It emerges from last evening's debate that two of the 10 Republican presidential candidates--Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo---don't believe in the theory of evolution. These aren't the big hitters on the GOP side, but it reveals an interesting under-current of anti-Darwin sentiment among Republicans and conservatives.
I know many on the right, especially the Christian right, are scared of Darwin. Even intellectual magazines like Commentary seem to have adopted an anti-Darwin position. This has enabled many on the left, as well as the professional atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, to portray conservative Christians as yahoos. Sometimes we do come across that way.
In my forthcoming book "What's So Great About Christianity" I will show why, contrary to the claims of Dawkins and company, Darwinian evolution does not undermine the design argument for God. On the contrary, the latest findings of modern science have greatly strengthened that argument. Paley was right and Dawkins is wrong. Fasten your seat-belt and wait for my book, or, if you are a real fanatic, pre-order it here.
But if Christian anxiety is misplaced, conservatives are even further off the mark. That's because Darwin's theory actually supports conservative positions in all kinds of interesting ways. First, Darwin gives a dark and selfish view of human nature, which is why we need a tough foreign policy to deal with bad guys who cannot be talked out of their badness--even if U.N. cocktails are served. In addition, the selfishness in human nature warrants a system called capitalism which channels this self-orientation toward the material betterment of society.
It gets better. Darwin shows that social institutions like the family are founded in the deep human drive to reproduce and care for the young. Reproduction and self-perpetuation are the natural root of human family arrangements, which cannot be redefined as mechanisms of "self-fulfillment" without jeopardizing their biological basis and function. Consider a simple statistic: when divorced moms remarry or have boyfriends in the house, those surrogate parents are vastly more likely to physically and sexually abuse the children than their own parents. Darwinian theory supplies the reason: the real parent shares the same genes as the child and this forms a bond that dispels sexual attraction and discourages abuse. "Family values" are supported by modern evolutionary biology.
I'm not saying embrace Darwinian evolution because it is politically useful. I am saying don't hastily reject a theory that has a lot of evidence going for it when it has the added merit of being politically congenial.
Reader Comments ( Page 11 of 11)
151. Hello Pboyfloyd (de la 150),
Here I am again. Took me a while to read the stuff. I was reading it at opportunity and at a slowish pace because too many Thrinaxodons, Sinosauropteryxs, Archaeopteryxs, Rodhocetuses, and Merychippuses at one time could seriously harm a person. (by the way Merychippus is my favorite closely followed by Acanthostega wagon)
From the papers it indeed sounds like these animals did an evolving act. And it seems strange. But the fact is that the horses stayed horses and the whales whales and the fish fish. They were just strange versions before right? That is what I got from it. The dinos to birds thing could work but it seems there are some missing links. Maybe I missed something though. I have to pull my mental resourses to concentrate through those scientific names they give these creatures.
Michelle at 11:15AM on Jun 4th 2007
152. Also Pboyfloyd (de la 149),
Ok man prove that it was not 6000 years ago.
Pay for education huh? What an outdated concept. Free information is the new wave.
I looked up the whale stuff. Some of them look like normal whales and some of them... how do they even know they are whales?
Michelle at 11:23AM on Jun 4th 2007
153. @ Michelle (comment 152)
Well, I don't know how old you are Michelle... but 6000 years might seem like a huge amount of time for a very young person... not so much for an older person.
I remember thinking, or saying, when I was seven or eight... about how OLD my parents were... my dad was 36 or 37 at the time... man was he old. LOL
I imagine that we also compare past time with our own age...
But if everyone had a kid when she(we'll go with the mom here) was 20... that would be 5 generations per 100 years. 50 generations per 1000 years... so only 300 generations since God created everything.
Even if you have the 'ladies' starting to pop out kids when they were 13... that is still only 8 generations per 100 years. 480 generations max.
But there's the Flood which wiped out most of the first 160 generations of people... that was a bit of a blow.(ouch)
So, within a max. of 280 generations we spread around the world, forgot about eskimos, aztecs, australian aboriginees et al.
All the Australian animals 'followed' the aboriginees to Australia(somehow) then the people promptly forgot this and decided that the world had come from a 'Dream-time'.
There are somewhere between one and ten million different species of just insects... some of them must have been evolving at ridiculous rates if there were only a few representative 'kinds' of insects that left the Ark.
Then there are the known Ice-Ages... when did they all have time to happen? Surely a world flood would have wiped any evidence of any between Adam and Noah?
The Tower of Babel 'incident' according to Creationists took place about 8 generations after the flood... so God mixed up their languages then sent them most of them packing to parts unknown... a maximum of 272 generations before you were born... this might seem like a lot Michelle but there would have been a lot of generations living together at the same time in this 'maximum generations' theory of mine.
How did they all manage to forget this incident... even a lot of the 'locals' seemed to forget... it just is not reasonable.
I didn't really get around to animals too much there... ehh, what can you do?
pboyfloyd at 11:43PM on Jun 4th 2007
154. Hi Pboyfloyd,
Well, I do not know your age either. I do not even know if you are a male or a female. But if you will look straight standing up with your head not cocked, you will see me. Early college age, between eighteen and fifty. Unless you are short. Then you will have to cock your head.
I think there was time. I do not know how long these ice ages were. Maybe they happened after the flood.
And what did the "locals" forget? The flood or the ice ages or what?
Michelle
Michelle at 1:52PM on Jun 5th 2007
155. Hey Pboyfloyd,
I figured that maybe you were upset because I didnt have any "wows" "whoas" or "Oh mys" in my last message. So I will add one. Here is the paste:
I am not eight years old. Oh my!
And if you did not want to tell me if you were a male or female or how old you were you did not have to. And if you wanted to stop the whole conversation thing, I dont know if you did, but if you did and you were like, "Ha, maybe if I go away for a while she will get bored and go away too." Usually you just tell someone goodbye when that sort of thing happens. Do not worry. I will not get offended or sue you.
Michelle at 5:39PM on Jun 7th 2007
156. @ Michelle (155)
I didn't abandon you without saying goodbye... I was movin' house.
Didn't look for new comments on this post for a couple of days... sorry.
I wasn't trying to get you to tell me personal info.
My point was how could people move to various parts of the world and forget how they got there so quickly?
pboyfloyd at 10:27AM on Jun 8th 2007
157. Hi Pboyfloyd,
Thats fine. I was just wondering. Making sure you wernt one of those, "Well, I dont wanna offend her," type of people.
And I was not thinking definitely that you were using indirect lingo to get me to tell ya my age. I told ya anyway, sort of, cause I didnt want you mistaking me for a little person.
And I do not know about how those people forgot their dear second cousins but I know they were somehow seperated. Dude, some people forget things quickly. And maybe then they valued things differently. Think Tower of Babble too. Totally makes sense. Here is a dramatization of a sentence they may have said. "I mean we love cousin Bobo but he dont speak our language any more, man. Bye bye Bobo... Yeah, I know you cant understand me." Time passed and Bobo and friends became old news. Maybe people stopped believing the stories after several hundred years.
Michelle at 11:30PM on Jun 8th 2007
158. @ Michelle
Yea, guess you're right. That's how it must have been. They were funny old people that lived in funny old times. And Bobo the ancestor of all clowns became untelligible... so.. Bye, Bye, Bobo.
Countless species of animals that lived before mammals can be sloughed off because the poem of Job mentions a monster.
God made the entire Universe 6000 years ago but we can see light from galaxies millions of light years away.
That might just as well be that Job monster's or cousin Bobo's fault as anything else.
And some scientists spend their lifetime making sense out of the clues all around us but some funny old guys have it all wrapped up kinda, vaguely ... kinda open for lotsa interpretation.
Christians could very well BE right, Michelle.
I guess, finally, finally out of all the religions that just made sense to those funny old people.... the Egyptians, that were so sure that they were right about the gods built huge pyramids... the Greeks and Romans that conquered the entire known world worshipping lots of gods... the vikings that were practically invincible with only their phoney gods... and even modern day ones.. all wrong... but they all work for the people involved....
... but out of all that your religion... the one you believe because you happened to be born in the USA at this time in history... that must co-incidentally be the really true one.
I don't know if it was supposed to come to me in a dream that the one true God would send me messages through his servant Michelle... sadly that didn't happen though.
Plus, ain't you the lucky one to have stumbled on the exact truth out of all the people that have lived and all the people that will live...
... say 'Hi!' to God for me when you see him... better yet... tell him that I said to go and F#@K himself. LMAO... that's a good one eh?
pboyfloyd at 10:15AM on Jun 9th 2007
159. Hello Pboyfloyd,
You said, "Countless species of animals that lived before mammals can be sloughed off because the poem of Job mentions a monster."
Ok, what do you mean? Im perverbially scratching my head here. Yeah my head that is on my shoulders.
And I wouldnt jump to conclusions about that lightyears stuff because it could have all been created at the same time, just at a vast distance. Really vast distance.
Yes I am sure it was Bobo that caused that. He sneezed.?
And you see, Pboy, religion evolved. It took millions of years but now we have the near perfect speciman of Christianity. Still a couple of seeming loopholes. But I am sure a few more million years should get that all worked out just dandy.
I afeared to say anything about those two comments
about dream and the last one. Ok. Bye.
Michelle at 1:12PM on Jun 11th 2007
160. @ Michelle
Okay, Michelle... I'll go over the points that I made(excluding the last couple...with better explanation.
In the geological column mammals are found only after a certain level... one easy way to disprove evolution would be to find a fossil of the wrong kind of animal in the wrong place... this has obviously never happened.
The book of Job is actually a poem... an old poem. Poems are notoriously filled with 'meanings' and 'truths' but not necessarilly facts... if you see what I am getting at.
The conclusion on the 'lightyear stuff' is that there are galaxies millions of lightyears away. Well we know this because we can see them through telescopes. We can see them through telescopes because because the light, which travels a certain distance in a year... has reached all the way here... and has taken millions of years to do it.
If the universe was only 6000 years old we wouldn't be able to see anything that was further than 6000 light years away... now would we?
You say that religion evolved... well the Bible is an apparently unbroken chain of events starting at the time when God created the heavens and the earth...
... if you mean evolved in the sense that the heavens doesn't mean the skies anymore, it means the entire universe... and the earth doesn't mean the land and sea anymore, it means the entire planet...
... well I think that that is only to compromise with reality... and evolving in the sense that you mean it is developing... not compromising.
Well.. I don't think that religion has evolved that much at all... there are still the same kind of people in charge telling everyone that worldly knowledge (science) must be wrong because it doesn't mesh with their version of revealed knowledge.
Science is just the latin word for knowledge.
from L. scientia "knowledge"
What do you suppose is more likely, Michelle... that all this science that we have... all this building up of knowledge and correcting bad ideas is just a huge conspiracy against Ken Ham et al... or is it more likely that if the sciences were not true... some scientist would have pointed that out a long time ago.
When Christian apologists like Ken Ham say that Darwinism and other sciences are simply 'just so' stories and just another religion... they are simply turning tables on scientists that say the same thing about religion.
If Ken Ham asked for evidence of evolution... and he really wanted evidence, he could enroll in a university...
... but if scientists ask for evidence for God, Ken Ham will just say that there is no evidence that there isn't God.
There are all kinds of disingenuous way to debate God and/or the Bible.
Feigning ignorance... 'I never heard that science' or 'I never read THAT in the Bible.'
Turning Tables... 'You can't prove that God does NOT exist'
Tu Quoque (you're as bad as us).. 'You guys are just making up stories too'
Circular reasoning (Begging the question)...
The Bible says that God is real and God inspired the Bible.
Special Pleading... there MUST be a God because I feel Him in my heart. There must be a designer, there must be a purpose.
But it is purpose with no purpose at all...
God loves us and wants us to be with him so..
God created the world and everything in it.so..
God created the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and He created the serpent... so...
God created the means for man to fall from grace and sin...so..
God came down to us to save us from the sin that he created...
Because God loves us and wants us to be with him.
And we have completed the circle.
But for what purpose... a test? But God knows all...He knows who will not pass the test... in fact... he must have known that Adam would not pass the test.
If a mother is truly Christian... she could sacrifice herself to Hell by killing all her babies... her babies will go to Heaven for sure.
Why is that not logical? Would you(as a mother say) NOT sacrifice yourself for your babies? Well, why not send them straight to Heaven...and sacrifice yourself to man's law, for the greater good of your babies?
pboyfloyd at 3:27PM on Jun 11th 2007
161. Hello Pboyfloyd,
Well, you say that mammals have not been found in certain levels of the geological column. What if they have and your friends have not told you. They hid them away in potato sacks. Threw them in the ocean or something. Oh my!
And um what does Job's monster have to do with the mammals and such? Im perverbially scraching my head still. Are you saying it ate the other mammals?
Ok that is some kind of reasoning that they havent given a name to yet that because people have only been around 6000 years we could only see things six thousand light years away. Who made that rule? Telescopes are special things that have special purposes. Foggy. Just foggy I suppose. Not clear reasoning.
And I was being sarcastic about the evolving of religion. Christianity has been around according to the Bible since the beginning of time.
And Pboyfloyd, not all Christians say science and religion do not go together. Not all scientists say they do not go together either. There are a lot of scientists who are Christians right now. And I aint talking the religion Christian Science. My pastor was ironically talking about this on Sunday.
And I still havnt seen evidence that evolution is definitely true. I know you said that it is not all on the internet yet. But still. I may go to some secular university and find out more about it. But really I probably do not need to. If the colleges found it out (of course they probably have connections) perhaps that info is still available.
Yes, the methods you mention, Pboy, have been used. Those are for people who do not know and do not want to admit it though. And the ignorance may not be feigned. They may honestly not know that there is a lungfish or that Job was a poem. Even the best could learn more.
Did you read the Purpose Driven Life? because that is what he says. He says life is a test. It seems to be. But there are of course things people cannot fully explain from the past. Here I go with the methods. I think partially because Christianity is an emotional thing as well as reason. Tell me you are not absolutely sure that evolution is definitely beyond a shadow of a doubt true. So yeah, we humans are all in the same boat technically. Christians do not know everything. Evolutionists do not know everything. Everyone else does not know everything. So yeah none of us can unroll a scroll and point out with perfect simplicity or complicatedness precicely how it works in a way that everybody would believe it.
Michelle at 9:52PM on Jun 11th 2007
162. @ Michele (comment 161)
Yea, I think that pharmacists are not telling us all the truth either.. surely they have to put spells on those pills before they do anything, right?
I always wondered about 747s being able to fly... there must be invisible demons keeping it in the air, right?
My 'friends' paleontologists are scientists and they love anomalies... so they would hardly be hiding them... they might get a Nobel Prize for their discovery!!
Why would scientists all over the world be going out into the field with the idea to sweep away anything new that might contradict what they had to learn? Believe me if I had to sit through some of the boring stuff memorizing funny names for years... and I came upon something that would stand everything on it's head... I'd be in there, publishing my findings and waiting for my call from the Nobel Prize Committee.
But I already explained to you that you could do this... and you'd be LOOKING for anomalies, right?
I think that we're going round in circles here now, especially if you are imagining... what.. satanic scientists... trying to keep the truth from the world by hiding evidence in potato sacks and/or dumping it in the ocean.
I give up, the facts are still the facts, though.
Oh, yea... there is only a couple of days until the astrology charts say that it is the best time to start a war... if Bush uses astrology.. then I guess Iran is about to 'get it' one way or another... watch the news.
pboyfloyd at 8:30PM on Jun 13th 2007
163. Hi again Pboyfloyd,
After yet another disappearing act, I have returned.
The following are responses in order to your afore posed points:
Those docs aint putting any spells on their pills I do not think. They know chemicals are enough. He he he.
Them 747s dont need demons. They have air pressure or jet stream or something like that. Your sarcasm is of the funny people of funny times... I aint one of them. These times are normal. ha ha
Hey maybe you do not know your "friends" the paleontologists as well as you think. Maybe they have some secret ambition for hiding their findings like their cat Spikey would get upset or something.
And some big prize dont put visions of sugar plums in my eyes too much. But... here's a start. Just in case you are inspired to fruit vision by world fame. Go to
http://listen.family.org/daily/A000000331.cfm
and the second one and listen away. Then tell me what ya think. I'd like to know.
I am not saying them scientists are "satanic". Maybe hiding someting though. They could be. I know I said before that maybe evil is a mix of bad chemicals. But that is a maybe. There is more to it than that I think. Maybe.
Michelle
Michelle at 10:23PM on Jun 21st 2007
164. Pboyfloyd,
Just thought I would add something to my last comment.
Dont know if you listened to the link yet but um just wanted to state that I understand that it may not exactally be a tasty cup of Joe to you but um yeah its something to get used to. Doesnt have a great deal of the sugar and milk of modern entertainment.
But I am sure if you open your microsoft word application and have it maximized and restore down your internet page while you are listening and then on micro put your favorite border around the document and put your restored down internet page in the center, it will definitely enhance your listening experience.
Michelle at 12:43PM on Jun 25th 2007
165. Ok, Pboy, you's been gone a long time and I still havnt gotten that goodbye you said youd say. And I know you are around because I saw a comment from you on another news blog that I was commenting on myself. It seems you scooted from here because I wanted you to listen to the religious. But I promise they will not hurt you too much, at least not so much you cant get over it in a couple days with medicine. Dont worry, Christians dont bite. We just give you the "goodness" disease. Some versions more dangerous and incurable than others. But believe me the one on this recording is mild.
Michelle at 11:47AM on Aug 10th 2007