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Tue 6 Jan, 2004 11:05 am
That is not me speaking: last night, I watched a nearly decade old program, produced surprisingly in Chicago, on PBS which dealt with creationism and its place in the American political and philosophical landscape.
One of the talking heads said that when he was a child, there was no such thing as a drug problem. Really? I remember all manner of talk during the 1950s of drugs and teenagers, although I think the drugs in question were heroin and codein. He went on to suggest that the teaching of evoluation was responsible for the rise of drug use, the decline of marriage and more. Why? Because evolution is without plan and creation supposes God's control. In a godless universe, there is despair and thus dependence upon drugs.
In a note of irony, the late Stephen Jay Gould talked about how a career is only 40 years long and it is awful that biologists sometimes find it necessary to take a year off from fruitful research to do battle with the creationists.
I know a woman who lives here in my upper-class Boston suburb where the main employers are HArvard and MIT who has a master's degree (in early childhood education) and who is a sweet natured, pleasant woman but who thinks Darwin is the devil. I can not understand that sort of person and, while I am glad that she gave up teaching, it saddens me that she has at least three children.
There is much that is ultimately unknowable. We can not absolutely "prove" the Big Bang. As a student in a Catholic college during the 1960s, forced to take 16 hours of theology and 16 hours of Catholic philosophy ("Theistic Realism" in which the devil was Jean-Paul Sartre who remains largely unknown to anyone under 35), we were worried about Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God, which is just as unprovable.
However, the ultimate conceit lies with the Creationists who stridently declare that they know the will of and identity of and the mind of God. Bring me a cautious Darwinist any day!
While we can not know with certainty all of the details of man's evolution (I understand the fossil record for chimaanzees is sparse, especially during the "earliest" period and we still do not know who the Neanderthals were), just as we can not know with certainty the nature of a black hole, to claim to know God with certainty is apostasy.
That man evolved is obvious. To fear evolution is to fear growth, improvement and development.
as they used to say in the DARK AGES when one enounters the unknown, one states "Here be dragons"
Too outrageously stupid to argue.
Show me a man who likes his answers in nice, neat little packages, and I'll show you a man who can be controlled. The thinking man cannot be controlled.
Well, if you don't classify the use/abuse of opium, hashish, absinthe, cocaine, ether, chloroform and tincture of opium (morphine) in the years prior the publication of 'The Origin of Species', I suppose you could be right.
Bollocks!
Plainoldme, when you come down to it, almost all religious explanations of natural phenomena come about because the believer cannot live with the uncertainty of not knowing. Unfortunately, there are brilliant people who fall into this category. They run up against the current limits of science, maybe the permanent limits, and they can't tolerate those limits. They then turn to the religious explanation. In this case they hijack the data of legitimate scientists and fit it into their theology of creation.
This is the way I generally view creationism.
As for attributing the belief in evolution to the use of drugs, why not? It's as logical as most social theories coming out of today's goofy religious culture. One thing is for sure, if the religious devotee wants to accept that idea as fact, there is nothing that can be said here to alter the thinking. In fact, if the believer can get together a million dollars to donate to Bush's campaign fund, the chances are that Bush will be willing to say in the state of the union address that drug use causes belief in evolution. This could be a good argument for restarting the war in Afghanistan. Maybe if we could wipe out the poppy farms, we could end the silly belief in evolution.
Chew on that theory for a while.
EDIT:
Well, well, upon rereading your question, I see that I got it exactly backwards: the claim is that belief in evolution causes drug use. But does it matter, really, which theory we argue over. I think Aristotle's law of equivalent arguments comes into play at this point. If it may be legitimately claimed that there is a point.
As you can see, I have a hard time taking this seriously.
POL, are certain you were watching PBS and not an old Monty Python skit?
We are still living in a world in which the full implications of Darwinian thought have not even begun to manifest. It's tragic that in a supposed age of science, people will still fight tooth and nail to protect their beliefs in the wake of evidence that demolishes them.
Nietzsche; so far I like your thinking.
The real harm in Darwinism lies not in the theory but in its misinterpretation by people in the nineteenth century, in which "survival of the fittest" became a justification for the absence of social conscience. Those who failed were weak, and should do the rest of us the kindness of dying off. This malady remains with us to the present day, through the rantings of the conservative right, who still think social Darwinism has scientific validity.
I suppose this is also the problem with the major Western religions; not the ideas themselves, but their misapplication. As proscriptive plans for how an individual leads his life, they may have some merit; as blueprints for society, with their subordination of women, shunning of homosexuality, and resistance to scientific advances and social evolution, they are anything but useful, except as a way to make their followers feel superior to the pagans or infidels while nurturing class divisions and indifference if not hate toward those who don't share their upbringing, beliefs, or simple good fortune.
The "good old days" valued by so many people were not so good if you weren't a white male. What we now call the third world today was everywhere then. And that was when Christianity was ascendent.
plainoldme.
Have a relation who " found God " he also found many ways to explain creation but couldn't "find " any way to explain away evolution, so he just said that evolution was the work of the devil, when I asked him to exsplain who the devil was, and after a half and hr of exsplaining... asked him to prove to me that there was a " Devil " he said " I Just Did " afraid once smiten with their beliefs logic flys out the door.
Darwin didn't even think up "survival of the fittest" as I recall.
plainoldme.
Have a relation who " found God " he also found many ways to explain creation but couldn't "find " any way to explain away evolution, so he just said that evolution was the work of the devil, when I asked him to exsplain who the devil was, and after a half and hr of exsplaining... asked him to prove to me that there was a " Devil " he said " I Just Did " afraid once smiten with their beliefs logic flys out the door.
I always like Cab Calloway.
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