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Monday, October 10, 2011

Comments

Robert Miller

This is an excellent analysis of Darwinist theory. (Why can't Fathers Baker, Schall and Fessio "take back" the Jesuit academy -- I'd love to be able to tell my son that he could go to Georgetown or Fordham, without danger of losing his intellect and soul.

The allure of Darwinism is totally alien to me -- and, I suspect, to most of our contemporaries. It is a dreary "orthodoxy" that reduces most ordinary human observations, conclusions and sentiment to "heresy".

At the end of the day, Darwinism is idiocy. If the universe is not human, there is no place for us in it. Why not etsi Deus daretur -- at every moment of however many billions of scientific years have passed.

Howard

This is about what I'd expect from a philosopher and/or psychologist. Philosophers do not pretend to be scientists; psychologists do, but much (not all) of what goes on in psychology is not really science, either.

Biology is not an axiomatic system like geometry. There is no equivalent in biology for Euclid's 5th Postulate. There are hypotheses that are subject to being tested. (We may not currently have any idea *how* to test a given hypothesis, a situation that is not unique to biology, but the hypothesis is not placed *in principle* protected from being disproved by observation or experiment.)

So, for example, the idea that all life descended from one ancestor is something which certain biologists are hoping to disprove. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35083220/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/scientist-alien-life-could-already-be-earth/. Anyone finding even microbial life with a fundamentally different biochemistry, or that had some alternative to the DNA of all known life (I'm not counting viruses as alive) -- that person would be a shoe-in for a Nobel prize.

Now let me put the shoe on the other foot and show how you yourself think in exactly the same way that "atheistic" scientists do. Think back to the last person to cut you off in traffic. Was that person descended from Adam? Does the Catholic Church teach that that person was descended from Adam?

The second question is the easy one to answer: No, the Catholic Church does not teach that the last person to cut you off in traffic was descended from Adam. Whoa there, you might object, the Catholic Church definitely does teach that all human beings are descended from Adam. That much is true; but the Catholic Church does not teach that the last person to cut you off in traffic was a human. Since some have entertained angels unawares, it is possible that, for reasons I cannot even guess at, an angel cut you off in traffic. However, even acknowledging the possibility, it's hard to avoid confidence that -- in the absence of any reason to think otherwise -- the rude driver was another human. Of course this means that you assume a long chain of "missing links", hypothetical ancestors that connect the driver back to a primordial ancestor: in your case Adam, in the case of Dawkins, the LUCA.

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