Today's Featured Wiki Article

When the Wikipedia makes this article the day's featured article, I have to comment. I have very strong opinions on this issue and have spent countless hours researching the "debate" from both sides. As both a person who has had a passion for science from an early age and a person with a very strong belief in a Higher Being, two concepts that in a sane world would be in no way contradictory, this long running argument is an attack that seems directed at reason out of ignorance and fear. (And could prove quite dangerous if followed to it's obvious conclusions, but I'll come back to that.)

For those who might be interested, I believe very strongly in a Higher Being (specifically, God the Eternal Father, his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, three separate and distinct beings acting as one in purpose). I believe that He "created the Heavens and the Earth and all things that in them are", including the natural laws and order of our world. The God that I believe in is a God of order, and His glory is intelligence. I see no obvious contradiction between my religious beliefs and science (including evolution). I feel that the teaching of religion should be taught in homes and churches, but spiritual matters are and should be a personal choice. No one should be forced to believe in any religion or religious concept, and the purpose of school is to teach unbiased science, not some completely unscientific concoction made up to get a circle of televangelists more spending cash.

ID as a "debate" sounds a lot like this: Someone says that they believe a Carpenter made their wooden chair, and that the Master Carpenter is all powerful. Because of His power, He, of course, did not use a hammer to pound in the nails, because He has the power to make the nails go in without using a hammer, that's what it means to be all-powerful. (And, of course, one is not supposed to think about whether or not it denotes great intelligence to use a supernatural power to pound in nails when there is a hammer sitting there next to you.) Therefore, studying the hammer as a tool useful to create the chair is blasphemy, and one should only be concerned with the Carpenter not any tools or means used in the creation of the chair. However, refusing to study the hammer and blueprints for the chair will not bring the student any closer to being able to build a chair, nor will it bring them any closer to being a carpenter themselves. In short, just sitting there staring at the Master Carpenter without any concern for learning from Him is neither a wise use of time nor a fulfillment of the Carpenter's plans for His children. It serves no good purpose.

It's like when I was in high school and we would make up debates just before the history teacher got there so we could argue all class long and not have to go into comas listening to the ever-boring procession of historical dates, names, and places (none of which struck any of us as being important or useful). ID (as purported by placed like the Discovery Institute), in my opinion, is nothing more than an attempt to drudge up an argument to avoid learning that which they dislike or fear.

The fact that many religious people have a fantasy, fairy tale idea of Deity should not impede scientific knowledge. This isn't the Dark Ages. Just because God could theoretically make the animals pop out of the ground like popcorn, it doesn't mean that He did, especially when the fossil evidence supports the idea that He didn't. If one believes that God created the Earth, it seems reasonable to believe that they also acknowledge His creation of the laws that govern the Earth. If they believe in the laws that govern the Earth, it is also reasonable to believe that an intelligent God would use those laws He created to accomplish His designs. Once you reach this point, you realize that science is just a means of studying the physical manifestations of God's handiwork, and that the study of it is a good way of learning about this marvelous and beautiful world we've been given and how to be responsible in our stewardship over it.

As to those who go out on the opposite limb of the tree by saying that we are not that well designed, or that nature isn't perfect in their eyes, that strikes me as an extremely narrow minded and arrogant assertion. What are they using as a comparison? What other sentient beings have they been studying, since we are the only forms of "higher life" on the planet? What alterations would they make, and more importantly, how would it effect the nature and purpose of life? In short, they have no frame of reference for their criticism, nor any concept of the possible ramifications of their purposed alterations.

It's like people who ignorantly say they wish they could go back in time and eliminate Hitler before he came to power, without any concept of the good things that were born from such a horrible atrocity (new laws to govern wars and conflicts, Israel being reinstated, and countless moral lessons learned from stories told by survivors, to name a few). True, what Hitler did was terrible to the point of being incomprehensible, but as often happens in life, good can come from the bad. To eliminate the bad is to eliminate the good that comes from it. Not that we should seek to do bad things so good can come out of it, however, we do learn as much (if not more) from the bad as we do from the good. Besides, in the end, Hitler and his followers reaped what they had sewn. They sewed death and destruction, and reaped it in their own turn. They sought to destroy a nation, and were instead destroyed themselves.

Back to the point, the entire "religion should fight all science it does not approve of" concept seems to me to be more dangerous than the religious people realize. By making such a stance (and in the process showing a complete ignorance of or lack of respect for the scientific method), they paint all religious people as being ignorant and combative. We are beginning to see the harvest of their efforts, as more and more young people speak out against religion and, by association, many basic moral codes. By the actions of some religious people, thousands turn their back on religion, thinking that all religion is as ignorant and comical as Dr. Dino. I wonder how many more years it will take this "debate" to make the majority of Americans anti-religious. I wonder how many more years it will take for that movement away from religion to bring a movement against morality. In the end, I wonder if the televangelists realize, or care about, the inevitable consequences of their fear mongering. (As you can probably tell, my opinion of televangelism is so low it's subterranean. Money and preaching do not belong in the same sentence, and if people really think that the laborer being worthy of his hire means that preachers are entitled to Hagee's $250-$1200 an hour, or $1,000,000 a year, salary taken from his "non-profit" organization, I'd love for them to define the words "Humility" and "Charity" to me with a straight face and preferably an actual grain of logic.)

Why do people get so up at arms fighting over which of two sides of a coin is better than the other? They are both the same coin, so can we stop bickering about it and get on to doing something useful?

~Quaggy