shockadelic, reida, i rest my case. dan's not interested in truth. he's only interested in denigrating anything which threatens his myths. there's nothing honest here, there's no integrity or good faith in dan's response. just a smug, childish, defensive dismissal.

dan, there is all variety of scientific truth which you, personally, would find difficult or impossible to test. do you regard quantum mechanics as fairy tale? relativity? electromagnetism?

why is it that the one body of scientific truth which you seek to dismiss as "fairy tale" is evolutionary biology?

The Catholic Church, in a turn around, has embraced the general principles of evolution in order to distance itself from a logical counter point - Creationism, a scientific absurdity. Dan, I fear, is treading on tricky ground - with all due respect, has he the intellectual capacity to offer a more compelling myth than that of evolution, or does he agree with a pseudo scientific method?

In continuing in a similar vein from my previous post - challenging the science of evolution is part of a broader social and political program that includes establishing absolute hierarchical relationships in families, churches, and communities; protecting unambiguous boundaries between men and women, gays and straights, and Christians and non-Christians; and finally, preserving an unchanging nature to gender roles, the function of churches, and the religious nature of government.

If, by ignoring the science of evolution and replace it with the pseudo-science of creationism, where it is believed the Earth's species are too elaborate and varied to have arisen by evolution. A creator, essentially God, must have created them. This dumbs down an ancient myth into literal belief, belies the subtlety of faith but is quite true to fundamentalist form.

Bushbasher,
The cavalier manner in which you throw around the words ‘truth’ and ‘scientific truth’ displays a confidence that could outstrip many among the devout. I would question whether the term ‘scientific truth’ even belongs in this discussion, unless you want to give more ammunition to Gray’s position that the secularists are borrowing too much from those of faith.

I don’t think science even has ‘Truth with a capital T’. Science is more a method, hopefully with truth as the goal. But such knowledge advances in a cumulative and self correcting manner.

One of the planks of the scientific method is testability or repeatability. The problem with evolution is that it is a theory of history, an explanation of what happened in the past, and therefore unrepeatable. For the others, not so. If you don’t like my idea on electromagnetism, I’ll demonstrate it with an experiment, again and again. If I can’t then you can question whether it’s really scientific.

Relda,
The Catholic Church is monolithic, but rarely capable of speaking with one voice. The pronouncements which come from the Vatican don’t always represent the broad spectrum within the ranks. There are still highly respected scientists within the Catholic Church critical of Darwin and evolution.

When speaking of these Christian moral issues you seem worried about creationists bringing a Trojan horse along with them. While creationists largely do have great respect for the Bible, this in itself should not discount their arguments. I can say this in view of the great pioneers of modern science who were nearly all deeply Bible believing (Bacon, Newton) as well as other great names of science post Darwin (Mendel, Pasteur). I put it to you that many concerns against creationists show fears of this Trojan horse and not their arguments themselves.

In investigating our origins, in the end we have two possibilities: a great intelligence beyond our own created the cosmos, or it created itself. Neither is ultimately provable scientifically. But I use the emotive term ‘fairy tale’ as I believe the evidence for evolution is insubstantial or not compelling.

not much point in arguing the subtleties of science with someone who attacks the idea of scientific truth. i used no capitals, dan, but feel free to keep attacking your straw man.

and your opinion is that the evidence for evolution is "not compelling"? why would i possibly care about your willfully uninformed opinion?

dan, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. but i realise i have no chance of convincing you of anything your religiously addled mind refuses to consider.

Your last paragraph is the most telling, Dan, for you confuse scientific truth with your own beliefs. In doing so and by your logic you equate all that is scientifically unprovable to a fairy tale (including, by implication, your own religious beliefs). If you wish to talk credibly on any scientific truth you need take the approach of a scientist. You talk as some evangelist, where your mission is not to support or reveal any scientific understanding, but to forge apologetic defenses for some generic or universal truth as contained in your particular biblical interpretation.

Darwin’s theory of how evolution happened, i.e. natural selection, is quite distinct from the fact of evolution. Other scientists have different theories of evolution, but only a negligible few deny the fact of evolution. It would appear scientists are far more uniformly aligned than a "monolithic" catholic faith. In the Origin of Species Darwin provided vast amounts of data about the natural world that he and others had collected or observed. Only after providing the data did he demonstrate how his theory accounted for the data much better than the theory of special creation - his theories were certainly, nor have ever been, beyond critique.

My problem with the Creationists is not with your so called "trojan horse" but their total disingenuousness . They consider as false any evidence or data contradicting their reading of the Bible. I do in fact question the basis of their argument. Despite their somewhat devious approach, their morality (Christian or otherwise) is not a central issue here. Creation scientists see no need to test their theory, since God has revealed it. Infallible certainty is not the hallmark of science. Scientific theories are fallible. Claims of infallibility and the demand for absolute certainty characterize not science but the pseudoscience you appear to happily support. Intelligent design is a mere re-format of Creationism - both ideas are unscientific, unprovable and therefore by your own definition, fairytales.... but we are free to believe what we want.

"The problem with evolution is that it is a theory of history, an explanation of what happened in the past, and therefore unrepeatable".

Not so. You can go to any high-school science lab in the country and watch selection and adaptation happen in a petri dish. By exposing an agar plate of bacteria to an antibiotic agent, most will die and the survivors will grow into a new culture with antibiotic-resistant properties. Voila! They have evolved!

This can be done in a matter of hours, so the changes wrought over billions of years are hardly surprising.

The standard counter-argument is that the progress from a single-celled organism to a human being is far more pronounced, and therefore a different kettle of fish. This is a nonsense, like saying that the theory of addition can be trusted when adding 2 apples to 2 apples, but not when adding 2 million apples to 2 million apples.

As for "a great intelligence beyond our own created the cosmos, or it created itself", if the former is so, who or what created that intelligence?