Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Just another belief system
Every once in awhile when I'm driving to and fro I turn the AM dial for fun to see where I land. I'm pretty sure I found Sean Hannity during my latest AM dialing for crazy but I kept right on going and landed on a religious station. I'm a sucker for these stations. As someone yet to experience the spiritual "aha!" moment, I tune in to see if anything said during the broadcast can shake my non-belief status. It hasn't yet. But I was super surprised to hear a discussion on Intelligent Design (i.e. thinly veiled creationism) versus the theory of evolution. The radio personality, I have no idea where I was on the dial so I can't give credit to anyone for this, was arguing that the theory of evolution was "just another religious belief system". You could cut the guy some slack and assume he was talking about how the people who believe in evolution are as zealous in their beliefs as the folks who believe in God. That would be one way to go. But, that's not where this guy went. No. He meant that since it's "just a theory," people who support the theory of evolution are doing so because they believe it to be true, not because it actually is true. Oy vey. I wish I could steer that guy to this Wikipedia page. (I chose Wikipedia because it is fairly accessible, has a lot of neatly summarized information, and links to outside sources. And, also, because I'm lazy.)
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2 comments:
Religion takes faith and calls it Truth.
Science takes evidence and calls it Theory.
Oh vey.
So, you know, I am a staunch believer in evolution.
But it doesn't help that the Wikipedia article says, "When scientists say evolution is a fact in this sense, they mean it is a fact that all living organisms have descended from a common ancestor (or ancestral gene pool) even though this cannot be directly observed"
...since intelligent design's central argument ALSO depends on the fact that God at work cannot be directly observed.
I think we could avoid a lot of problems if we could just go back in time and convince scientists to use a different word than 'theory.' Of course, the believers have an infinite number of things to hang their religion hat on.
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