovery.
What changed me was going to college (got an undergrad in a biological field) and doing my own research. During said research I caught the ‘number 2’ guy at Discovery in a downright no doubt about it lie. He had said some fish biologist dude was skeptical of evolution. I stumbled across that paper purely by luck or chance (and made sure it was the quoted paper in the Discovery literature) and read it. The biologist was very clear that while he didn’t believe in a certain theory as to how the class of fish he was studying evolved, he had an alternate theory of the history of this fish’s evolution. I mean this was very clear, hardly any biological ‘jargon’ was necessary, and he went on for several paragraphs. Meanwhile this guy I had trusted from the DI had selectively quoted part of his dissent about the older evolutionary theory as to how the fish evolved, and then outright stated that he was a skeptic of evolution, totally ignoring the later part of his paper.
While that didn’t totally make the case against creationism, it did against the ‘Discovery’ Institute. And this was in the early 90’s before their shenanigans were widely spread about the web for all to see. Now there are wonderful resources like the Talk Origins archive and nearly all scientists have their contact information (and often some of the papers) available for free on the internet. I had no such resources. I had 2 college libraries and a few Baltimore city ones. I had no money for more exotic research or to go to other cities or countries, and I certainly couldn’t count on help from the Biology department (I’d be embarrassed) when I was checking out the anti-evolution ‘case’. People these days have it so much easier.There’s no excuse for creationism or “Intelligent” Design anymore other than people being suckered into believing what they want to believe.
Who was the “number 2” guy you ran into?
I can’t help but notice your criticisms resemble the kind we all tend to face in regards to the Pioneer Fund.
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Mr Clark, my friend, I fear that I must disagree with you, here. There is no way to reconcile the doctrine of an all-loving, all-forgiving God with the pitiless realities of evolutionary theory. No way at all.
More of that modern American Christian “Jesus is your boyfriend” theology. Looking at the Bible, God is all-powerful and the Truth is Absolute.
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I will have to disagree with you on this one. Well. It entirely, I agree calling evolution “racist” is goofy.
But i don’t think the ID proponent is necessarily so far off base. Even if the discovery institute is. ID is a legitimate theoretical framework unless you embrace an anti-realist approach to science as a discipline. Certainly the queation “Does evidence of design exist in nature” is a legitimate question.
Beyond that, there is no reason to think that ID and Evolution concepts are incompatible unless you adopt the religious position of Dawkins et al.
Quite possibly ID and evolutionary theories relationship will turn out to be that is Newtons Classical Mechanics and Einstein’s General Relativity.
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I’m a Creationist (Christian), reject evolution, but accept adaptation. I don’t think HBD studies are racist. God created one man and one woman, so two races at most. Earth was one continent in the middle of the ocean. Then the Tower of Babel thing happened, God scattered the people, split up the continent into smaller ones, and the people adapted to their new surroundings and climates and needs, creating the different races. God didn’t create the races, is my view. He created one race, and the “laws,” if you will, of adaptation, which laws He created, took over from there. I don’t think HBD studies are incompatible with the theory of Intelligent Design at all.
I think we can all agree that the motivation for the rejection of evolution and the big-bang theory is primarily theological rather than scientific, as such, if you want Christians to be more accepting of evolution, it is the theological concerns which needs to be addressed.
The problem is that most Christians cannot square a “good” Edenic creation of Adam and Eve with the evolutionary idea of struggle for life, death, decay and destruction for the origins of man. Once you’ve addressed this primary concern, the rest will fall in place.
There was a “just-so” story or idea suggested by the Christian philosopher Alexander Pruss where he posits in interesting way for Christians to be able to accept both literal 6 days creationism AND the big bang and evolutionary origins of man. His scenario goes, God creates the world and everything in it as “literally” as might please any 6 days creationist. But he places a little “contingency” plan in the universe. If Adam should fail the test of the Tree of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, a mechanism would kick in whereby Adam and Eve would crumble back to dust, God would grab their souls, and the entire universe would collapse into a “big crunch” and explode back out again in a big bang and evolution, etc, etc, and when the first monkeys emerged out of their primal state and into their human state, God simply stuffs the souls of Adam and Eve into these proto-humans and they awaken in their new “fallen” state.
I expanded upon this account on my blog where I accepted Pruss’s basic narrative with the important theological interpretation that after Adam sinned and God cursed him and all of creation, God’s wrath then does “dissolve” all of creation and radically alters both Adam’s and the world’s nature via Big Crunch followed by the Big Bang and evolution to set into place the “postlapsarian” state of both Adam and the world as essentially “fallen beings” made by the big bang and evolution which are God’s means of “cursing” Adam and the world, and not pure and innocent as they were originally formed by God.
I hope that you would consider my account which can be assessed here:
http://rationalityofaith.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/how-we-can-both-accept-creationism-read-genesis-1-3-literally-and-accept-the-big-bang-theory-and-evolution/
ID doesn’t have to be about the disinterested watchmaker god that started the universe, gave it rules, and then took a nap. ID, for me, has always included the God of the Bible, who is very much interested in and involved in His creations. For me, ID represents the outcome of God’s developing an underlying code of life, but then actively creating a huge…likely infinite…variety of lifeforms to inhabit the worlds He creates.
The key term here is variety. Each creature exists in its own sphere, producing like offspring from its own seed, and only its own seed. God allows for apes that look like humans and humans that look like apes and everything in between without having to reconcile Himself with any of mankind’s ideas of “evolution”. He can create anything He wants in any variety, configuration, or combination. He’s God.
If some of those creatures live to continue to reproduce, and others go extinct due to environmental conditions, then that’s what we would call (in our limited view) natural selection, but that is no excuse for pretending these things just happened by happy accidents.
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“(In a sense, this is nothing new, as the early Marxists rejected Darwinism for Lysenkoism since the latter better aligned with Marxist ideals.) ”
Karl Marx sent Darwin a copy of The Communist Manifesto while they were still alive. It was found among Darwin’s papers, with the pages uncut.
Marx died in 1883.
Lysenko became Director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1940. Lysenkoism was adopted as an official doctrine in the USSR in 1948.
Um. Don’t let me interrupt your practicing…
-dlj.
Do you have any proof if that? Owning a copy of Marx’s book doesn’t make you a Marxist.
And Lysenkoism is explicitly anti-genetics and anti-Darwin
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