Anyone else encountered the Rev. Michael Dowd? \u00a0He reminds me of the renowned cell biologist, Ken Miller, who also proclaims a happy marriage between evolution and belief in God. \u00a0We owe a lot to Miller for fighting creationism in the Dover, PA schools case. \u00a0But he leaves room for God, which at best is unnecessary. \u00a0And at worst, incredibly callous.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/thankgodforevolution.com\/book<\/p>\n
How shortsighted does someone have to be to say \u201cThank God for evolution\u201d? \u00a0It\u2019s hard to think of a greater engine of suffering than natural selection and the food chain.\u00a0 If any god had any choice in the matter, and set up this scheme on purpose anyway, then we live in a ghastly, Malthusian petri dish. \u00a0Even if God is loving to some, he isn’t equally loving to everyone.\u00a0 We just know that some people suffer more than others.<\/span><\/p>\n For most people, beliefs are about feeling good and getting along with others. \u00a0Many scientific facts run counter to these aims, and in most of the people, most of the time, it is the facts which are relaxed.<\/span><\/p>\n It seems Dowd thinks God could have used evolution to create humans.\u00a0 But this would not be Darwinian evolution, which is unguided and without foresight.\u00a0 So to say that \u2018evolution could be the way God did it\u2019 is a contradiction.\u00a0 The most a theist could say is that God created humanity by using the \u2018method we call evolution by natural selection, and made it look exactly like he was not involved\u2019.<\/p>\n Religion and faith can be defended as ways to \u2018know\u2019. \u00a0Alvin Plantinga views it like this:<\/p>\n \u201cPlantinga compares the difference in justified beliefs to a case where you are accused of a crime on the basis of very convincing evidence, but you know that you didn\u2019t do it. For you, the immediate evidence of your memory is not defeated by the public evidence against you, even though your memory is not available to others.\u201d<\/p>\n But this is pretty weak.\u00a0 Of course a religious belief could turn out to be true.\u00a0 But a psychotic in an institution might be right about something, too.\u00a0 The issue is whether a method such as faith is a reliable way to knowledge, and not just something that is present in people who are sometimes right for other reasons or due to chance. \u00a0When a religious belief is correct, it is by accident.<\/span><\/p>\n While we don\u2019t do science on consensus, the social aspect of how we acquire knowledge is paramount.\u00a0 When we make claims on anything other than a scientific foundation, we make ourselves unconversable to others.\u00a0 Religion hides this by getting large numbers to accept its claims, but those claims are unjustifiable outside each tradition.\u00a0 Science is an evolving set of methods, not a set of claims.\u00a0 Because it listens to nature and counts on revision, it is as unbiased as we can get. \u00a0Listening to nature, as revealed by science, is the only approach I know of that has the potential to unify humanity in a common worldview.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anyone else encountered the Rev. Michael Dowd? \u00a0He reminds me of the renowned cell biologist, Ken Miller, who also proclaims a happy marriage between evolution and belief in God. \u00a0We owe a lot to Miller for fighting creationism in the Dover, PA schools case. \u00a0But he leaves room for God, which at best is unnecessary. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}