01.31.06
Ed, the captain goes down with the ship
E. O. Wilson in USA Today wants me to accept the fault line between science and religion. What on earth for?
Wilson is completely unrepentant on natural selection, so the fault line persists. ID is also at fault, so that has to go.
Presto, we have a bridge between science and religion. Actually, the right approach would be to have religions with no content, dogmatically. Buddhism came/comes close to that, its many accretions notwithstanding.
Religion should be about consciousness, and a series of gestures or incidents of self-awareness. Doctrines of the dogmatic type are the curse that has ruined monotheism.
A similar fate will overtake biology is Darwinists foist their religious attitude on the subject.
Let’s accept the fault line between faith and science
By Edward O. Wilson
If the perennial culture war between science and fundamentalist Christianity about evolution seems insoluble, the reason is that it is insoluble.
The fault line, which affects conservative belief not just in Christianity but in almost all other religions around the world, can be found along the outer edge of biology. On one side is the acceptance of evolution of all life independently of God, a view held by a small minority of Americans. On the other lies a spread of beliefs, from denial that evolution ever occurred to acceptance that it did but under the direction of God.
This gap, opened by Charles Darwin in his 1859 On the Origin of Species, has not been narrowed by the endless debates that ensued. Quite the contrary, it has been steadily widened by the growth of science.
Modern biology has arrived at two major principles that are supported by so much interlocking evidence as to rank as virtual laws of nature. The first is that all biological elements and processes are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. The second principle is that all life has evolved by random mutation and natural selection.
Although as many as half of Americans choose not to believe it, evolution, including the origin of species, is an undeniable fact. Furthermore, the evidence supporting the principle of natural selection has improved year by year, and it is accepted with virtual unanimity by the biologists who have put it to the test.