David Gould

<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n09/coyn2409.htm" target="_blank">http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n09/coyn2409.htm</a>

a book review of Michael Ruse's "Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion"

I liked the Feynman quote at the end. I too would rather live not knowing the answers than live with answers that were wrong.

RealityCheck

Disclaimer - My comments are based on the book review by Jerry Coyne, and I have not
read Michael Ruse's book.

The Feynman quote is good. But I still want to know the answers.

Ruse apparently wasted a book on worthless drivel. He obviously does not understand evolution or its implications. Ruse's perspective is religious, not rational. If you start from the theist perspective and use faulty reasoning, you are bound to be blind to reality. His 'make it fit' approach to reconciling science and religion is pure BS. There is no evidence for teleological evolution. The obvious reason for the idea is to salvage the bible version of creation.

The key presumption made by Ruse seems to be that the religious dogma of the bible must somehow be salvaged. The convoluted twists of reason he goes through to wedge evolution and religion together is clue to the actual problem. Ruse is an intellectual
packrat who can't let go of useless ideas that have been superceded by a better description of reality.

As I see it, the only way to reconcile religion and science is for religion to be a guide for good social behavior, and science to be the guide for discovering reality.

RC

lpetrich

Sorry for not noticing this thread; I hadn't realized that it was about Michael Ruse's new book. I had started the thread "Intergalactic Jesus" on my comments about it.

I've gone over to <a href="http://www.amazon.com" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com</a> and checked on the reviews of that book -- there were some fundies there, claiming that true Christianity requires the literal truth of Genesis 1-11. A lot of the other reviews were fairly general and did not touch on the issues mentioned by Jerry Coyne.

But there was a somewhat-longer review by David Read that touched on some detailed issues.

One was the clear fact that the fossil record shows the existence of a lot of suffering, predation, and death long before humanity. DR was honest enough to acknowledge that this was a conclusion reached long before Charles Darwin published his magnum opus.

Another was the Bible's statement of descent from a single pair (the Genesis 2 story), which does not seem supported by evolutionary biology -- there have been attempts to estimate the sizes of human-ancestor population bottlenecks, and the smallest values I've seen are ~1000, which is significantly greater than 2.

My patience runs out here...

Brad Messenger

Ruse's book was intended to promote evolution among skeptical Christians and not promote Christianity to evolutionists.

I have skimmed through his book while browsing in the bookstore, and he is not intent on making Christianity an important contribution to our understanding of reality. For instance, he summarizes the objection of Dawkins saying that placing God as the explanation of biological diversity only begs the question of His existence. Ruse's response was to say that this problem exists independently of evolution, and thus evolution does not cause the difficulty. In other words, he is saying that evolution does not create numerous problems for Christians, I guess even of the conservative kind.

While I think evolution provides evidence for naturalism over theism, I think Ruse is correct that one can accept evolution and Christianity without being illogical. That's probably all Ruse meant by complementary.

I'm not endorsing the strong thesis the reviewer says Ruse gives, but I don't consider Ruse in the league of apologetic scientists.

Rather, he is a philosopher of science who has decided the best way to make evolution secure in scientific curriculum is to combat the Dawkins of the world by writing a book showing how it can work rather than not. While I don't like to see authors re-interpret outdated opinions in order to match recently established scientific discoveries, sometimes politics demands it.