Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
CRITIQUING RELIGION:
EVOLUTION VS CREATIONISM
"Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth." Dennis Overbye
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." Albert Einstein
Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us
Richard Dawkins: Growing Up In The Universe
Oxford professor Richard Dawkins presents a series of lectures on life, the universe, and our place in it. With brilliance and clarity, Dawkins unravels an educational gem that will mesmerize young and old alike.
Ep 1: Waking Up in the Universe
Ep2: Designed and Designoid Objects
Ep3: Climbing Mount Improbable
Ep4: The Ultraviolet Garden
Ep5: The Genesis of Purpose
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THE UNIVERSE IS A REALLY BIG PLACE
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Perhaps the single most astonishing disproof of creationism; light that left galaxies as long as 13.7 Billion years ago combined with HST's technological eyes have brought scientists closer than ever before to understanding the early Universe.
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An animation that was rendered using the measured redshift of all 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.
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The red shift of light from distant galaxies is a key fact in support of the expanding universe/big bang theory.
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Evolution vs Creationism
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A person's unconscious attitudes toward science and God may be fundamentally opposed, researchers report, depending on how religion and science are used to answer "ultimate" questions such as how the universe began or the origin of life.
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Debunking the young earth creationism myth
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The theory of evolution provides a powerful, beautiful, consistent explanation for the appearance of design in biological life, one that can not only explain the past but predict the future. And it's supported by an overwhelming body of evidence.
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The ongoing argument between the blind who struggle to explore the world as it is around them, and the blind who prefer to conjure phantoms in the spaces within their skulls.
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Many of the beliefs held by religious moderates -- smart people who respect science and the separation of church and state -- are as untenable as the dogma of fundamentalists.
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Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
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They clearly want to ape a real museum, but they can't — their mission is the antithesis of open inquiry.
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"I think there's a lot of focus on fear, and I don't think that's a very Christian message... I find it a malicious manipulation of the public."
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Children should learn how Darwin developed his theory, how it was later tested & elaborated, how and why the Victorian churches opposed it, the spiritual anguish of many Victorians, & how some people have invented intelligent design to rescue a lost cause
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As the scientific community celebrates 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin in 2009, and 150 years since the publication of his famous work that explained how life evolved on Earth, the conflict between religion and science seems to be escalating.
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A new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they "believe in the theory of evolution," while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don't have an opinion. These attitudes are strongly related to education & religiosity
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The peculiarly American failure to come to terms with Darwin’s theory and what it’s become since 1859 is a sign of something broader: the failure to come to terms with science and the teaching of science.
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It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.
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Today biologists are exploring evolution at a level of detail far beyond what Darwin could, and they're discovering that evolution sometimes works in ways the celebrated naturalist never imagined.
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Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution.
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After the “Origin,” all organisms became connected, part of the same, profoundly ancient, family tree. Similarities and differences became comprehensible and explicable. Darwin gave us a framework for asking questions about the natural world, & ourselves.
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The apology says that Christians, in their response to Darwin's theory of natural selection, repeated the mistakes they made in doubting Galileo's astronomy in the 17th century.
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Theologians and scientists will discuss faith and Darwinism at a five-day Vatican-sponsored conference
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Bush himself called for the so-called "controversy" between intelligent design and evolution to be taught in schools, whereas virtually every intelligent scientist believes that there is no such controversy.
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Federal Science Minister Gary Goodyear's refusal to say whether he believes in evolution has left scientists questioning what that means for Canadian research.
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Recent advances in science and medicine, along with an abundance of observations and experiments over the past 150 years, have reinforced evolution's role as the central organizing principle of modern biology.
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Intelligent design stumbles by revealing itself as religious theory
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Evolution should be taught — indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes — for at least three reasons.
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In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.”
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The majority of evidence collected over the last 150 years supports Darwin, and few dissenting opinions have survived a review by scientists.
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Many who oppose creationism in the science classroom are quite happy for it to be discussed in Religious Education. But it is very hard to make the case for creationism as a legitimate scientific theory.
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The creationism row at the Royal Society has exposed the number of Britons who believe Darwin was wrong about man's origins – and the Bible right.
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Battling creationists will not fix science education. Teaching science will.
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A new law in Louisiana allows teachers to bring in "supplemental textbooks" about evolution, the origins of life and global warming to science class.
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Teaching intelligent design in public school biology classes violates the Establishment Clause because intelligent design is not science and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."
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One of the architects behind the unscientific intelligent design movement, Stephen Meyer, is finding success in referencing its greatest enemy: Charles Darwin.
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Lauri Lebo, author of Devil in Dover, gives an insider's account of a historic court battle about dogma and Darwin in small-town America.
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The film, more than any other creationist/ID effort I’ve seen, is antiscientific and antirational. In it, Frankowski opposes not just evolutionary theory but the scientific superstructure built in the West since Renè Descartes.
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In the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, narrator Ben Stein poses as a "rebel" willing to stand up to the scientific establishment in defense of freedom and honest, open discussion of controversial ideas like intelligent design (ID).
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The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn't even subtle.
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The works of creationists like "Dr." Ron Carlson sometimes cross the line between preposterous and downright offensive.
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A favourite lie is 'there are no transitional fossils'. This is manifestly untrue. We now have abundant evidence for how all the major groups of animals are related, much of it in the form of excellent transitional fossils.
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A new strategy is taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, a way for students to hear religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.
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This is your brain on peanut butter. Hilarious, in a scary kind of way.
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Despite the age of the “Origin of Species,” much of what we know about speciation, from frogs to finches to all manner of beetles, has been learned recently.
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Within the next few decades, biologists may figure out how the millions of species on Earth are related to one another. But for people to actually see that tree of life, the tree itself will have to evolve.
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There's a new spark of life in iconic experiments first done in the 1950s, on the kind of primordial "soup" that may have predated life itself on Earth.
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Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
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Ardipithecus provides clues to what the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimps might have looked like before their lineages diverged about 7 million years ago.
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"This is not an ordinary fossil. It's not a chimp. It's not a human. It shows us what we used to be,"
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The fossil remains found in a cave in South Africa could represent an evolutionary link between tree-dwelling apes and our earliest human ancestors to walk upright
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A remarkably well preserved series of fossilised skeletons have been unearthed from a cave in South Africa and identified as a new ancestral species of ape-like hominid that could have been the direct ancestor of humans.
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The 1.5-million-year-old footprints display signs of a pronounced arch and short, aligned toes, in contrast to older footprints.
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Researchers have discovered the skull of a 29 million-year-old animal that could be a common ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes, including humans.
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Biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years.
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Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes.
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Scientists have only a handful of specimens that illustrate the evolutionary narrative that goes from ancient lizard to limbless modern serpent.
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The fossil of a "bizarre" feathered dinosaur from the era before birds evolved has been discovered in China.
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Researchers in China and the UK say they have discovered the fossils of a new type of flying reptile that lived more than 160 million years ago.
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Similar molecules on much, much earlier meteorites may have been instrumental in kick-starting life on Earth
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The researchers say it is the first time that it has been possible to document the appearance of a gene, its selection and subsequent spread through a population of wild animals.
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This prehistoric animal represents a "missing link"—a branch on an evolutionary tree—between an ancestor that walked on land and today's sea-going seals and their relatives.
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The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) prehistoric creature.
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A study has shed light on a key genetic step in the evolution of animals' limbs from the fins of fish, scientists say.
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