SOBRE EL CUIDADO DE LA CASA COMÚN

CARTA ENCÍCLICA
LAUDATO SI’

DEL SANTO PADRE
FRANCISCOSOBRE EL CUIDADO DE LA CASA COMÚN

Ecumenismo

Ecumenismo es la tendencia o movimiento que busca la restauración de la unidad de los cristianos, es decir, la unidad de las distintasconfesiones religiosas cristianas «históricas», separadas desde losgrandes cismas. Si bien el término «oikoumenē» se utilizó desde los tiempos del Imperio Romano para expresar al mundo como unidad, en la actualidad la palabra «ecumenismo» tiene una significación eminentemente religiosa, y es usada primordialmente para aludir a los movimientos existentes en el seno del cristianismo cuyo propósito consiste en la unificación de las diferentes denominaciones cristianas, separadas por cuestiones de doctrina, de historia, de tradición o de práctica.

En cambio, la búsqueda de cooperación entre diferentes religiones (tanto entre las religiones abrahámicas —judaísmo, cristianismo e islam— como con otras) se llama diálogo interreligioso.¹

En el sentir de numerosas personalidades cristianas del último siglo, el ecumenismo constituye un camino de superación de las divisiones entre los cristianos, en orden al cumplimiento del mandato de Cristo: «[...] que todos sean uno [...]» {Juan 17:21).²

Entre las muchas personalidades relevantes que tienen o tuvieron influencia en el desarrollo de la conciencia ecuménica se encuentran Robert Gardiner, el teólogo Yves Congar, el hermano Roger Schutz —fundador de laComunidad ecuménica de Taizé—, Chiara Lubich —fundadora del Movimiento de los Focolares—, el patriarcaAtenágoras I, los papas Juan XXIII, Pablo VI y Juan Pablo II, y el arzobispo de Canterbury Rowan Williams.

Catolicismo (del griego καθολικός, katholikós, 'universal, que comprende todo') es un término que hace referencia al carácter de la fe profesada por los cristianos fieles de la Iglesia católica, como así también a la teología, doctrina, liturgia, principios éticos y normas de comportamiento derivadas, al igual que al conjunto de sus seguidores como un todo, a quienes se les denomina «católicos».² El vocablo «catolicismo» se usa por lo general para hacer alusión a la experiencia religiosa compartida por las personas que viven en comunión con la Iglesia de Roma.³

De manera más específica, el término se refiere solamente a la Iglesia católica, compuesta por 23 iglesias sui iuris que se encuentran en completa comunión con el Papa y que en conjunto reúnen a más de mil millones de fieles⁴ (una sexta parte de la población mundial y más de la mitad de todos los fieles cristianos).^5 6 La principal característica distintiva de la Iglesia católica es el reconocimiento de la autoridad y primacía del papa, obispo de Roma.^{Nota 1} Sin embargo hay varias Iglesias que comparten también el adjetivo calificativo de «católicas», como la Iglesia ortodoxa y las Antiguas iglesias orientales, la Iglesia asiria del Oriente y las Iglesias que constituyen la Comunión Anglicana

βιβλία

Por el año 605 a.C., el Pueblo de Israel sufrió una dispersión o, como se le conoce Bíblicamente, una "diáspora". El rey Nabuconodosor conquistó a Jerusalén y llevó a los israelitas cautivos a Babilonia, comenzando de Babilónica" (cf. 2 Reyes 24, 12; y 2 Reyes 25, 1).

Pero no todos los israelitas fueron llevado cautivos, un "resto" quedó en Israel: 2 Reyes 25, 12; 2 Reyes 25, 22; Jeremías 40, 11; Ezequiel 33, 27. También un número de Israelitas no fueron cautivos a Babilonia sino que fueron a Egipto: 2 Reyes 25, 26; Jeremías 42, 14; Jeremías 43, 7.

El rey Ciro de Persia conquistó a Babilonia (2 Crónicas 36, 20; 2 Crónicas 36, 23) y dio la libertad a los israelitas de regresar a Israel, terminando así su esclavitud. Algunos regresaron a Palestina (Esdras 1, 5; 7, 28; y Nehemías 2, 11) pero otros se fueron en vez a Egipto, estableciéndose, en su mayoría, en la ciudad de Alejandría (fundada por Alejandro Magno en el 322 a.C, contaba con la biblioteca mas importante del mundo en esa época). En esta gran ciudad convivían griegos, judíos y egipcios. Así que los judíos estaban disgregados aun después del fin del cautiverio, unos en Palestina y otros en la diáspora, sobre todo en Alejandría. En el tiempo de Jesús habían mas judíos en Alejandría que en la misma Palestina (1 Macabeos 1, 1)

Mientras la primera semejanza de un canon hebreo se empieza a formar, la lengua hebrea comienza a morir y desapareció completamente para el año 135 a.C. Por esta razón Jesús y sus contemporáneos en Palestina hablaban arameo, un dialecto del hebreo.

La Traducción de los Setenta (Septuagésima)

Como en la mayor parte del mundo civilizado, la lengua principal de Alejandría en el siglo III a.C. era el griego. Había por eso gran necesidad de una traducción griega de las Sagradas Escrituras. La historia relata que Demetrio de Faleron, el bibliotecario de Plotomeo II (285-246 a.C.), quería unas copias de la Ley Judía para la Biblioteca de Alejandría. La traducción se realizó a inicios del siglo tercero a.C. y se llamó la Traducción de los Setenta (por el número de traductores que trabajaron en la obra). Comenzando con el Torá, tradujeron todas las Sagradas Escrituras, es decir todo lo que es hoy conocido por los cristianos como el Antiguo Testamento. Introdujeron también una nueva organización e incluyeron Libros Sagrados que, por ser mas recientes, no estaban en los antiguos cánones pero eran generalmente reconocidos como sagrados por los judíos. Se trata de siete libros, escritos en griego, que son llamados hoy deuterocanónicos. Vemos entonces que no hay un "silencio bíblico" (una ausencia de Revelación) en los siglos precedentes al nacimiento de Jesús. 

La Traducción de los Setenta contiene los textos originales de algunos de los deuterocanónicos (Sabiduría y 2 Macabeos) y la base canónica de otros, ya sea en parte (Ester, Daniel y Sirac) o completamente (Tobit, Judit, Baruc y 1 Macabeos).

La Traducción de de los Setenta es la que se usaba en tiempo de Jesucristo y los Apóstoles

La versión alejandrina, con los siete libros deuterocanónicos, se propagó mucho y era la generalmente usada por los judíos en la era Apostólica. Por esta razón no es sorprendente que esta fuera la traducción utilizada por Cristo y los escritores del Nuevo Testamento. 300 de las 350 referencias al Antiguo Testamento que se hacen en el Nuevo Testamento son tomadas de la versión alejandrina. Por es no hay duda de que la Iglesia apostólica del primer siglo aceptó los libros deuterocanónicos como parte de su canon (libros reconocidos como Palabra de Dios). Por ejemplo, Orígenes, (Padre de la Iglesia, † 254), afirmó que los cristianos usaban estos libros aunque algunos líderes judíos no los aceptaban oficialmente.

Al final del primer siglo de la era cristiana, una escuela judía, quizás de rabinos, hicieron un canon hebreo en la ciudad de Jamnia, en Palestina. Cerraron el canon con los profetas Esdras (458 a. C.), Nehemías (445 a. C.), y Malaquías (433 a. C.). Este canon comprendía de 22 a 24 libros. No rechazaron los libros deuterocanónicos definitivamente, pero no los incluyeron entre los canónicos. El canon reconocido por los judíos no se fijó hasta mas de cien años después. Aun entonces, los libros "deuterocanónicos" siguieron siendo leídos y respetados por los judíos. Mientras tanto los cristianos siguieron reconociendo la versión alejandrina. Es así que surgieron los dos cánones del Antíguo Testamento.

Los dos cánones del Antiguo Testamento

El canon de Alejandría (la traducción de los Setenta al griego, hecha antes de Cristo y aceptada por todos los cristianos y muchos judíos, que contiene los libros deuterocanónicos).

El canon de Palestina (Jamnia, traducción hebrea hecha después de Cristo).

Los historiadores ponen como fecha en que se fijaron los cánones de las traducciones de Alejandría y de Palestina para el siglo segundo de nuestra era. El Obispo Melito de Sardis registró la primera lista conocida del canon alejandrino en el año 170 A.D. Contenía 45/46 libros (el libro de Lamentaciones se consideraba como parte de Jeremías). El canon Palestino contenía solo 39 libros pues no tenía los libros 7 libros Deuterocanónicos.

La Vulgata de San Jerónimo

La primera traducción de la Biblia al latín fue hecha por San Jerónimo y se llamó Vulgata (año 383 AD). El latín era entonces el idioma común en el mundo Mediterráneo. San Jerónimo en un principio tradujo del texto hebreo del canon de Palestina. Su estilo era mas elegante y en algunas frases distinto a la Traducción de los Setenta. Además le faltaban los libros deuterocanónicos por no estar en el texto hebreo. Esto produjo una polémica entre los cristianos. En defensa de su traducción, San Jerónimo escribió una carta: Ad Pachmmachium de optimo genere interpretandi, la cual es el primer tratado acerca de la traductología. Por eso se le considera el padre de esta disciplina. Ahí explica, entre otras cosas el motivo por el cual considera inexacta a la septuagésima. Finalmente se aceptó su versión, pero con la inclusión de los libros deuterocanónicos. Por eso la Vulgata tiene todos los 46 libros.

La Iglesia establece el canon

La controversia sobre que libros son canónicos fue larga, extendiéndose hasta el siglo IV y aun mas tarde. Las polémicas con los herejes, particularmente los seguidores de Marción, que rechazaban libros generalmente reconocidos por los Padres, hizo que la Iglesia definiera con autoridad la lista de los libros sagrados (el canon).

Los concilios de la Iglesia, el Concilio de Hipona, en el año 393 y el Concilio de Cartago, en el año 397 y 419, ambos en el norte de África, confirmaron el canon Alejandrino (con 46 libros para el Antiguo Testamento) y también fijaron el canon del Nuevo Testamento con 27 libros. La carta del papa S. Inocencio I en el 405, también oficialmente lista estos libros. Finalmente, el Concilio de Florencia (1442) definitivamente estableció la lista oficial de 46 libros del A.T. y los 27 del N.T.

El canon del Nuevo Testamento se definió en el siglo IV tras un largo y difícil proceso de discernimiento

El mismo nombre de "Nuevo Testamento" no se usó hasta el siglo II. Uno de los criterios para aceptar o no los libros fue que tuviese como autor a un apóstol; su uso, especialmente en la liturgia en las Iglesias Apostólicas y la conformidad con la fe de la Iglesia. Fue bajo estos criterios que algunos evangelios atribuidos a los Apóstoles (ej. Ev de Tomás, Ev. de Pedro) fueron rechazados. El evangelio de San Juan y el Apocalipsis se consideraron por largo tiempo como dudosos por el atractivo que tenían con grupos sectarios y milenaristas.

Todos los católicos aceptaron el canon de la Biblia fijado por los concilios mencionados y, como este canon no fue causa de seria controversia hasta el siglo XVI, no se necesitó definir el canon de la Biblia como una verdad infalible.

A la Biblia Protestante le faltan libros

En el 1534, Martín Lutero tradujo la Biblia al alemán y agrupó los siete libros deuterocanónicos bajo el título de "apócrifos", señalando: "estos son libros que no se tienen por iguales a las Sagradas Escrituras y sin embargo son útiles y buenos para leer." Es así como los protestantes llegaron a considera a los deuterocanónicos como libros no aceptados en el canon, o sea como libros apócrifos.

Siempre los cristianos habían reconocido esos libros como parte de la Biblia. Los concilios del siglo IV y posteriores habían confirmado la creencia cristiana. La opinión de Lutero era mas bien la de los judíos que seguían la traducción de Jamnia. Es por eso que los protestantes, carecen de los libros deuterocanónicos de la Biblia:

• Tobías
• Judit
• Ester (protocanónico con partes deuterocanónicas)
• Daniel (protocanónico con partes deuterocanónicas)
• I Macabeos
• II Macabeos
• Sabiduría
• Eclesiástico (también llamado "Sirac")
• Baruc

Lutero no solo eliminó libros del Antiguo Testamento sino que hizo cambios en el Nuevo Testamento

"Él [Martín Lutero] había declarado que la persona no se justifica por la fe obrando en el amor, sino sólo por la fe. Llegó incluso a añadir la palabra "solamente" después de la palabra "justificado" en su traducción alemana de Romanos 3, 28, y llamó a la Carta de Santiago "epístola falsificada" porque Santiago dice explícitamente: "Veis que por las obras se justifica el hombre y no sólo por la fe". (Scott y Kimberly HAHN, Roma dulce hogar, ed. Rialp, Madrid, 2000, página 57; Scott Hahn fue ministro protestante, presbiteriano antes de su conversión)

Se tomó la libertad de separar los libros del Nuevo Testamento de la siguiente manera:

• Libros sobre la obra de Dios para la salvación: Juan, Romanos, Gálatas, Efesios, I Pedro y I Juan.
• Otros libros canónicos: Mateo, Marcos, Lucas, Hechos, el resto de las cartas de Pablo, II Pedro y II de Juan.
• Los libros no canónicos: Hebreos, Santiago, Judas, Apocalipsis y libros del Antiguo Testamento.

Los protestantes tienen los mismos libros que los católicos en el Nuevo Testamento porque no aceptaron los cambios de Lutero para esta parte del canon.

Los protestantes y evangélicos se encuentran en una posición contradictoria

Reconocen el canon establecido por los concilios del siglo IV para el Nuevo Testamento (los 27 libros que ellos tienen) pero no reconocen esa misma autoridad para el canon del AT.

Es interesante notar que la Biblia Gutenberg, la primera Biblia impresa, es la Biblia latina (Vulgata), por lo tanto, contenía los 46 libros del canon alejandrino.

Posición de la Iglesia Anglicana (episcopalianos)

Según los 39 Artículos de Religión (1563) de la Iglesia de Inglaterra, los libros deuterocanónicos pueden ser leídos para "ejemplo de vida e instrucción de costumbres", pero no deben ser usados para "establecer ninguna doctrina" (Artículo VI). Consecuentemente, la Biblia, versión del Rey Jaime (1611) imprimió estos libros entre el N.T. y el A.T. Pero Juan Lightfoot (1643) criticó este orden alegando que los "malditos apócrifos" pudiesen ser así vistos como un puente entre el A.T. y el N.T. La Confesión de Westminster (1647) decidió que estos libros, "al no ser de inspiración divina, no son parte del canon de las Escrituras y, por lo tanto, no son de ninguna autoridad de la Iglesia de Dios ni deben ser en ninguna forma aprobados o utilizados mas que otros escritos humanos".

The Morality of Evolution

As a watchman on the tower, I feel to warn you that one of the chief means of misleading our youth and destroying the family unit is our educational institutions. There is more than one reason why the Church is advising our youth to attend colleges close to their homes where institutes of religion are available. It gives the parents the opportunity to stay close to their children, and if they become alerted and informed, these parents can help expose some of the deceptions of men like ... Charles Darwin.

Ezra Taft Benson

More than other modern societies, United States relies, even depends, on myth to cement its confidence. Americans are profoundly ahistorical.

Our national myths are representations of identity and the actual instrument of acculturation. This process of acculturation through myth, moreover, is achieved through entertainment: television and movies. The culture of a society—its ethos—defines distinctive patterns of individual and group behavior. Culture shapes the way we look at the world. Whatever our immediate group membership, our final sense of identity is shaped by larger cultural patterns. If we define ourselves according to myth, what kind of worldview has it given us?

First, at the core,  the United States has an essentially religious value system. The primal myth of our origin is that of the "Pilgrim’s Progress," with the Plymouth Colony completely overshadowing Virginia and its lineal transplanting of British class and caste. We believe that the source and inspiration of America is bound up in religion: religious freedom, but also the moral vantage of Calvin. The impact of Protestant thought is felt in the ways we talk about mission, service, sacrifice, restraint. It underlies the sense that Americans share of serving a higher calling. This underpinning remains dominant today even though it is highly secularized, and transmuted into legal, constitutional language.

Second, Americans still hew a set of specific myths about the United States. One of these is that America is the source of human progress and can achieve perfection as a society. Americans believe that there has never been a society quite like our own. This American "exceptionalism" suggests that we are a people graced with unusual natural endowments. We think of ourselves literally as a "people of plenty." But our mythology also reminds us that this land was a great "untamed wilderness," a "land of savagery." It was the exceptional will, unity and vision of the American people and their beliefs that transformed the landscape. The twin icons of national bounty and national achievement have inspired two senses of an American national purpose: a conviction that the United States should serve as an example to the world, that America and its people are the model for all human development; and an impulse to change the world for good, to become the active agency of human progress. Tyranny and resistance to change are so entrenched in the world that only direct American intercession can shift the direction of history. America’s gifts demand that it assume a missionary role.

In the United States at the turn of the 20th century, Darwinism was greeted with glee because it seemed so compatible with the prevailing ideology of theday,  where robber-baron capitalists like the Carnegies, Mellons, Sumners, Stanfords and yes, even Jack London, could not stop rattling on about how the "survival of the fittest" justified crushing unions, exploiting immigrant labor or being left unregulated to amass huge fortunes while administering monopolies. In the popular ethos of the United States, there is a confusion of Capitalism with the American worship of the individual and the nuclear family. It can be argued that these ideas are related but they are different and independent. According to the American work ethic you only get what you work for, but this is not what Capitalism is. Capitalism is the idea that market forces, carried out by intelligent agents looking for profit (self interest), let by themselves will generate wealth and prosperity for society as a whole. The dichotomy Capitalism/Socialism is actually dated. If one understands socialism as government control of the economy, all, 100%, of the world's governments are socialist to some degree. In any case, we now live in a competitive society and are often told that to get ahead we require drive, commitment and determination, that we must expend a great amount of energy and, if necessary, use force to get what we want. A ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality is deeply entrenched in our culture. Despite the fact that this Wild West mentality  is a historical byproduct, it is now attributed to Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Religious fundamentalists are sincere on their view of the World as a battleground between Good and Evil. For them anything that undermines faith in God, specially with regards to children, is utterly evil. The teaching of Science to children, in particular Evolution, is seen as a threat to children indoctrination. Nonetheless,  the attack on Evolution is an attack on Science as a whole. Science is not about what to believe but rather a method to perceive Reality. It is the critical objective look at reality aspect of Science that is perceived as a treat by the religious establishment. However, teaching religious ideas as an alternative to factual descriptions of reality undermines science education by misinforming students about the scientific method — the basis for science literacy.

The scientific method teaches students the fundamentals of science — how to observe data, perform experiments and form scientific theory. Religious explanations for creation are not science – they cannot be confirmed or denied by the scientific method. Teaching them as science confuses and misleads students about the scientific method, thereby warping their ability to live in a technology-driven society

Most people don't read scientific papers because they are extremely complex. Even college science students have a hard time digesting scientific papers. But what is easy to understand is that, since the bible says this, science says that, therefore science is the devil, and since we hate the devil and our job is to fight him, we must hate science and fight it. Christian leaders can be blind sighted to the outside world at times. All this commotion about a science that goes against the bible. The Bible today, still says that the Earth does not move around the sun as much as it did thousands of years ago. The Bible did not change. At the end of the Middle Ages, Christian leaders threatened heavy punishment to Galileo for suggesting that, based on his scientific evidences, the Earth revolved around the Sun. 

Any effort to introduce a theological doctrine into public school science curricula would inevitably offend some teachers and students. After all, a Protestant fundamentalist's "literal" reading of Genesis would likely differ markedly from that of a Catholic or an Orthodox Jew. Both public school educators and religious leaders should be concerned about the prospect of biology lessons degenerating into debates on Biblical or religious interpretation.

Evolution by natural selection, at its core, works like this: living organisms are characterized by heritable variation for traits that affect their survival and reproductive abilities. This heritable variation originates from the (truly random) process of mutation at the level of DNA. The process of evolution turns out to be largely the result of two components: mutations (which are random) and natural selection (which, again, is not random). It is the joint outcome of these two processes that—according to evolutionary theory—explains not only the diversity of all organisms on Earth, but most crucially the fact that they are so well adapted to their environment: those that weren’t did not survive the process. Because the environment changes overtime, and therefore, what characteristics of life forms are better changes, and it cannot be said in absolute terms that extinct forms are inferior to those present today.

You may find it intuitively difficult to believe that two relatively simple natural processes can produce the complex order we observe in living organisms. But the beauty of science is that it so often shows our intuitions to be wrong. Because nature does not always function according to our common sense or intuition, the scientific method a necessity on the quest of the human race for survival.

Evolution is both a theory and a fact, contrary to simplistic creationist views. How can this be? Evolution is a fact in the sense that it is beyond reasonable doubt that living organisms have changed over time throughout the history of the earth. It is a theory in the sense that biologists have proposed a variety of mechanisms (including, but not limited to, mutation and natural selection) to explain the fact of evolution.

The theory of evolution is a fundamental concept of biology and it is supported by the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence. Simply eliminating evolution from the public school curriculum in order to ease community tensions would do a great disservice to all students. It would deny public school students an adequate science education – which is more and more becoming a necessity for professional success in a high-tech world.

It must be said that there is a propagandistic perversion of language, and there are religious groups that use the language of science to mislead and actually undermine a scientific conceptualization of Reality. Religious opponents of evolution have cloaked religious beliefs in scientific sounding language and then mandating that schools teach the resulting "creation science" or "Intelligent Design" as an alternative to evolution. Intelligent Design organizations are fundamentalist religious entities that consider the introduction of creation science into the public schools part of their ministry. Creation science rested on a "contrived dualism" that recognized only two possible explanations for life, the scientific theory of evolution and biblical creationism, treated the two as mutually exclusive such that "one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution," and accordingly viewed any critiques of evolution as evidence that necessarily supported biblical creationism. Creation science is simply not science because it depends upon supernatural intervention, which cannot be explained by natural causes, or be proven through empirical investigation, and is therefore neither testable nor falsifiable.

The argument for Intelligent Design (ID) is not a new scientific argument, but is rather an old religious argument for the existence of God, traced back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, who framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer. Although proponents of ID occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed. The writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity. Dramatic evidence of ID's religious nature and aspirations is found in what is referred to as the "Wedge Document." The Wedge Document, developed by the Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture. The Discovery Institute, the think tank promoting ID whose CRSC developed the Wedge Document, acknowledges as "Governing Goals" to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.

Because Science wins over Religion on factual description of Reality, the attack on Science is made nowadays on moral grounds.  From the point of view of religious fundamentalists, Science is a competing religion, although a silly one at that. Then the scientific community is under attack with this straw-man argument against evolution:

But if design, conversely, is rational, why do so many scientists reject it? Because this is not an issue of science, but of religion. Their religion is that of materialism and naturalism, and they are under no illusions as to the implications of design.

James M Tour, in the blog entry Layman’s Reflections on Evolution and Creation. An Insider’s View of the Academy, claims insufficient understanding of what he calls Macroevolution. Macroevolution is evolution on a scale of separated gene pools.^[1] Macroevolutionary studies focus on change that occurs at or above the level of species, in contrast with microevolution,^[2] which refers to smaller evolutionary changes (typically described as changes in allele frequencies) within a species or population. However, contrary to claims by creationists, macro and microevolution describe fundamentally identical processes on different time scales.

Russian entomologist Yuri Filipchenko first coined the terms "macroevolution" and "microevolution" in 1927 in his German language work, "Variabilität und Variation". Since the inception of the two terms, their meanings have been revised several times and the term macroevolution fell into limited disfavour when it was taken over by such writers as the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt (1940) and the paleontologist Otto Schindewolf to describe their orthogenetic theories.^[7]

A more practical definition of the term describes it as changes occurring on geological time scales, in contrast to microevolution, which occurs on the timescale of human lifetimes.^[8] This definition reflects the spectrum between micro- and macro-evolution, whilst leaving a clear difference between the terms: because the geological record rarely has a resolution better than 10,000 years, and humans rarely live longer than 100 years, "meso-evolution" is never observed.^[8]

As a result, apart from Dobzhansky, Bernhard Rensch and Ernst Mayr, very few neo-Darwinian writers used the term, preferring instead to talk of evolution as changes in allele frequencies without mention of the level of the changes (above species level or below). Those who did were generally working within the continental European traditions (as Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, Bernhard Rensch, Richard Goldschmidt, and Otto Schindewolf were) and those who didn't were generally working within the Anglo-American tradition (such as John Maynard Smith and Richard Dawkins). Hence, use of the term "macroevolution" is sometimes wrongly used as a litmus test of whether the writer is "properly" neo-Darwinian or not.

At the end of his article, Tour makes a reference to the movie, “Expelled. No Intelligence Allowed.” He asserts that a subset of the scientific establishment is retarding the careers of Darwinian skeptics. He closes citing  Viktor Frankl , The Doctor and the Soul with the comment If Frankl is correct, God help us:

“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

“I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers [emphasis added].”

The movie Expelled main theme is that what it calls Darwinism inherently contain the seeds of Nazism, and even more Darwinism equals Nazism. This frighteningly immoral narrative is capped off a la Moore, with shots of the Berlin Wall, old stock footage of East German police kicking around those trying to escape through the wall to the West and some solemn blather by Ben, who calls upon each one of us to rise up in defense of freedom and knock down a few walls in order to get creationism back into the curriculum at American Schools.

There were many nations, such as Britain which embraced Darwinism but saw a considerable number of their population killed trying to eliminate Nazism. There were other nations, such as the Soviet Union, where Darwinism was seen as so dangerous and subversive to State sponsored dreams of social engineering that those who espoused it were killed or exiled and a complete biological fairy tale, Lysenkoism, put into classrooms and agricultural policy ultimately leading to the deaths of millions from starvation.

Now, Christian groups are tying a neutral scientific theory to racism, antisemitism and xenophobia.That is extremely irresponsible and untrue. In fact, Christianity has a stronger link to anti-semiticism and xenophobia than Evolution which is a scientific theory that purports every man is from the same ancestor.
Throughout history, especially in the Crusades, European Christianity has consistently been a xenophobic culture - Jews were expelled out of England, were treated as second class citizens by Christians, and were not allowed to own lands. Black people were expelled by the Protestant Queen Elizabeth during the food shortage in England. Nazi Hitler, had Christianic themes in support of his treatment of the Jews.

The linking of Nazism to Evolution is a dishonest and cheap attempt at trying to personify a scientific theory as the root of all evil in the world. Evolution implies is that every human came from a single
ancestor. Darwin himself was anti-slavery and he said that there was "no clear distinctive characteristics to categorize races as separate species, and that all shared very similar physical and mental characteristics
indicating common ancestry". However this went against Christian beliefs of that time. A German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who wrote "Life of Jesus", "The Positivity of the Christian
Religion" and thought to be Christian by many critics believed that scientific racism - or the use of science to propose that other races such as blacks are of different heritage and descended from apes "fitted well with the Christian belief of a divine Creation following which all of humanity descended from the same Adam and Eve.

The Bible sanctions slavery, and from the 1820s to the 1850s it was cited in the Southern States of the United States of America to support the idea that negroes had been created unequal, suited to slavery, by writers such as the Rev. Richard Furman, Joseph Smith Jr. and Thomas R. Cobb." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism).

Christians are very uncomfortable with the idea that Adam and Eve were Africans - who, by the now debunked scientific racism are deemed to be descendants of apes. This was a central Christian tenet for much more years than evolution was around, and it was the catalyst for the systematic degradation of a particular group of people - the fact that black people were descendants of apes, gave Christians the biblical right to rule over them. Now that evolution has equalized and showed that all men are equal, and given the current taboo of identifying oneself as racist as well as the demise of Scientific racism. Many xenophobic people turn to Intelligent Design as their last ditch attempt to salvage some element of supernatural support for dominion over a certain group of people. This does not mean all Intelligent Design supporters are racists, but it is certainly a comfortable place for xenophobic individuals to channel their energies to.

Mind and reality

alan watts - simplicity and complexity

The Bible on suffering

Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Bart Ehrman debate the topic: Does the Bible Provide an Adequate Answer to the Problem of Suffering? at Ohio State University on April 15, 2010.

Нотович, Николай Александрович

Uploaded on Jul 3, 2011

Documentary produced by the government of India showing how that Jesus came to India for lessons and to teach Dharma.

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Nikolaj Aleksandrovič Notovič, known as Nicolas Notovitch (born 1858) was a Russian aristocrat, Cossack officer, spy^[1][2] and journalist. Notovitch is known for his 1887 book claiming that during his unknown years, Jesus left Galilee for India and studied with Buddhists and Hindus there before returning to Judea.^[3][4] Notovitch's claim was based on a document he said he had seen at the Hemis Monastery while he stayed there, but later confessed to having fabricated his evidence.^[5][6] Modern scholars view Notovitch's accounts of the travels of Jesus to India a hoax which includes major inconsistencies.^[6][7] Notovitch also wrote some political books on the role of Russia in war.

Notovitch claimed that he broke his leg in India and while recovering from it at the Hemis monastery in Ladakh, he learned of the "Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men" - Isa being the Arabic name of Jesus in Islam. Notovitch's story, with the text of the "Life," was published in French in 1894 as La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ. It was translated into English,^[10] German, Spanish, and Italian.

Notovitch claimed that the chief lama at Hemis told him of the existence of the work, which was read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the "Life of Issa," which was said to have been translated from the Pali. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses "in accordance with the requirements of the narrative." As published by Notovitch, the work consists of 244 short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters. The otherwise undocumented name "Issa" resembles the Arabic name Isa (عيسى), used in the Koran to refer to Jesus and the Sanskrit "īśa", the Lord.

The "Life of Issa" begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, its deliverance by Moses, its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. At the age of thirteen the divine youth, rather than take a wife, leaves his home to wander with a caravan of merchants to India (Sindh), to study the laws of the great Buddhas. Issa is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend time among the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. Issa spent six years studying and teaching at Jaganath, Rajagriha, and other holy cities. At twenty-nine, Issa returns to his own country and begins to preach. He visits Jerusalem, where Pilate is apprehensive about him. The Jewish leaders, however, are also apprehensive about his teachings yet he continues his work for three years. He is finally arrested and put to death for blasphemy, for claiming to be the son of God. His followers are persecuted, but his disciples carry his message to the world.

Notovitch's book gained significant controversy as soon as it was published - historian Max Müller expressed incredulity at the accounts presented and suggested that either Notovitch was the victim of a practical joke, or had fabricated the evidence.^[11][12] Müller said: "Taking it for granted that M. Notovitch is a gentleman and not a liar, we cannot help thinking that the Buddhist monks of Ladakh and Tibet must be wags, who enjoy mystifying inquisitive travelers, and that M. Notovitch fell far too easy a victim to their jokes."^[5]

Hemis monastery, Ladakh in 1949

 

Muller then wrote to the head lama at Hemis monastery to ask about the document and Notovitch's story and the head lama replied that there had been no Western visitor at the monastery in the past fifteen years, during which he had been the lama there, and there were no documents related to Notovitch's story.^[5][13] Other European scholars also opposed Notovitch's account and Indologist Leopold von Schroeder called Notovitch's story a "big fat lie".^[5]
J. Archibald Douglas who was a professor of English and History at the Government College in Agra India then visited the Hemis monastery to interview the head lama who had corresponded with Müller and the lama again stated that Notovitch had never been there and no such documents existed.^[13] Wilhelm Schneemelcher states that Notovich's accounts were soon exposed as fabrications, and that to date no one has even had a glimpse at the manuscripts Notovitch claims to have had.^[6] Notovich at first responded to claims to defend himself.^[14] But once his story had been re-examined by historians, Notovitch confessed to having fabricated the evidence.^[5]

Although Notovitch had been discredited in Europe, Swami Abhedananda wrote a book called Journey to Kashmir and Tibet in which he stated that had visited Hemis and seen a document similar to the one Notovitch had mentioned, and produced a Bengali translation of parts of it.^[15] But after Abhedananda's death, one of his disciple admitted that when he went to the monsatery to ask about the documents he was told that they had disappeared.^[15]

Bart D. Ehrman, a Bible scholar and historian famous for his best sellers, says that "Today there is not a single recognized scholar on the planet who has any doubts about the matter. The entire story was invented by Notovitch, who earned a good deal of money and a substantial amount of notoriety for his hoax."

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Николай (Шулим) Александрович Нотович (1858 — ?) — российский разведчик, писатель, журналист, дворянин и казак-офицер. Известен написанной по-французски книгой «Неизвестная жизнь Иисуса Христа» (более известной как «Тибетское Евангелие»), якобы содержащей ранние проповеди Иисуса и предполагающей, что Иисус от 12 до 30 лет жил в Индии.

cdesign proponentsists

Benjamin Jeremy "Ben" Stein (born November 25, 1944) is an American actor, writer, lawyer, and commentator on political and economic issues. He attained early success as a speechwriter for American presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Later, he entered the entertainment field and became an actor, comedian, and Emmy Award-winning game show host.

Stein has frequently written commentaries on economic, political, and social issues, along with financial advice to individual investors. He is the son of economist and writer Herbert Stein,[1] who worked at the White House under President Nixon. His sister, Rachel, is also a writer. While, as a character actor, he is well known for his droning, monotone delivery, in real life he is a public speaker on a wide range of economic and social issues.

Published on Jun 14, 2012

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091617/
Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is a movie about the freedom of speech suppression to which Intelligent Design proponents are being subjected.

English and Romanian subtitles available via Captions (CC) button.

This peer reviewed paper, which shows that hereditary variation arises from the NON-RANDOM action of built-in biochemical systems that mobilize DNA and carry out natural genetic ENGINEERING:
http://www.mobilednajournal.com/conte...

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a 2008 documentary film directed by Nathan Frankowski and hosted by Ben Stein.^[2][3] The film contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design in nature and who criticize evidence supporting Darwinian evolution and the modern evolutionary synthesis as a "scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nation's laboratories and classrooms."^[4][5] The scientific theory of evolution is portrayed by the film as contributing to fascism, the Holocaust, communism, atheism, and eugenics.^[6][7] The film portrays intelligent design as motivated by science, rather than religion, though it does not give a detailed definition of the phrase or attempt to explain it on a scientific level. Other than briefly addressing issues of irreducible complexity, Expelled examines it as a political issue.^{[8][6][9][10]}

Expelled opened in 1,052 theaters, more than any other documentary before it, and grossed over $2,900,000 in its first weekend.^[11] It earned $7.7 million, making it the 18th-highest-grossing documentary film in the United States (statistics include 1982–present, and are not adjusted for inflation).^[11] In July, the movie was re-released allowing groups of 300 to book private screenings in theaters.^[12]

The general media response to the film has been largely unfavorable. Multiple reviews, including those of USA Today and Scientific American, have described the film as propaganda.^[7][13][14] The Chicago Tribune's rating was "1 star (poor)",^[15] while The New York Times described it as "a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry" and "an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike."^[7] It received an 8% meta-score from Rotten Tomatoes (later improved to 9% overall) where the film was summarized thus: "Full of patronizing, poorly structured arguments, Expelled is a cynical political stunt in the guise of a documentary." Christianity Today gave the film a positive review.^[16]

The American Association for the Advancement of Science describes the film as dishonest and divisive propaganda, aimed at introducing religious ideas into public school science classrooms.^[17] The film has been used in private screenings to legislators as part of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaign for Academic Freedom bills.^[18]

The reason why the “court of public opinion” doesn’t like evolution has nothing to do with its truth, and everything to do with its supposedly unsavory implications. It tells us that we’re neither the products of a special design by God, nor imbued by a deity with some celestial purpose and meaning. People don’t like these implications and so they reject the theory. It has nothing to do with them having learned the evidence for evolution and found it insufficient.

The movie's faux tale of an evolutionist led Inquisition is followed by Stein interviewing a short parade of self-avowed atheists who also are fervent Darwinians as they mock intelligent design in particular and religion in general. They also look frumpy. As an antidote we get deep, sincere ruminations mainly from some monumentally pompous thinker no one has ever heard of who is nevertheless stylishly attired and living in a gorgeous apartment in Paris. He assures what is hopefully an increasingly irritated audience that god and science can live together in peace. Then, and most culpably in terms of the downright immorality of the movie and everyone associated with it, we are presented with what will happen if we keep teaching Darwinism in our schools. The logical consequence of Darwinism is Nazi eugenics: the state directed murder of the handicapped, mentally ill, political dissidents and racial "inferiors"!



Intelligent Design at its core may be a racist and xenophobic concept. What evolution and Darwinism ultimately implies is that every human came from a single ancestor. Darwin himself was anti-slavery and that there was "no clear distinctive characteristics to categorize races as separate species, and that all shared very similar physical and mental characteristics indicating common ancestry". However this went against Christian beliefs of that time. A German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who wrote "Life of Jesus", "The Positivity of the Christian Religion" and thought to be Christian by many critics believed that scientific racism - or the use of science to propose that other races such as blacks are of different heritage and descended from apes "fitted well with the Christian belief of a divine Creation following which all of humanity descended from the same Adam and Eve. However, the Bible also sanctions slavery, and from the 1820s to the 1850s it was cited in the Southern States of the United States of America to support the idea that negroes had been created unequal, suited to slavery, by writers such as the Rev. Richard Furman, Joseph Smith Jr. and Thomas R. Cobb." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism).

Christians are very uncomfortable with the idea that Adam and Eve were Africans - who, by the now debunked scientific racism are deemed to be descendants of apes. This was a central Christian tenet for much more years than evolution was around, and it was the catalyst for the systematic degradation of a particular group of people - the fact that black people were descendants of apes, gave Christians the biblical right to rule over them. Now that evolution has equalized and showed that all men are equal, and given the current taboo of identifying oneself as racist as well as the demise of Scientific racism. Many xenophobic people turn to Intelligent Design as their last ditch attempt to salvage some element of supernatural support for dominion over a certain group of people. This does not mean all Intelligent Design supporters are racists, but it is certainly a comfortable place for xenophobic individuals to channel their energies to.

The movie, Expelled, is an attempt by Intelligent Design proponents to create a diversionary tactic by painting evolution as a key component in the anti-semitic reign of the Nazi when Nazism had deeper roots in Christianity than a scientific concept.

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From an interview:

"What would you like to say to Darwin?

[Ben Stein replies]"You are a wealthy man, you married a wealthy
woman, why don't you just live quietly out in the countryside and not
torture us with your half-baked suppositions, which have caused so
much misery?"

"Viewers of Expelled might think that Ben Stein has been giving speeches on college campuses and at other public venues in support of ID and against "big science." But if he has, the producers did not include one. The speech shown at the beginning and end was staged solely for the sake of the movie. Michael Shermer learned as much by speaking to officials at Pepperdine University, where those scenes were filmed. Only a few of the audience members were students; most were extras brought in by the producers. Judge the ovation Ben Stein receives accordingly.

Expelled frequently repeats that  religious explanations are "forbidden" by "big science."  Evolution and the rest of "big science" are described as having an atheistic preference. Science avoids design explanations for natural phenomena out of logical necessity. The scientific method involves rigorously observing and experimenting on the material world. It accepts as evidence only what can be measured or otherwise empirically validated (a requirement called methodological naturalism).

Expelled claims that Caroline Crocker was fired because she mentioned Intelligent Design in a class she was teaching. However, the evidence says otherwise. While there may have been grounds to fire her with cause, Crocker was not fired and continued to teach her course after student complaints; in addition, she did not just “mention” intelligent design, but rather was teaching demonstrably false creationist material.

The Sternberg peer review controversy concerns the conflict arising from the publication of an article supporting the controversial concept of intelligent design in a scientific journal, and the subsequent questions of whether proper editorial procedures had been followed and whether it was properly peer reviewed.

One of the primary criticisms of the intelligent design movement is that there are no research papers supporting their positions in peer reviewed scientific journals.^[1] On 4 August 2004, an article by Stephen C. Meyer (Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture) titled "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories", appeared in the peer-reviewed journal,  

Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Meyer's article was a literature review article, and contained no new primary scholarship itself on the topic of intelligent design.^[2] The following month, the publisher of the journal, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, released a statement repudiating the article and stating that Richard M. Sternberg (whom they described as a "former editor") had, in an unusual manner, handled the entire review process without consultation or review from an associate editor.^[3] Sternberg disputes the Council's statement and asserts that the paper was appropriately peer reviewed by three biologists who "concluded that [the paper] warranted publication".^[4]

The same statement from the Council vowed that proper review procedures would be followed in the future and endorsed a resolution published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which states that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting intelligent design.^[5] On September 18, the Discovery Institute issued a statement exulting over the publication of Meyer's paper in a peer-reviewed journal and chastising the National Center for Science Education for stating that the paper should not have been published.^[6] The Biological Society of Washington's president, Roy McDiarmid called Sternberg's decision to publish Meyer's article "a really bad judgment call on the editor's part" and it was doubtful whether the three scientists who peer reviewed the article and recommended it for publication were evolutionary biologists.^[7]

Robert Jackson Marks II is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University and proponent of intelligent design. From 1977 to 2003, he was on the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle. He was the first president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Neural Networks Council (now the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society) and the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.^[1] Marks has over 300 peer-reviewed technical publications, and is a fellow of the IEEE and the Optical Society of America.^[2] An old earth creationist,^[3] he is a subject of the 2008 pro-intelligent design motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.^[4][5]

In 2007, Marks created on a Baylor University server a website for the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, a site promoting intelligent design.^[6] The website, initially hosted on Baylor servers, was deleted when Baylor's administration determined that it violated university policy forbidding professors from creating the impression that their personal views represent Baylor as an institution. Baylor said they would permit Marks to repost his website on their server, provided a 108 word disclaimer accompany any intelligent design-advancing research to make clear that the work does not represent the university's position.^[7][8][9] The site now resides on a third-party server ^[10] and still contains the material advancing intelligent design.
Additional controversy arose when it was discovered that William Dembski, a notable intelligent design proponent and former Baylor staff member at the heart of a previous intelligent design controversy at Baylor over the Michael Polanyi Center's promotion of intelligent design who was removed as the center's director, had returned to Baylor as a member of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab.^[11] Dembski's participation was funded by a $30,000 grant from the Lifeworks Foundation, which was funded and administrated by researcher Brendan Dixon of the Biologic Institute, another lab promoting intelligent design affiliated with the Discovery Institute.^[12][13]

The Discovery Institute is a U.S. non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design. Its Teach the Controversy campaign aims to teach creationist anti-evolution beliefs in United States public high school science courses alongside accepted scientific theories, positing a scientific controversy exists over these subjects.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

A federal court, along with the majority of scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, say the Institute has manufactured the controversy they want to teach by promoting a false perception that evolution is "a theory in crisis",^[7] through incorrectly claiming that it is the subject of wide controversy and debate within the scientific community.^[8][9][10] In 2005, a federal court ruled that the Discovery Institute pursues "demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions",^[7][9][11] and the institute's manifesto, the Wedge strategy,^[12] describes a religious goal: to "reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions".^[13][14] It was the Federal Court's opinion that intelligent design was merely a redressing of creationism and that, as such, it was not a scientific proposition.

Marks agrees that "associating with [intelligent design] proponents can be harmful to your career" and expressed sympathy for Guillermo Gonzalez and William Dembski, who feature with Marks in the pro-intelligent design film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.^[14] Interview footage with Marks was shot for Expelled following the deletion of the website.^[4] The motion picture alleges persecution of intelligent design advocates by academic institutions and the scientific establishment.^[5]

A major scientific problem with proposed ID explanations for life is that their proponents cannot suggest any good way to disprove them. ID "theories" are so vague that even if specific explanations are disproved, believers can simply search for new signs of design. Consequently, investigators do not generally consider ID to be a productive or useful approach to science.

Expelled includes many clips of scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, William Provine and PZ Myers who are also well known as atheists. They talk about how their knowledge of science confirms their convictions and how in some cases science led them to atheism. Surveys do indicate that atheism is more common among scientists than in the general population. Nevertheless, the film is wrong to imply that understanding of evolution necessarily leads to a rejection of religious belief. Francisco Ayala of the University of California, Irvine, a leading neuroscientist who used to be a Dominican priest, continues to be a devout Catholic, as does the evolutionary biologist Ken Miller of Brown University. Thousands of other biologists across the U.S. who all know evolution to be true are also still religious. Moreover, billions of other people around the world simultaneously accept evolution and keep faith with their religion. The late Pope John Paul II said that evolution was compatible with Roman Catholicism as an explanation for mankind's physical origins.

During Scientific American's post-screening conversation with Expelled associate producer Mark Mathis, we asked him why Ken Miller was not included in the film. Mathis explained that his presence would have "confused" viewers because showing Miller would have invalidated the film's major premise that evolutionary biologists all reject God.

As Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer and other proponents of evolution appearing in Expelled have publicly remarked, the producers first arranged to interview them for a film that was to be called Crossroads, which was allegedly a documentary on "the intersection of science and religion." They were subsequently surprised to learn that they were appearing in Expelled, which "exposes the widespread persecution of scientists and educators who are pursuing legitimate, opposing scientific views to the reigning orthodoxy," to quote from the film's press kit.

When exactly did Crossroads become Expelled? The producers have said that the shift in the film's title and message occurred after the interviews with the scientists, as the accumulating evidence gradually persuaded them that ID believers were oppressed. Yet as blogger Wesley Elsberry discovered when he searched domain registrations, the producers registered the URL "expelledthemovie.com" on March 1, 2007—more than a month (and in some cases, several months) before the scientists were interviewed. The producers never registered the URL "crossroadsthemovie.com". Those facts raise doubt that Crossroads was still the working title for the movie when the scientists were interviewed.


Inside and outside the scientific community, people will no doubt continue to debate rationalism and religion and disagree about who has the better part of that argument. Evidence from evolution will probably remain at most a small part of that conflict, however.

Have you seen the movie?

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Uploaded on Dec 28, 2010

Ken Miller's talk on Intelligent Design at Case Western University. Ken Miller basically rips Intelligent Design apart in a 2 hour long exposé of the claims of intelligent design and the tactics that creationists employ to get it shoehorned into the American school system.

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Art. I, § 3.²³ Article I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution states the following:

All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry against his consent; no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious establishments or modes of worship.

Deception by trickery or sophistry

Religious fundamentalists are sincere on their view of the World as a battleground between Good and Evil. For them anything that undermines faith in God, specially with regards to children, is utterly evil. The teaching of Science to children is seen as a threat to children indoctrination. They fail to understand that Science is not about what to believe but rather a method to perceive Reality. Teaching religious ideas as fact undermines science education by misinforming students about the scientific method -- the basis for science literacy. The scientific method teaches students the fundamentals of science -- how to observe data, perform experiments and form scientific theory. Religious explanations for creation are not science – they cannot be confirmed or denied by the scientific method. Teaching them as science confuses and misleads students about the scientific method, thereby warping their ability to live in a technology-driven society.

However, it must be said that there is perversion of language and there are religious groups that use the language of science to mislead and actually undermine a scientific conceptualization of Reality. Religious opponents of evolution have cloaked religious beliefs in scientific sounding language and then mandating that schools teach the resulting "creation science" or "Intelligent Design" as an alternative to evolution. Intelligent Design organizations are fundamentalist religious entities that consider the introduction of creation science into the public schools part of their ministry. Creation science rested on a "contrived dualism" that recognized only two possible explanations for life, the scientific theory of evolution and biblical creationism, treated the two as mutually exclusive such that "one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution," and accordingly viewed any critiques of evolution as evidence that necessarily supported biblical creationism. Creation science is simply not science because it depends upon supernatural intervention, which cannot be explained by natural causes, or be proven through empirical investigation, and is therefore neither testable nor falsifiable.

The argument for Intelligent Design (ID) is not a new scientific argument, but is rather an old religious argument for the existence of God, traced back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, who framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer. Although proponents of ID occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed. The writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity. Dramatic evidence of ID's religious nature and aspirations is found in what is referred to as the "Wedge Document." The Wedge Document, developed by the Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture. The Discovery Institute, the think tank promoting ID whose CRSC developed the Wedge Document, acknowledges as "Governing Goals" to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.

Since the scientific revolution of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena.

Science is an abstraction, an ideal, The human brain is limited in its ability to perceive reality. Science is by definition, a work in progress, an approximation to reality, an iterative process of understanding never completed. The flowing and uncertain nature of Science is hard to grasp by the religious mind that perceives everything that happens as full of moral meaning within crisply defined boundaries between Good and Evil. From the point of view of religious fundamentalists, Science is a competing religion, although a silly one at that. Then the scientific community is under attack with this straw-man argument against evolution:

But if design, conversely, is rational, why do so many scientists reject it? Because this is not an issue of science, but of religion. Their religion is that of materialism and naturalism, and they are under no illusions as to the implications of design.

Any effort to introduce a theological doctrine into public school science curricula would inevitably offend some teachers and students. After all, a Protestant fundamentalist's "literal" reading of Genesis would likely differ markedly from that of a Catholic or an Orthodox Jew.

Both public school educators and religious leaders should be concerned about the prospect of biology lessons degenerating into debates on Biblical or religious interpretation.

Evolution by natural selection, at its core, works like this: living organisms are characterized by heritable variation for traits that affect their survival and reproductive abilities. This heritable variation originates from the (truly random) process of mutation at the level of DNA (although Darwin didn’t know this, he observed that there was variation and noted that somehow it was heritable from one generation to the next). Natural selection then is the differential survival and reproduction of organisms that have (heritable) traits that allow them to do better in the struggle for life. That’s it, but the concept is profound because the process of evolution turns out to be largely the result of two components: mutations (which are random) and natural selection (which, again, is not random). It is the joint outcome of these two processes that—according to evolutionary theory—explains not only the diversity of all organisms on Earth, but most crucially the fact that they are so well adapted to their environment: those that weren’t did not survive the process. Indeed, many organisms do not survive or reproduce, with the result that more than 99 percent of the species that ever existed have by now gone extinct.

You may find it intuitively difficult to believe that two relatively simple natural processes can produce the complex order we observe in living organisms. But the beauty of science is that it so often shows our intuitions to be wrong. Because nature does not always function according to our common sense or intuition, the scientific method a necessity on the quest of the human race for survival.

Evolution is both a theory and a fact, contrary to simplistic creationist views. How can this be? Evolution is a fact in the sense that it is beyond reasonable doubt that living organisms have changed over time throughout the history of the earth. It is a theory in the sense that biologists have proposed a variety of mechanisms (including, but not limited to, mutation and natural selection) to explain the fact of evolution.

The theory of evolution is a fundamental concept of biology and it is supported by the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence. Simply eliminating evolution from the public school curriculum in order to ease community tensions would do a great disservice to all students. It would deny public school students an adequate science education – which is more and more becoming a necessity for professional success in a high-tech world.