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Rape Victim Fights Back Richard Gillmore was sentenced to 30 years in prison for raping Tiffany Edens. Now, he's up for (More) Richard Gillmore was sentenced to 30 years in prison for raping Tiffany Edens. Now, he's up for parole, so she faced him in court to try to keep him behind bars. Hattie Kauffman reports. (Less)
Evolution and American Opinion Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine (More) Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. I have often wanted to talk to the director of the human genome project, Francis Collins, about this particular subject. He is a minority in the scientific community, Gallup shows, as a believing evangelical christian. He holds the two “majesteria,” to quote Gould, as separate and also makes it clear that the work he performed on the HGP does not confirm any of his beliefs about god. To use Harris’ verbiage, he has, in a sense, “partitioned” his mind to a “spiritual” side and a “scientific” side. If you read Collins’ description of his conversion story, it follows something like: he was walking a pleasant wood when he ran into a frozen waterfall interestingly divided into three parts; because of this transformative moment, he kneeled and confessed his devotion to the trinity. The partition is in deed thick and very present.
I have to give him credit for at least acknowledging the fact that he doesn’t use the scientific method to support his religious beliefs. I actually think he might have a hard time finding credibility in the scientific community should he make such a claim. That is precisely why I think some one in his position has to forcibly separate the two worlds, otherwise the two will interact, so to speak, and destroy the other like eaglets in their nest. The plain truth in Francis is that he does not use the same degree of evidence-based thinking in his religious pursuits as he does in his genetic studies. The two factors combined, evidence-based thinking and application of scientific knowledge to support religious statements, create several situations in which there exists conflict of statements: a man can be or cannot be born by a virgin, man can or cannot fly without the aid of technology, the earth can or cannot be stopped for a period to resolve human conflicts, or water can or cannot be made into fermented grape juice by the touch of a hand.
The believer is essentially asking the scientific community to reject its knowledge and certainty in diverse areas of expertise (this is PhD type studying, I make an understatement here) should she tell us to believe her propositions. To claim knowledge in the areas of say physiology and physics by a reading of 1000+ year old texts is preposterous. What I have always found amazing is how much the religious public will agree with something, should it not obviously contradict their creed’s teachings. By agree I mean accept, work with, or even take as true. The television is a great testament to the willingness of evidence-based thinkers to work for the entertainment of the community, yet take the same intuitions of particle physics that justify the images on the screen and explain their implications in a reductive particle brownian kinetics type study within the cell, then a conflict arises and these ideas are placed in the fridges of respect, despite their apparent abilities to predict particle motion in the living room box.
This is the behavior we are witnessing in the United States in a subject surrounding the origins of man. My argument here is that the self same tools man has used to develop drugs, say, or combat genetic disorders, upon which so many believers and nonbelievers rely, are the same tools scientists use to justify the “lowly stamp” (C. Darwin) of humanity’s origin. Disingenuous regard for this area of science, almost 200 years old, is unimpressive by any standards.
I posted this video to show just how far we have to come before there can be an open understanding about who humans truly are. (Less)
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