Thanks for your point of view, Rhian, and of course you are right to point out those areas that science does not begin to explain. But in my opinion these very ideas of human-ness are simply not explained either by the bible. In my experience, religion only hampers the capacity of human beings to fully contemplate their own existence and to understand relationships and fears and a sense of ethics and morality because it begins from false premises. Never a helpful place to start.

Runner, runner runner. What are we going to do with you!lol. " Holes! What holes? When mans consciousness began, the need for mental sercuirty was the main key to survival and will be need for a time to come. But this fear we all have came from our 5 million year growth and as some can see, its now getting in the way some-what, and like some that have already said, its holding us back.

Build a little temple at home, and pray and have all the faith you like, but doesn't change the fact that Mr Darwin,s theory is the only one with any credibility and that's where the 20th century is going my friend and in the future this need for faith will be called something else.

Its Evolution! and how we were all programed can not be changed.

EVO

AdamD,
If you don’t like the sound of panic (especially amongst evolutionists), then don’t read the libel and name calling coming from Sancho and Wing Ah Ling’s second post on Sunday.

Sancho,
Thanks for crediting my post as ‘reasoned discussion’. It might be nice if we could all aim for the same.

Grim,
What was my point about ‘outmoded philosophers’?

I suppose that all scientists are philosophers to a degree because they are applying a certain method of thinking or reasoning to their research. Yet we tend to delineate ‘scientists’ from philosophers when they apply their theories to empirical data which can be put to the test with repeatable experiments.

I would class Marx and Freud as great thinkers whose ideas challenged our self perceptions. The world still reverberates under their influence. Yet as far as having practical testable applications, I think they have been found wanting. This is why I called them ‘outmoded philosophers’. Marxist theories, in the old communist countries and elsewhere, have been deemed as a failed experiment. I understand that Freud’s ideas are considered quaint, if not amusing, in the circles of most practical psychologists.

So for these, it is not that they “didn’t get it exactly right the first time.” The question becomes just what exactly, if anything, did they get right? Any philosophy is only as good as its explanatory power and usefulness is predicting events and machinations in the empirical world.

You raise the name Mendel. Mendel’s genetics hardly contributed to Darwin’s work. They challenged it. Whether Darwin’s naturalist ideas will withstand further challenges, I predict not.

david f,
>> no scientific evidence against Darwin's theory. If such evidence should appear in the future then Darwin's theory will be abandoned. <<

I do not think "abandoned" is the right word in connection with an established scientific theory. Newtonian physics was not abandoned but extended, at most superseded, by both relativity and QM, and none of them is going to be abandoned but probably “immersed“ into some wider theory - superstrings, loop quantum gravity or what. After all, Newtonian mechanics is still a useful model in many situations of practical mechanics, the same as the flat Earth model with its Euclidean geometry is a useful model for local cartography.

It is mathematics that tells you in what sense the Newtonian model represents a limiting situation for both relativity and quantum mechanics, and it is also mathematics that tells you that the usefulness of the flat Earth model corresponds to the locally good approximation of the ellipsoid by its tangent plane.

As I understand it, Darwin's theory has become as established as Newton's mechanics. Some new “scientific evidence“ can lead mostly to its expansion or modification, into e.g neo-darwinism as professed by Richard Dawkins, some parts of it superseded, never to abandonment. However, there do not seem to be on the horizon as revolutionary successors as relativity and quantum mechanics were to Newtonian mechanics. And I do not see anything that could play the role of mathematics which in case of physics allows you to bridge the "paradigm changes", though applications of mathematics to biology might still surprise us all.

[The situation is even more complicated when one considers various models (called religions, from the most primitive to the philosophically sophisticated, sometimes denigrated as “mental gymnastics”) of a reality in which the distinction between the objective and the subjective is blurred (like the distinction between whether a mathematician creates or discovers), a reality that neither our senses nor our instruments - or theories built on mathematical models - can reach.]

I wrote this knowing that david is a professional physicist; apologies to others.

Dear George,

I chose my words with thought. When I wrote abandoned I meant abandoned. Established scientific theories have included the existence of ether, the non-variability of the species, the atom as irreducible and the existence of phlogiston. All these were well-established scientific theories at one time. They are now abandoned. They were not modified or still applied to a limited extent. They were abandoned. Scientific theories may be modified, limited in application or abandoned no matter how well-established they are.

I see no prospect of Darwin's theory being superseded or abandoned at this time. However, any scientific theory is provisional, no matter how well established, to be abandoned on the receipt of new evidence. Even though I see no prospect of Darwinian theory being disproved to say it couldn't be would be exhibiting the dogmatism that runner wrote of.

Panicking? That was funny, please continue.

EVO