Monday, February 04, 2008

What will those silly Darwinists say next???

This is a hoot...some guy in a science forum spewed out this ridiculous comment at me today:

I'm sure they [my children] will end up (and I'm sure, very nice) good little Christians. It's only too bad that we, as a country, won't be able to count on them to lead the way in technology, medicine or research.

Pardon my name calling, but this guy is a moron.

It’s difficult to follow the logic here....of course it’s non-existent, so that would certainly explain it. He’s essentially saying that Christians can‘t be scientists. Good grief.... everyone knows that’s BS...there are even many YECs who are scientists and physicians.

He’s evidently forgetting that my children are and will continue to attend public elementary, high school and college. They’ll know everything they need to know about evolution so that they can feign the same mental illness that biologists who adhere to Darwinism have. In fact, they'll know more about evolution than the average science student because they'll have a background in ID and creationist theories as well.

Religion doesn’t stop science or research, and there have only been a few regrettable conflicts involving religion and science in the past.

From The Irrational Atheist....a list which was provided by PZ and his zoo with Vox Day's commentary...

This was the most comprehensive list, which covered pretty much everything brought up by anyone else:

1. Galileo’s trial. (1633 a.d.)
2. The demonization of mathematics during the Dark Ages. (476 to 1000 a.d.)
3. The persecution of alchemists during the Middle Ages. (476 to 1485 a.d.)
4. The execution of Michael Servetus. (1553 a.d.)
5. Opposition to the theory of evolution.
6. The destruction of libraries and the burning of books during the fourth and fifth centuries.
7. The ban on the works of René Descartes. (1663 a.d.)
8. The imprisonment of Roger Bacon. (1277 a.d.)
9. The condemnation of Francis Bacon.29 (1621 a.d.)
10. The destruction of Islamic manuscripts by Cardinal Ximenes. (1499 a.d.)
11. The execution of Giordano Bruno. (1600 a.d.)
12. The execution of Lucilio Vanini. (1619 a.d.)
13. The murder of Hypatia. (415 a.d.)
14. The recantation of the Comte de Buffon. (1753 a.d.)
15. St. Paul’s rants against the “wisdom of the wise” in Corinthians. (First century a.d.)
16. The Byzantine emperor Justinian’s closing of Plato’s Academy in Athens.31 (529 a.d.)
17. The ecclesiastical monopoly upon lay education.
18. Martin Luther’s attacks upon reason. (1517 a.d.)
19. Rejection of modern medicine by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other sects.
20. The excommunication of Johannes Kepler by the Catholic Church. (1612 a.d.)

Now, one can’t help but note that the most recent of these terrible sins against science took place more than 250 years ago, in 1753, except for the three that still apply today. This is not evidence of an ongoing war, it is merely a collection of historical grudges, most of them remarkably petty. By this standard, Christians would be justified in continuing to hold the Jews liable for the historical crime of murdering their Lord and Savior.32 Furthermore, five of these seven individual victims of Christian persecution were themselves Christians.

No wonder the Unholy Trinity found it difficult to come up with anything more specific than the spurious example of stem cell research.

The idea that religion is the enemy of science is a remarkably silly one when examined in scientific terms. Consider that Christian nation and the hostility to science that it supposedly harbors due to its extraordinary religiosity. And yet the United States of America accounts for more than one-third of the global scientific output despite representing only 4.5 percent of the global population. The scientific overperformance of religious America is a factor of 7.89, representing 28.7 percent more scientific output per capita than the most atheistic nation in Europe, France.33

Ironically, it is easy to provide an example of scientistry sinning against both the scientific method and the body of knowledge much more recent than most of religion’s supposed crimes. For example, Ernest Duchesne was a French military doctor who discovered the medical benefits of mold and submitted his doctoral thesis showing the result of his experiments with the therapeutic qualities of bacteria-killing molds to the Institut Pasteur, which ignored it because he was only twenty-three and had no standing in the scientific community. It would take another thirty-two years before Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic qualities of penicillin. As historian Daniel Boorstin notes in Cleopatra’s Nose, the chief lesson of the history of science is that it is not ignorance that menaces scientific advancement, but rather the illusion of knowledge.

Science, itself, has brought us many more problems to deal with than religion ever could...

Both my children love science and do very well in school. Imagine that....seeing at they're (gasp!) Christians. They know I want them to learn everything they possibly can about evolution. My hope is that they choose a career in the field of science...though I think my oldest has his heart set on engineering.

This, again, just goes to show that the underlying problem in this debate isn't that scientists have something to fear from religion, but rather it's their philosophical beliefs that are being questioned. They're not terribly fond of that...

[RB: bite me.]