Meridian Magazine, a somewhat popular online LDS magazine, once again has up a poor discussion about science. I don't mind if they talk about science, but why these sorts of articles. What bothers me more is that the author, Rodney Stark, is normally a good author. Admittedly his academic area of focus is social science and not biology. So perhaps that explains some of this. The article in question is a reprint from The American Enterprise, a journal I'll confess I'm not familiar with. It appears to be a conservative political journal though. Might I add, as a conservative, that I find frequent anti-evolutionary views in conservative journals more than a little disturbing?
I sometimes think that those who bring up issues like the lack of transitional fossils really are arguing that for something to be a science it must appeal to deductive and not inductive arguments. I think that they wouldn't be pleased until we had a fossil for every species that ever lived. However as time goes on we do find more and more transitional species. The talk.origins FAQ offers a good discussion of this. Now Stark is right in that it is hardly complete. But when you consider how lucky we are to find fossils at all, that's hardly surprising. What is interesting though is how many transitional fossils we've found that line up with our expectations. I especially like this diagram from Time magazine a few years back.
What bothers me is that I think those arguing against evolution have bought into the silly caricatures of religion that the so-called secularist foes of religion argue against. (Well, more likely people like Dawkins simply keep hearing about religion in the context of anti-evolutionists and think that religion is actually committed to evolution being false) The problem when LDS journals repeat these arguments (which make very little sense in an LDS context) they put into the minds of many less educated lay members the idea that the gospel and evolution are at odds. What happens then is when kids go to college and learn that there really are good reasons to believe evolution they have a crisis of faith. When it is completely unnecessary.
What's odd, is that, IIRC Rodeny Stark in not LDS. He is conservative, but IIRC in one early book of his ("A Theory of Religion") he states he is not particularly religious, though he would rather live a religious socitey than a non religous one.
Rodney Stark has been the darling of many LDS ever since he made the claim that Mormon growth would continue and the church would become one of the largest world religions by the end of the 21st century. It was a silly claim on many levels and certainly the last 10 years the rapid growth of LDS over the last 150 years has slowed dramatically. Yet I think because he was so praising of Mormonism many Mormons have given him more credance than he deserves. (A common intellectual failing we have as a people, unfortunately)
His book The Churching of America which only mentions Mormons once or twice (and in passing), is a great book. One of those that should be required reading for anyone who studies or comments on religion.
Also, his intial "silly" claim isn't so silly in the original context. He gave it all sorts of qualifiers and caveats ("If current growth trends continue..." and the like).
I think he was just trying to up the ante on his rhetoric because some scholars were trying to marginalize him as studying a religion not worthy of study. But there may have been other factors - I don't know for sure.
I completely agree with the post. I get *very* nervious when I hear people, it almost always being religious people, claim that the two points of view are completely at odds and cannot be reconciled. This, in my opinion, was the most innappropriate things JFSII ever said about evolution in the docrines of salvation. If he hadn't believed the theory, great. If he wanted to show us why, even better. But to declare with ringing finality that the gospel and evolution cannot coexist in the same mind seems to me to be a way to score easy wins. Obviously the people who read his writings are more than somewhat partial towards the gospel so if it has to be one or the other, it will usually be the gospel. He wins the fight without ever throwing a punch. And then these people now feel almost obligated to act like idiots in the rest of the worlds opinion denying carbon dating, fossil records, the age of the earth and so on. And all this through no great fault of their own.
I should add that in the context of evolution it isn't just religious people. People like Dawkins, for instance, seem to draw just as big a divide between religion and evolution as Biblical literalists do. Indeed sometimes supporters of evolution are far worse of a problem than the religious anti-evolutionists. These supporters of evolution confuse what evolution actually says and then give religious people ammunition for why evolution is a threat to religion.
I'd say that many attacks on evolution are due to misunderstandings of what the implications of evolution are for religion. Obviously if you think evolution will invalidate your faith you'll attack evolution (or lose your faith) Figures like Dawkins make the problem far worse, not better, and help contribute to the anti-evolutionary hysteria in the country. (And I hate to say that considering how well he writes about evolution proper)
I agree with that. Some times I feel that theists need to be a little bit more careful in reading atheistic literature. There is a difference between saying "since evolution is true, there must be no God" and "since there is not God, evolution must be true." Dawkins sometimes falls into this trap.
It must be confessed, however, that evolution does have a lot to say about what religions have said about creation (man, animals, timescale, machanisms) and man place in the world today. It is at odds with many widely accepted religious notions. While it may not prove that there is no God, it does should that no God was necessary, and that a particular version of God, namely the most popular one, does not exist. I think this is more along the lines of what Dawkins is trying to say in his works which, I might add, are very, very good.
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