In view of all the heat emanating from the debate about religious accommodationism, including the new statements on Panda’s Thumb that P. Z. Myers, I, and now Richard Hoppe are making the lot of young earth creationists much easier by telling the truth about the number of atheistic scientists, I think it’s time for a break. But I can’t resist one more question about accommodationism: where is the evidence that showing people how their faith comports with evolution makes them more likely to accept evolution? I’m not talking about anecdotes here, but systematic data. After all, the AAAS, NCSE, and NCSE predicate their entire strategy on accepting this principle. Would it have been much easier for Christians to accept the heliocentric solar system has the Pope shown them that it could be seen as consistent with the Bible? I don’t think so. I think that in the end scientific truth is always accepted by the public (albeit sometimes slowly), and that its acceptance is not accelerated by stroking people with religious platitudes.
Whoops, I’m on a tirade. Enough. Here, for your delectation, is non-accommodationist philosopher Russell Blackford (a party to this debate) and his atheist cat Mystical Prince Felix (“Felix” for short). Felix is a blue point ragdoll.
Cats can’t be atheists, because every cat thinks he (or she) is God.
Jerry: The typo makes me think that something didn’t get copied right. But as your post above the cat reads, we should expect that the Pope’s pronouncement last month should have no influence upon the beliefs of the African faithful about causal links between condoms and protection against AIDS.
Brave man, to wear a black T-shirt with a light cat.
Good looking fellas, though.
I always chuckle when I read that evolutionists are still taking the idea seriously, and roar laughing when they refuse to understand that the basic concept of natural selection is, in fact, at least as comedious as some of the more outlandish creation scenarios developed by the historic creationists and religionists.
For some reason, completely unknown to myself, I have been thinking about evolutionisn for thirty years or so and now understand that it explains exactly nothing about the origin of life on this planet.
And now here is the truth:
Natural selection could just as easily be a mechanism which prevents speciation as a mechanism which allows or causes it. The “selected” individual is selected merely because this individual has the most stable genome and represents the best archetype with which nature’s changes will have the most difficult time trifling.
This circumstance encourages genetic stasis rather than change as the silly evolutionists still insist on fantasizing.
That should be the end of darwinian evolution, but like any determined religionists, evolutionists refuse to let the idea go. In reality human beings have no idea why some critters (species) have been encouraged to proliferate and others have been doomed to extinction.
And now this: The best possible explanation of life is that it is an experiment employing the same “live and learn” techniques by which human civilization has been created by human beings: Learning from a knowledge of the past and applying that knowledge to the construction of more useful, or at least more pleasant, mechanisms.
And so life has been created by some force with which we have not so far become acquainted.
The idea of darwinian or neodarwinian evolution is merely an interesting bit of mythology.
And yes, life on this planet, is much too complex to be reduced to random collisions between form and environment. It has indeed been teleopathically designed.
By what or whom? Nobody knows.
Truman Green,
Surrey BC