Hello guest! Thank you for your comment. While I do not disagree with what you stated, I would like to emphasize that the primary point of this post was to refute the claim that the "flaws" in the vertebrate eye--which turn out to not be flaws at all--serve as conclusive evidence against the possibility of design. I was not trying to make a negative argument against natural selection in this case.

However, I think this picture is an exaggeration - it may be true in a few cases (though I can't think of any) but I don't believe this is the way many scientific revolutions have occurred. Take plate tectonics, quantum theory and relativity for example. These became accepted "canon" in a matter of decades (much sooner in the case of plate tectonics, once good evidence was available).
I think you may be the one who is painting too rosy a picture of what a scientific revolution (as opposed to the Scientific Revolution) involves. Historian of science Thomas Kuhn described in depth how the paradigm shift involved in a number of scientific revolutions occurred, and it was hardly a peaceful process. Though I am loath to cite Wikipedia, it does offer an easy to reference list of classic Kuhnian paradigm shifts in the sciences, which includes all three of the cases that you cited. We need to realize that Max Planck was speaking from personal experience when he gave the quote I cited earlier.

I know of no example in which a religious "truth" has changed this rapidly in the face of contrary evidence, and I see this rigidity as a great weakness of religious thought.
Were there particular examples of this reluctance to change that you had in mind?

I would also point out that unlike many religions, science has never resorted to war or executions to enforce and promulgate its view of the world.
You speak of religion and science as if they are personal agents, but they do not have a life of their own. It is people who use (and abuse) both religion and science. And like you said, people will be people. Certainly great evils have been done in the name of religion, but great evils have also been done in the name of science, such as the research conducted by Nazi scientists during the Holocaust or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Throughout history, science has been drafted to concoct deadlier and more destructive weaponry, culminating in atomic weapons, biological agents, and other weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, science has resulted in advances in healing and medicine. I would argue that it is not "science" in itself that drove these changes, but the people who were applying science. And this includes both theists and atheists.

Now, if you say that religious beliefs can motivate or drive people to do certain things, I would agree with you. But which specific goals and actions are to be pursued obviously depends on the content of these beliefs. What needs to be evaluated then is not "religion" itself, but the actual teachings and essential beliefs that are foundational to that religion. Again I can only speak for Christianity, but I would daresay that the great evils (such as the Crusades and the Inquisition) that have historically been done in the name of Christianity have certainly not been in keeping with the teachings of Christ.

I think that it is important to avoid the error of people like Richard Dawkins when they lump all "religions" together with one fell swoop. I make no effort to defend religion in general. It is the Christian faith alone that I uphold here. Yes, even among Christians there are disagreements on various aspects of belief, but this is no different than what you find among scientists. I would recommend that which C.S. Lewis presents as "Mere Christianity" as a good point from which to start in understanding and evaluating the basics of the Christian faith.

Yeah, I realized that my comment is saved after I re-wrote my comment. Oh well. Regarding changing the ID style; I don't think ID releases their original CSS style sheet, but to append your own styles you can try the Settings/Custom CSS option after logging into your ID dashboard, and then add in the box whatever custom CSS you would like to have replace the default ID CSS. I'm going to be playing around with it on my own blog tonight. G'luck!

Oh, and if you ever need some apologetics information or articles addressing issues on science and faith, feel free to read through some of the stuff I have on my blog! If I'm reading things correctly you're preparing for another mission trip to Germany? Blessings to you on your calling, brother!
My recent post Addressing “A Grievous Intellectual Sin”

Hi David. Came across this post via a google search for Intense Debate css styling. I recently started using ID on my blog and I'm looking into how to style the appearance. Have you taken a look at these posts from the ID blog? They also recommend the use of the Firefox extension FireBug, which enables you to see how the html for a certain element on a page is being processed. The neatest feature is that it will also show the CSS style for every element, and you can alter the values and see the result in real-time. This might be especially helpful if you are trying to resize the ID window, as you can see exactly what width values would work for your blog template. Hope this helps!

Science has made tremendous strides by refusing to cling to the past. If we continued to revere Aristotle we'd still be in the middle ages. Perhaps religious thinkers could learn something from that, and develop a more honest, openminded, evidence-based approach to understanding?

I am in complete agreement with you here. And I believe that there are already positive examples of Christians who would fit that description. Also, if you look at the writings of the historic giants of Christian thought, such as Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, I believe that you will indeed find just such a vibrant, open-minded, evidence-based approach to understanding. For example, take these excerpts from St. Augustine's De Genesi ad Litteram libri duodecim (trans: The Literal Meaning of Genesis):

"In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it" (St. Augustine De Genesi ad Litteram I, xxxxi)

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion." (St. Augustine De Genesi ad Litteram II, xix)

For a contemporary example of such a thinker, I would highly recommend the book, God's Undertaker, Has Science Buried God? by John Lennox, professor of mathematics at Oxford University. You may be interested in this short talk from his website on, "Is Christian Faith against Reason?"

I'm not sure where Murray gets these ideas from. I've never heard a scientist make a statement like that.

I can't speak for Murray's sources, but even in the last two weeks I've had a discussion with a trained scientist who made the statement to the effect that since there was no evidence for Noah's flood, that the rest of Scripture can simply be rejected.

It's only when religion strays onto the "turf" of science that things get acrimonious.

What are some of the ways that you feel that religion has strayed onto the turf of science?

In contrast, religions are often highly dogmatic (particularly the Abrahamic traditions) and in some cases have maintained a dogmatic position for hundreds of years in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence (and have a long history of persecuting or executing dissenters, persisting even to today in some countries).

I will restrict the scope of my comments here to Christianity, as that is what I am most familiar with. I readily acknowledge that there are currently and historically many examples of religious people who chose to hold dogmatically to tradition against the evidence, although I would argue that many of the most popular examples of this (such as the trial of Galileo) are often grossly oversimplified and misrepresented. And I would also submit that scientists are not immune to holding dogmatically to their preferred theories, even when the evidence seems stacked against them (the example of Fred Hoyle and his insistence on a steady state cosmology). And paradigm shifts in science are also fraught with conflict and resistance from the "old school". I am reminded of Max Planck's quote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

As I see it, the key problem is that religion does not accept any independent arbiter of "truth" or "usefulness". The thinking often goes "it was written in the holy book, so it is true by definition", end of argument. Over time, as contradictory evidence builds up, it leaves the dogmatic religious types looking increasingly silly.

Perhaps you may have heard the expression, "All truth is God's truth"? I believe that Christians who resist discernible truth from sources other than Scripture are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I find myself in agreement with the position that God is the author of both Nature and Scripture, and that therefore there is no conflict between the revelation (or record) of Nature and the revelation of Scripture. This does not mean that there will not be disagreements about how Nature and Scripture agree, because both are subject to the interpretations of human beings who do not see all things clearly. The evidences from one can help affirm or correct the interpretations of the other. With humility, reason, and a desire for truth, both scientists and theologians can arrive at a truer understanding of the universe.

One of your primary points seems to be--and do correct me if I am not representing it correctly--that the validity of a scientific idea does not depend on the personal worldview or other ideas of the person making the claim. You cite how we accept Newton's law of gravitation even though he believed in alchemy as an example to prove your point. On this point I am in complete agreement with you. I would also add as another example to your list Fred Hoyle's theory of nucleosynthesis, which was proven valid even though he continued to hold to his belief in a steady state universe.

Where I disagree with you is your contention that Mike Murray is saying anything that is in opposition to this point, or that he is levying any kind of criticism against the scientific method or the workings of science. Murray's criticism of the particular scientists that are the object of his essay is reserved for when they go beyond science; when they get "off the subject," as he put it at the beginning of his essay.

When these scientists cite Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton as supporters of the view that God had no hand in the creation of the universe, they are engaging in historical scholarship, not science; thus the fallacy that I described fully applies to these statements, and Murray is justified in calling this a "sin of omission." Murray specifically targets scientists in his essay, but non-scientists make these same claims as well, and the statements are just as fallacious whether a scientist or a non-scientist makes them.

For example, would you consider it valid for someone to say that Richard Dawkins is a proponent of Intelligent Design, citing that he is on the record for saying that life on earth could have been designed by some advanced alien civilization, and that evidence for a designer could be found in the details of molecular biology? Wouldn't you say that this is a distortion of what Dawkins really believes, and that it is fallacious to imply that Dawkins is a supporter of ID by omitting what he has said against it? In the same way, it is dishonest to imply that the giants of physics past would agree with the idea of disproving God's hand in the creation of the universe.

It is valid to say that Newton's laws of motion are not predicated on a belief in the natural states of certain elements. But it would be false to say that Aristotle did not believe that motion was the result of matter returning to its natural state of affairs. It may be valid to say that our application of gravitational theory today is not contingent upon a belief in God. But it is indeed wrong to say that Newton did not see God as a necessary cause for gravity. Murray's point is that it is intellectually dishonest to imply that Newton believed otherwise.

What is being omitted is not some particular scientific aspects of a theory, what is being omitted are key aspects of the contextual history of a particular scientific theory. Murray is not trying to point out a fallacy within science; he is pointing out a fallaciously incomplete representation of history. This is what I documented at the end of this current post.

Scientists may be fully proficient in their understanding of current scientific theories, but many are also sadly deficient in their knowledge of the history of science. I submit that it is dishonest to present a revisionist view of the history of physics that tries to omit the belief in the role of a Creator.

In regard to your complaint about Murray's use of the Big Bang, what exactly are the statements that you find to be in error? I don't see Murray asking what happened "before the big bang," as you seem to imply.

Testing the Intense Debate comment system.