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   From: I-WAS-JUST-GANG-PROBED-BY-THE-ObamaRegime-SPY-NETWORK@IRS.   
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   On 9/28/2014 9:35 PM, Sid9 wrote:   
   > God, Darwin and My College Biology Class   
   >   
   > By DAVID P. BARASH   
   > SEPT. 27, 2014   
   >   
   > EVERY year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my   
   > students The Talk. It isn't, as you might expect, about sex, but about   
   > evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how   
   > they don't.   
   >   
   > I'm a biologist, in fact an evolutionary biologist, although no   
   > biologist, and no biology course, can help being "evolutionary." My   
   > animal behavior class, with 200 undergraduates, is built on a   
   > scaffolding of evolutionary biology.   
   >   
   > And that's where The Talk comes in. It's irresponsible to teach biology   
   > without evolution, and yet many students worry about reconciling their   
   > beliefs with evolutionary science. Just as many Americans don't grasp   
   > the fact that evolution is not merely a "theory," but the underpinning   
   > of all biological science, a substantial minority of my students are   
   > troubled to discover that their beliefs conflict with the course material.   
   >   
   > Until recently, I had pretty much ignored such discomfort, assuming that   
   > it was their problem, not mine. Teaching biology without evolution would   
   > be like teaching chemistry without molecules, or physics without mass   
   > and energy. But instead of students' growing more comfortable with the   
   > tension between evolution and religion over time, the opposite seems to   
   > have happened. Thus, The Talk.   
   >   
   > There are a few ways to talk about evolution and religion, I begin. The   
   > least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible.   
   > Stephen Jay Gould called them "nonoverlapping magisteria," noma for   
   > short, with the former concerned with values and the latter with facts.   
   > He and I disagreed on this (in public and, at least once, rather   
   > loudly); he claimed I was aggressively forcing a painful and unnecessary   
   > choice, while I maintained that in his eagerness to be accommodating, he   
   > was misrepresenting both science and religion.   
   >   
   > In some ways, Steve has been winning. Noma is the received wisdom in the   
   > scientific establishment, including institutions like the National   
   > Center for Science Education, which has done much heavy lifting when it   
   > comes to promoting public understanding and acceptance of evolution.   
   > According to this expansive view, God might well have used evolution by   
   > natural selection to produce his creation.   
   >   
   > This is undeniable. If God exists, then he could have employed anything   
   > under the sun - or beyond it - to work his will. Hence, there is nothing   
   > in evolutionary biology that necessarily precludes religion, save for   
   > most religious fundamentalisms (everything that we know about biology   
   > and geology proclaims that the Earth was not made in a day).   
   >   
   > So far, so comforting for my students. But here's the turn: These   
   > magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish.   
   >   
   > As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for   
   > religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent   
   > pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and   
   > omni-benevolent God.   
   >   
   > The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call   
   > the argument from complexity. This once seemed persuasive, best known   
   > from William Paley's 19th-century claim that, just as the existence of a   
   > complex structure like a watch demands the existence of a watchmaker,   
   > the existence of complex organisms requires a supernatural creator.   
   > Since Darwin, however, we have come to understand that an entirely   
   > natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural   
   > selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels   
   > of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but   
   > altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely   
   > mechanical phenomenon.   
      
   Why didn't a watch simply Evolve in nature without a human to build it?   
   Or maybe it has in a different universe or a different space-time.   
      
   Shouldn't everything evolve "like steel into gears" and gold into a   
   cover? How is it that only life evolves in this story?   
      
   And that begs the question of what LIFE evolved from. And why new forms   
   of DNA haven't been discovered and animals that are NOT connected to   
   that original DNA are NOT found evolving every day and why new humans   
   that are from our original single cell ancestors DNA has not evolved   
   into new apes and are NOT also themselves evolving and walking out of   
   the jungle every day to join humans?   We have humans and we have apes,   
   why is there nothing between them anywhere walking the planet?  If apes   
   survived and humans survived why don't those evolving from one to the   
   other also survive?   
      
      
   And it doesn't have to be a God it could be an alien that changed or   
   started life and or intervened and created evolution.  There is NO   
   reason to believe in evolution and NOT believe in evolution on other   
   planets and other life evolving  and that would mean that if you believe   
   in evolution you believe in space aliens and for all we know that's who   
   created evolution here.   
      
      
      
      
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