Tricia

What think ye of this article? (Please don't hurt me, I didn't write it .)

******************

this was written by an atheist.


May 13, 2000

How evolution became a religion
Creationists correct?: Darwinians wrongly mix science with morality,
politics

Michael Ruse
National Post

{Very nice Tricia, but articles like this one are almost certainly subject to copyright. Please post links to them rather than cutting and pasting them. This article can be found <a href="http://pages.zdnet.com/sartre/RULES/id15.html" target="_blank">here</a>, for instance - Pantera}

Michael Ruse is professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of
Guelph. His next book, Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship
between Science and Religion, will be published this fall.

~Tricia

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: Pantera ]</p>

hezekiah jones

Michael Ruse is not an atheist.

Tricia

hmmm..... well a friend sent it to me and he said the author was an atheist.

oops.

~Tricia

ok but what about the rest?

hezekiah jones

It's very nice. Did you read it?

Ruse is criticizing Richard Dawkins' militant polemics in a roundabout way, much as Dawkins has been criticized many times on this board.

Ruse obviously thinks drawing moral conclusions directly from evolutionary theory, while in many cases quite admirable, plays into the hands of the creationist critics, and furthermore is entirely unnecessary.

What do you think of the article?

(Michael Ruse, incidentally, is a highly regarded philosopher of science and a tireless defender of science against creationists and "intelligent design theorists.")

Daggah

What about the rest? Evolution is not a religion.

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: Daggah ]</p>

hezekiah jones

Did a quick google search. Pretty well every notorious creationist site jumped all over Ruse's theological musings (out of context, naturally).

Of course you won't find this at answersingenesis:

So Tricia, what are your thoughts on Ruse's newspaper article?

&lt;code&gt;

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: hezekiahjones ]</p>

Pantera

Me too - looking for a site to link to instead. With hindsight, "Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science" wasn't the best line to stick into the search engine when looking for the whole thing.

hezekiah jones

Incidentally there's an excellent article by Ruse in Robert Pennock's Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics (thanks pseudobug - great book!), in which Ruse stomps all over Alvin Plantinga's pathetic critique of methodological naturalism. (Plantinga thinks methodological naturalism should make way for Christian God.)

tgamble

A bit more of the quote given.

"Creationism is wrong; totally, utterly, and absolutely wrong. I would go further. There are degrees of being wrong. The creationists are at the bottom of the scale. They pull every trick in the book to justify their position. Indeed, at times they verge right over into the downright dishonest. Scientific Creationism in not just wrong, it is ludicrously implausible. It is a grotesque parody of human thought, and a downright misuse of human intelligence. In short, to the believer, it is an insult to God."

Michael Ruse: Darwinism Defended.

Also see
<a href="http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or151/mr93tran.htm" target="_blank">http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or151/mr93tran.htm</a>

Howay the Toon

[/B]

You can't criticise Dawkins on the grounds that one should not draw moral conclusions from Evolutionary theory, since that is precisely the point made by Dawkins over and over again.