Journal pudge's Journal: Fundamentalism and Evolution 23
I am told fundamentalists disbelieve in evolution. While many do, I've never seen a definitive study on it, and it is not a part of The Fundamentals to disbelieve in evolution.
Indeed: The Fundamentals, the essays that started the fundamentalist movement, contained some ardently anti-evolution essays, but also contained essentially pro-evolutionist essays, or perhaps more accurately, papers that are explicitly accepting that evolution may be true, and that this does not in any way harm Christianity, and that there's nothing anti-Christian about evolution. For example, George Frederick Wright in The Fundamentals almost 100 years ago:
Modern evolutionary speculations have not made much real progress over those of the ancients. As already remarked, they are, in their bolder forms atheistic; while in their milder forms they are "deistic" -- admitting, indeed, the agency of God at the beginning, but nowhere else. The attempt, however, to give the doctrine standing through Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has not been successful; for at best, that theory can enlarge but little our comprehension of the adequacy of resident forces to produce and conserve variations of species, and cannot in the least degree banish the idea of design from the process.
It is, therefore, impossible to get any such proof of evolution as shall seriously modify our conception of Christianity. The mechanism of the universe is so complicated that no man can say that it is closed to Divine interference.
That is a fundamentalist, in The Fundamentals, almost 100 years ago, saying there is nothing especially wrong with evolution (though he did not explicitly subscribe to it; he was, essentially, an Old Earth Creationist, which is not very similar to what we think of as Creationism, but is more similar to today's Intelligent Design, in that both accept that evolution may be true, but that God intervened to cause [at least some of] those evolutionary steps, which is, given the nature of God, not all that different from the Catholic church's view of Divine Domino Player who does not intervene, but sets up all the blocks and then starts the chain reaction).
And Wright even bashes Richard Dawkins well before Dawkins was born, for good measure:
Furthermore, a great mistake is made when the dicta of specialists in scientific investigation are accepted in religious matters as of any particular value. Indeed, the concentration of specialists on narrow lines of investigation really unfits them for duly weighing religious evidence.
Granted, some groups of "fundamentalists" are predominantly anti-evolution; maybe most fundamentalists are (though I suspect the strongest reason people believe that is because the loudest fundamentalists are anti-evolution). But being anti-evolution is not a necessary or fundamental feature of fundamentalism. The fundamental features of fundamentalism are noted in The Fundamentals, some of which explicitly tell us that evolution isn't evil.
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No political value, either (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also disturbing that such specialists are accorded credibility when they speak about public policy. I think of this whenever I heard Richard Dawkins talk about education, or global warming believers talking about the fixes they want. Identify the costs and benefits of the relative options for us, according to your specialty, and then let us subjectively appraise and value the costs ourselves, and make the decision ourselves, rather than appointing you as the priestly caste to decide for us.
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Now, the thing some can't get their minds around is that sometimes natural selection can separate a single species into two non-interbreeding species. But when the statement "Fundamentalists (or Creationists) do not believe in Evolution" is made, it can be very confusing. I think what is really meant is that some people don't believe that evolution (speciation) is the mechanism through which all species today have been arrived at.
Right: fundamentalists don't believe evolution can result in speciation. Which is what pudge's quotation from The Passing of Evolution [geocities.com] actually says, though whether pudge recognized this is questionable:
Wright is saying, in this passage, that Darwin's theory of evolution is false bec
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Right: fundamentalists don't believe evolution can result in speciation.
NOT right. SOME (perhaps most? but we don't know) fundamentalists do not believe that, and there is NOTHING inherent to fundamentalism which precludes such a belief.
Wright is saying, in this passage, that Darwin's theory of evolution is false because one species never evolves into another.
No, he is not. He is implying he disagrees with it, but not asserting that it is false. Big difference.
"Design" (by which he means "immediate Divine direction") is responsible for speciation.
He thinks so, yes, but he is saying that Darwin's theory, even if true, does not mean that there is not such design. And he's right. If everything Darwin ever said is true, it doesn't mean God didn't intervene to make it happen that wa
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Pudge, it's virtually impossible to discuss the facts of the matter with you because you selectively snip out and ignore half of what I say, then assert that the remaining points haven't proved my case. I don't have time to repeat myself.
I agree with you that people who reject belief in Christ's resurrection and in God are not Christians. They may call themselves that but they are not. Similarly, belief in biological evolution, belief that all animals including human beings share a common ancestor, is a re
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Pudge, it's virtually impossible to discuss the facts of the matter with you because you selectively snip out and ignore half of what I say, then assert that the remaining points haven't proved my case.
I do not believe I did that, but to any extent I did, I learned it from you: you do this every single time.
I agree with you that people who reject belief in Christ's resurrection and in God are not Christians. They may call themselves that but they are not. Similarly, belief in biological evolution, belief that all animals including human beings share a common ancestor, is a rejection of The Fundamentals, by my reading of Wright's essay, "The Decadence of Darwinism," and "Evolutionism in the Pulpit." This is pretty obvious. So people who believe in evolution are not fundamentalists.
False. You misunderstand what you read, and what The Fundamentals are. It is a widely believed, but clear fallacy, that The Fundamentals (and hence, fundamentalism) requires absolute agreement on certain matters. If this were the case, why did The Fundamentals contain clearly contradictory statements about evolution by Wright, Orr, and Beach? Beach was a flat-out creationist, Wright an old Earth
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Does it bother you that you are so transparent to me?
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This is so much more fun than Hannity and Colmes.
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That's news to me. The first of the "five fundamentals" at the root of Christian fundamentalism is biblical inerrancy (a stronger term than infalibility.) What groups call themselves Fundamentalists and also reject young Earth creationism?
It's not about groups. It's about people. Already in this discussion I listed three authors of "The Fundamentals" -- can't get much more Fundamentalist than that -- who were not Young Earth creationists: Wright (a geologist) was an old-earth creationist (believing in geologic time, but also that God intervened to cause variation of species), and James Orr was a theistic evolutionist (basically accepted evolution, except perhaps in the case of Adam). And frankly, none of these is all that different, unle
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Actually, students and parents of minor students should decide what's taught in biology classes, and people paying for biology classes should decide what's taught in biology classes. We don't need a priestly caste of scientists to do it for us.
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When someone writes "priestly caste of scientists" I generally assume they do not understand what it is about science that makes it important, and important to teach. In other words, your opinion in this matter is not valuable to me.
people paying for biology classes should decide what's taught in biology classes
Libertarians are funny. Do you realize that is not even possible? What would be the point of paying to learn something you already know?
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When someone writes "priestly caste of scientists" I generally assume they do not understand what it is about science that makes it important, and important to teach.
I'm saying scientists shouldn't set public policy simply because they are scientists.
Libertarians are funny.
And you're patronizing, but I'll live. At least we can entertain each other.
Do you realize that is not even possible? What would be the point of paying to learn something you already know?
The last time I checked school children were not the ones who paid for school.
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When someone writes "priestly caste of scientists" I generally assume they do not understand what it is about science that makes it important, and important to teach. In other words, your opinion in this matter is not valuable to me.
So you don't understand what someone writes when they write "priestly caste of scientists." What they mean, as jdavidb said, is that scientists should not be taken as infallible on anything, and not authoritative on public policy, morality, philosophy, and so on. We have elevated scientists so high that Richard Dawkins is actually believed to, by virtue of his work in evolution, have anything interesting to say about religion, when he is, quite clearly, ignorant about most of the things he writes about o
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Wait a second, why shouldn't biologists decide what is taught in biology class?
Because in our system of government, the people, not the scientists, make the decisions for themselves. The people may choose to put biologists in charge of that decision, and sometimes they do, but there's no reason why the people "should" make such a decision, because there's a lot more to teaching science than science itself. It's the same reason we don't put scientists in control of environmental policy decisions: we elect people who make those decisions (or who appoint people who will). We could ch
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My real answer is that anybody should be able to decide what they are or are not willing to teach (and under what terms), and anybody should be able to decide what they are or are not willing to be taught (or to have taught to their children). In pudge's preferred system, that's determined by local control (voting). I'd like a little more localized control than that, but it's the same principle.
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My real answer is that anybody should be able to decide what they are or are not willing to teach (and under what terms), and anybody should be able to decide what they are or are not willing to be taught (or to have taught to their children). In pudge's preferred system, that's determined by local control (voting). I'd like a little more localized control than that, but it's the same principle.
Well, the public school is controlled by the school board. It doesn't make sense for it to be controlled any more locally, unless you, of course, completely reorganize the school. That said, of course, children (via their parents) should be able to decide what they are willing to be taught (and the school board can decide whether or not those children should be able to graduate etc., if they don't fulfill the "requirements"). But of course, I also believe schooling of any kind should not be mandatory.