Re:
http://hnn.us/articles/10142.html
But Which Religion?
If you want to teach religion in the public schools, you need to
teach the full range of religion: Islam and Judaism, of
course, but also Greek Philosophy, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism,
Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, etc. Come to that, you
need to teach the full range of Christianity, not just
Protestantism.
I understand that, theologically, creationism is not
incompatible with Catholicism. However, since the end of
Simony, it is very difficult for a man to become an Archbishop
without being extensively educated. Further, it would be safe to
say that the intellectual pride of the Church are the Jesuits.
Here are, respectively, Archiepiscopal and Jesuit statements on
the point of Creationism.
http://www.philosophy-religion.org/handouts/creationism..htm
http://www.americamagazine.org/gettext.cfm?articleTypeID=1&textID=584&issueID=279
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Practically speaking, Creationists are Fundamentalists, radical
Protestants maintaining the inerrancy of the King James Edition,
and the lack of need for further commentary or exegesis. The
Catholic position is of course that the Bible is a tricky old
document, and that before you start preaching it, you need to go
through a rigorous course of instruction, including the study of
ancient languages, in a seminary or divinity school, which course
of instruction normally leads to ordination as a priest.
The Catholic Encyclopedia's position on the King James Edition is
fairly temperate:
http://www.newadvent.org/
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02141a.htm
Also some articles from the Catholic Encyclopedia on Creationism
and Evolution:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05654a.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04475a.htm
Inter alia, they suggest that divine providence might act through
evolution.
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An unofficial Catholic attack on the King James Edition. The sort
of things that an Archbishop or a Jesuit would be too
high-minded to say :
http://www.catholicapologetics.net/
http://www.catholicapologetics.net/0002kjv.htm
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RE:
http://hnn.us/articles/10142.html
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=54091#54091
Natural Selection is not the only form of Non-Intelligent Design
One of the implications of the Human Genome Project has been
the discovery of just how few genes there are. The last I heard,
the count was down to 30,000, not all of which are unique to
humans. People are beginning to think more in terms of the notion
of "complexity," that is, the ways in which simple mechanisms,
interacting with their environment, generate complex structures.
This is sometimes called a "self-organizing system." Experiments
with rats have demonstrated, for example, that bones grow to meet
the loads placed on them. Bone contains osteoblast and osteoclast
cells which patch damaged areas, changing the bone's shape
in the process. The use of the bone generates continuing
microfractures to be mended. Instead of presuming a lot of
co-evolved genes, you talk about feedback mechanisms which tend to
synchronize the different elements of the body. For example, if
one of your legs is longer than the other, this will tend to
affect the respective loads placed on the two legs when you walk,
and presumably it would generate a corrective growth mechanism.
The shape of a bone does not reflect genetic programming, so much
as the fact that this shape is the strongest one for a given
load pattern. It is much the same principle as soap
bubbles forming spheres. It is reasonable to think that clusters
of neurons work on a principle analogous to bones. At this level,
the differences between a man and a rat are essentially
differences of dimension rather than differences of kind.
The implication of Complexity is that evolution is not as
difficult as was previously thought. Complexity is, I suppose, a
kind of paradigm shift. It is much more economical in its
operation than Darwinian natural selection. One could think of
complexity as a kind of "reduced Lamarckianism."