Sunday, November 20, 2005

Neo Darwinists Seek Inoculation Against Criticism


Have you noticed liberals shrieking as if Dracula had appeared in their midst? Why the terrible fear of thinking or is it FOG (Fear of God)? Only those with some sort of stick up their collective asses would disgree with the good Cardinal's common sense observations. Whether or not these observations are true is another matter but without open discourse we will never know. Why is it that liberals seek to curtail discourse? Have you noticed that the curtailment of discourse is a common feature of both religious and ideological intolerance?

The thinking of Mao Tse Tung and other ideologues has more in common with Shiite mumbo jumbo and liberalism than with those who might question your descent from the random connections of the universe.

And let's not forget devolution if we are going to talk about evolution. In other words, socially speaking, evolution is not progressive, it can be regressive. Pay attention, the devolved are all about you.

Part of the comments below appeared on Yahoo from the religion editor, Tom Hennigan

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Schoenborn, a good-humored Dominican who was the editor for the Church's authoritative Catechism published in 1992, expressed surprise at the barrage of criticism he got for saying Darwin could not explain everything.

"If this is a scientific theory, it must be open to scientific criticism," he said. "What I'm criticizing is a kind of strategy to immunize it, as if it were an offence to Darwin's dignity to say there are some issues this theory can't explain.

"There's a kind of ban on discussing this and critics of the evolution theory are discredited or discriminated against from the start," he said.
"What I would like is to see in schools is a critical and open spirit, in a positive sense, so we don't make a dogma out of the theory of evolution but we say it is a theory that has a lot going for it but has no answers for some questions."

He questioned neo-Darwinism, the scientifically updated version of Darwin's thesis first published in 1859, and its argument that natural selection -- the so-called "survival of the fittest" -- created life out of matter randomly.

"Can we reasonably say the origin of man and life can only be explained by material causes?" he asked. "Can matter create intelligence? That is a question we can't answer scientifically, because the scientific method cannot grasp it."

"Common sense tells us that matter cannot organize itself," he said. "It needs information to do that, and information is a manifestation of intelligence."

Although his reading on evolution has covered several scientific disciplines, Schoenborn stressed his objections to neo-Darwinism were essentially philosophical.

Like his mentor Pope Benedict, he is deeply concerned that materialism -- the science-based view that matter is the only reality -- is crowding out religious and spiritual thinking in modern man's perception of the world.
"It's all about materialism, that's the key issue," he said.

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