According to Edward Wilson, the desire of mankind to explain their origins has led to three dominant worldviews that attempt to explain human existence and present condition. These three worldviews are God-centered religion, political behaviorism, and scientific humanism. However, these views fail to recognize another increasingly popular worldview known as Intelligent Design. Because the theory of Intelligent Design hinges on the premise that human existence is the direct consequence of a supernatural “intelligent designer” who designed the world and all of its complex organisms, that in turn are made up of complex parts designed purposefully by this “intelligent designer”, Wilson has lumped this theory in with the God-centered creation worldview (par. 12). However, proponents of Intelligent Design differ from traditional Creationists in the idea that they are attempting to put a scientific stamp on their theory. Proponents of this theory conduct scientific research to ferret out facts that scientifically support their theory. As Intelligent Design attempts to meld Creationism and Darwinism, it certainly should be addressed as an independent worldview from those examined by Wilson. As individual principals go, there are none so staunchly supported and stubbornly held to as those regarding the beginning of life. Because religion relies on the blind faith that mankind epitomizes God’s creative power and our present condition has likewise been guided by his hand, political behaviorism relies on the theory that humans are simply blank slates, free from the bindings of religious dogma and evolving genetic imprinting and are able to be molded and imprinted with the “best” political ideals, and scientific humanism relies on the ...
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...elligent Design. While it is reasonable to associate Intelligent Design with Creationism, the two differ in the fact that proponents of Intelligent Design seek to explain existence not only through the existence of a natural designer, but also through scientific research and supporting evidence. Because the theory attempts to merge God-centered religious based views and scientific views, it should be assigned an independent world view. That being said, it remains that there is no common ground between the three worldviews and because both political behaviorism and Creationism have no scientific basis for explanation they are wholly incompatible with science. As long as the scientific community continues to recognize that “the battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology”, as Wilson states, there can be no compatibility between the three world views (par. 23).
The Dover Area School District of Dover, Pennsylvania is seeking approval from the General Assembly of Pennsylvania House to include the theory of intelligent design in the instruction of biology. Intelligent design, also known as I.D., is a theory that seeks to refute the widely-accepted and scientifically-supported evolution theory. It proposes that the complexity of living things and all of their functioning parts hints at the role of an unspecified source of intelligence in their creation (Orr). For all intents and purposes, the evidence cited by I.D. supporters consists only of the holes or missing links in evolutionary theory; it is a widely-debate proposal, not because ?of the significant weight of its evidence,? but because ?of the implications of its evidence? (IDnet).
Humans have asked questions about their origin and their purpose on earth for eons. The Bible tells humans that God created them and explains their purpose. However, since the Renaissance, humanism answers questions about origins by naturalistic means and science has been redefined in the process. Most institutions of higher education and many individuals have adopted the naturalistic theory of evolution to explain human origin without considering its effects on faith. In contrast to prevailing thought at Goshen College, a literal six-day creation is foundational to the Gospel message. Combining evolution and Christianity makes one’s faith less logical and opens one’s science to new quandaries.
Jones states that intelligent design is a religious view, based of creationism and not a scientific theory. He adds that the Dover school board’s claim to be examining an alternate form of science is simply, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom. After the judge decision the school board, consisting of newly-elected, pro- science members. The federal courts have ruled that creationism, creation science, and intelligent design are not science, but instead endorse a specific religious belief. Therefore, these topics are not appropriate content for a science classroom. Neither Intelligent design nor any other form of creationism has met any of the standards of science and cannot be tested by the scientific method. On the other hand, evolution, like all other sciences, is founded on a growing body of observable and reproducible evidence in the natural
Many scientists today believe that there are no rational grounds for supporting creationism (intelligent design) and that there is no evidence to support its claims. However, that has proven to be incorrect. Creationist believe that there is, in fact, evidence supporting intelligent design and that ID is the only logical explanation for the vast complexity that is found in all of creation. Even though the Big Bang Theory is thought to disprove intelligent design, ID is a valid science and has many accounts of proven evidence, including the highly improbable conditions necessary for supporting life and the discovery of duons and functional "junk" DNA.
These days, most of the textbook only presents evolution theory as a fact to interpret the origin of life and the earth. More and more people get to reject creation unconsciously because they had no opportunity to compare and evaluate both worldview in same degree. I interviewed my three close acquaintances and heard a various responses from many people including my interviewees. Some of them had same belief with me, but some people had significantly different opinion with me. As a consequence of evolution theory’s monopoly in education, non-believers and Christians are unconsciously influenced by this secular worldview.
Justice Felix Frankfurter stated in his opinion in McCollum v. Board of Education, "We have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors." (Moore 1) For the last century in America and ideological war has been fought in our legislatures, courts, and schools. Some parts of the fundamentalist Christian movement have tried repeatedly to prevent the teaching of the Darwinian theory of evolution in public schools because they see it as a threat to their religious beliefs. Darwin's theory posits that species evolve over eons of time, changing in ancestor-descendant relationships from one species to another. This is often perceived as standing in direct conflict with the Bible account of the creation of the world as told in Genesis, which states that the world is only a few millennia old and that god created man and all of the species of animals in a single epoch. The latest battle in this conflict is over the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). Robert Weitzel states that "IDers maintain that life is too complex to have developed solely by evolutionary mechanisms. They believe this complexity could only have been engineered by an intelligent designer. Strategically, they refrain from identifying the nature of the designer. This tactic is designed to give their notion of creation a patina of scientific credibility and protection from First Amendment challenges" (1). Intelligent Design advocates have pushed forward on many fronts to try and introduce it into school curricula all over the country and they are meeting with a measure of success and a good deal of popular support. While the ID movement enjoys wide support from the populace, especially in traditionally conservative areas, it is imperative that the teaching of Intelligent Design is kept out of public school curricula because of the separation that must be maintained between religion and state.
Edward O. Wilson, in his essay Intelligent Evolution, diagnoses the gap between science and religion as “tectonic” (556), and predicts its continuous expansion. Obviously, the widest chasm appears in the field of biology: evolution versus creation. Evolutionary science sees life as a consequence of blind chances, while Abrahamic religion views life as a creation of God. After all, is it possible for evolution or creation to become the “correct” explanation, prevailing over the other? Wilson claims that evolution is the correct one, but I believe that there is no better or worse answer. Each authority is built on the different ground: either proof or faith. Hence, there is no common criteria to weigh them side by side and simply choose the answer.
Since the beginning of the human race there has been a lingering question as to the origins of man and how all living things acquired their characteristics. The two main theories that arose over time were Creationism and Evolution, both of which provided very distinct answers to this question. Creationism based its answer on the idea of a supernatural power or being that created the entire universe, man and the numerous other organisms that live within it. While, Evolution theorizes that all living things have the potential to change and grow over time into something new and different. So in other words, one theory suggests that humans and all the organisms on Earth are the result of divine design, while the other indicates that they are only the result of environmental adaption and growth. However, as neither theory is without flaw and it is only through close examination that a true understanding of man’s origins can be obtained.
After Sir Charles Darwin had introduced his original theory about the origins of species and evolution, humanity’s faith in God that remained undisputed for hundreds of years had reeled. The former unity fractured into the evolutionists, who believed that life as we see it today had developed from smaller and more primitive organisms, and creationists, who kept believing that life in all its diversity was created by a higher entity. Each side introduced substantial arguments to support their claims, but at the same time the counter-arguments of each opponent are also credible. Therefore, the debates between the evolutionists and the creationists seem to be far from ending. And though their arguments are completely opposite, they can co-exist or even complement each other.
Life is a complicated process that everybody has to experience. As human beings most people have to interact in society, but it is their decision if they want to live a public or private life. Most people live their own lives or experiences in private, while other people decide to be more open and have a public life. Having a public life might sound pleasurable or interesting, but sometimes it could turn into a nightmare or a problem. Being a public person can be convenient or beneficial but occasionally people have to pay an unexpected price for it. Some individuals keep private and public life separate and do not see a connection between them. For others, both kinds of life are related. Private and public life are connected, and not isolated as many people think.
Important to the task, the definition of Intelligent Design should be clear. Its predicates must represent its truthful position. This is necessitated by the fact that in their fight against Intelligent Design, opponents often employ derogatory and misrepresenting terms. They have branded Intelligent Design with names such as ‘creationism in a cheap tuxedo,’ ‘neo-creationism,’ and have called it ‘unscientific.’ These definitions se...
On the very first page of his book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), he argues that ethical philosophers severely lack credibility and must take the evolved nature of human minds into account: [Our understanding of good and evil] was evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers… at all depths” (Wilson 1975, p. 3). One of Wilson’s goals is to prove that scientific materialism is superior to religion and that it can provide a better code of ethics. In On Human Nature (1978), he explains that he wants to provide a solution to what he perceives as religion’s pervasive and erroneous domination of social life (Wilson 1978, p. 142). He asserts that the moral code found in the Bible is arbitrary and causes needless guilt and suffering among the human populace. Wilson desires to analyze religion from a sociobiological perspective, believing that an explanation of religion in terms of evolutionary biology would give scientific materialism a final victory over religion: “If religion… can be systematically analyzed and explained as a product of the brain’s evolution, its power as an external source of morality will be gone forever” (Wilson 1978, p. 201). Wilson is not only interested in examining human nature and human values, but also he’s also interested in prescribing values for mankind. In Sociobiology he suggests that “a genetically accurate and hence completely fair code of ethics must wait for further contributions of evolutionary sociobiology” (Wilson 1975, p. 144). In On Human Nature, he argues that “the principal task of human biology is to identify and to measure the constraints that influence the decisions of ethical philosophers and everyone else, and to infer their significance through neurophysiological and phylogenetic reconstructions of the mind… in
Talking on both sides of the debate, each side feels as though the other has no scientific reasoning come up with their theory. In reading the article written by Shipman, the evolutionists believe that intelligent design has no concrete evidence on how the world was crea...
Up until the Enlightenment, mankind lived under the notion that religion, moreover intelligent design, was most likely the only explanation for the existence of life. However, people’s faith in the church’s ideals and teachings began to wither with the emergence of scientific ideas that were daringly presented to the world by great minds including Galileo and Darwin. The actuality that there was more to how and why we exist, besides just having an all-powerful creator, began to interest the curious minds in society. Thus, science began to emerge as an alternative and/or supplement to religion for some. Science provided a more analytical view of the world we see while religion was based more upon human tradition/faith and the more metaphysical world we don’t necessarily see. Today science may come across as having more solid evidence and grounding than religion because of scientific data that provides a seemingly more detailed overview of life’s complexity. “Einstein once said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” (Polkinghorne, 62). Yet, we can still use theories and ideas from both, similar to Ian Barbour’s Dialouge and Integration models, to help us formulate an even more thorough concept of the universe using a human and religious perspective in addition to scientific data.
Viktor Frankl said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance, to choose one’s way.” I support this quote because if something doesn’t go the way you want it you could either look at the bright and spirited part of it, and make things better, or look at the dull and awful part of it, and make things worse. If it were me I would always try to look at the bright part of it, especially since you are the one who chooses your own perception and outlook on life. That is why you should think of it like this; do you want your perception on life to be tremendous and wonderful or dreadful and horrific.