Viewing Chinese Lanterns in Pittsburgh
Paul Nelson
On the day after Thanksgiving, I was viewing Abutilon pictum — commonly known as the Chinese lantern plant — at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Pittsburgh, PA. While being charmed by its whimsical beauty, I also mused about the genetic coding requirements for the changes in protein expression and timing (during development) to give its precise floral morphology. Psalm 111:2.
America’s Unchristian Beginnings : Founding Fathers: Most, despite preachings of our pious right, were deists who rejected the divinity of Jesus.
BY STEVEN MORRIS
The Christian right is trying to rewrite the history of the United States as part of its campaign to force its view of religion on others who ask merely to be left alone. According to this Orwellian revision, the Founding Fathers were devout Christians who envisioned a Christian nation.
Not true. The early presidents and patriots were generally deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the relevance of the Bible.
* Thomas Paine, pamphleteer whose manifestoes encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the War of Independence: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
* George Washington, first President: He seems to have had the characteristic unconcern of the 18th-Century deist for the forms and creeds of institutional religions. Although he often referred to Providence as an impersonal force, remote and abstract, he never declared himself to be a Christian, either in contemporary reports or his voluminous correspondence.
Washington championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray, a Universalist who denied the existence of hell, was invited to become an Army chaplain, other chaplains petitioned Washington to reject him. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washington uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
* John Adams, second President: Drawn to the study of law but facing pressure from his father to become a clergyman, he wrote that he found among lawyers “a noble air and gallant achievements” but among the clergy, the “pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces.” Late in life he wrote, “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it!!!’ ” It was during Adams’ presidency that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” This treaty with the Islamic state of Tripoli had been written and concluded by Joel Barlow during Washington’s Administration.
* Thomas Jefferson , third President and author of the Declaration of Independence: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.” He referred to the Book of Revelations as “the ravings of a maniac” and in further criticism of the Bible he wrote: “The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.”
* James Madison, fourth President and father of the Constitution: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise,” he wrote. “During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
* Ethan Allen , whose capture of Ft. Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire the country to pursue the War of Independence: “That Jesus Christ was not God is evident from his own words.” Allen also wrote that he was generally “Denominated a deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian.” Allen stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked if he promised “to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God.” Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the god of nature, and the laws those “written in the great book of Nature.”
* Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion . . . has received various corruption changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.” He died a month later, a deist, not a Christian.
Ps. America's founders and doubtless many others were pushed away from the JEHOVAH of the bible because Christendom's version of him is the author of a hyper politicized gospel that is OK with attempting to force an outward piety upon society by force of arms. And both traditionalists and modernists are guilty of this vice lest anyone conclude that I am picking sides.
Failed Darwinian predictions
Cornelius G Hunter
addition to the DNA code, there are other fundamental molecular processes that appear to be common to all life. One intriguing example is DNA replication which copies both strands of the DNA molecule, but in different directions. Evolution predicts these fundamental processes to be common to all life. Indeed this was commonly said to be an important successful prediction for the theory. As Niles Eldredge explained, the “underlying chemical uniformity of life” was a severe test that evolution passed with flying colors. (Eldredge, 41) Likewise Christian de Duve declared that evolution is in part confirmed by the fact that all extant living organisms function according to the same principles. (de Duve, 1) And Michael Ruse concluded that the essential macromolecules of life help to make evolution beyond reasonable doubt. (Ruse, 4)
But this conclusion that the fundamental molecular processes within the cell are common to all species was superficial. In later years, as the details were investigated, important differences between species emerged. For example, key DNA replication proteins surprisingly “show very little or no sequence similarity between bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes.” (Leipe) Also different DNA replication processes have been discovered. These results were not what were expected:
In particular, and counter-intuitively, given the central role of DNA in all cells and the mechanistic uniformity of replication, the core enzymes of the replication systems of bacteria and archaea (as well as eukaryotes) are unrelated or extremely distantly related. Viruses and plasmids, in addition, possess at least two unique DNA replication systems, namely, the protein-primed and rolling circle modalities of replication. This unexpected diversity makes the origin and evolution of DNA replication systems a particularly challenging and intriguing problem in evolutionary biology. (Koonin)
Some evolutionists are reconsidering the assumption that all life on Earth shares the same basic molecular architecture and biochemistry, and instead examining the possibility of independent evolution, and multiple origins of fundamentally different life forms. (Cleland, Leipe)
References
Cleland, Carol. 2007. “Epistemological issues in the study of microbial life: alternative terran biospheres?.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38:847-861.
de Duve, Christian. 1995. Vital Dust. New York: BasicBooks.
Eldredge, Niles. 1982. The Monkey Business. New York: Washington Square Press.
Koonin, E. 2006. “Temporal order of evolution of DNA replication systems inferred by comparison of cellular and viral DNA polymerases.” Biology Direct 18:1-39.
Leipe, D., L. Aravind, E. Koonin. 1999. “Did DNA replication evolve twice independently?.” Nucleic Acids Research 27:3389-3401.
Ruse, Michael. 1986. Taking Darwin Seriously. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Religious Intuition Can Lead to Scientific Discovery: The Cases of Copernicus and Ferguson
Robert Shedinger
A common criticism of intelligent design holds that ID is more religion than science. This criticism is problematic as ID possesses a strong and growing empirical foundation. The purpose of this criticism, however, is to undermine any claims to truth associated with ID. As the argument goes, religion is subjective and faith-based while science is objective and empirically based. Religion therefore almost by definition can never provide reliable insights about the nature and structure of the physical universe. Thus, if ID is religion, it cannot be true. This would all be well and good except for the fact that there are at least two noteworthy examples of religious reasoning leading directly to scientific hypotheses later empirically confirmed to be true.
When I first began teaching at Luther College over twenty years ago, I had a senior colleague who held a PhD in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Bruce Wrightsman (who has since passed away) shared with me an article he had published back in 1980 in an obscure anthology titled “The Legitimation of Scientific Belief: Theory Justification by Copernicus.” My colleague argued persuasively that Nicholas Copernicus possessed no empirical evidence to place the sun at the center of the solar system but that he rather had relied on a religious justification. It is a shame this article has not garnered more attention.
Epicycles and Equants
By the 16th century, the old Ptolemaic system had become rather messy with its bevy of ad hoc features like epicycles and equants designed to keep the geocentric system consistent with observations. Messy as it was, the Ptolemaic system did remain consistent with observations and retained its practical use as a calendrical tool. There was no compelling empirical evidence suggesting a heliocentric solar system (a point supported by Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich in God’s Planet).
Copernicus, however, viewed the Ptolemaic system as a monstrosity. The God he believed in was the great artisan of the universe, and such a God would never create something as messy and clumsy as the Ptolemaic system. Placing the sun at the center of the solar system led to a simpler and more elegant model, one more pleasing to Copernicus’ religiously inspired aesthetic sensibilities. And it was on this basis that his theory rested. In Bruce Wrightsman’s words:
One may not like Copernicus’s reasons for coming to believe in and justifying his system but that is not a rational ground for refusing to accept them as reasons. We must therefore remind ourselves that scientific investigation had much broader implications for Copernicus than it has for many today and included those purposes which we classify as religious and extra-scientific.1
To be sure, Copernicus’ theory flew in the face of church doctrine, forcing Copernicus to delay publication out of fear of ecclesiastical reprisal. Yet despite the fact that Copernicus’ religiously inspired ideas about the structure of the cosmos may have been deemed heretical according to the orthodoxies of his day, they were religious nonetheless. And when Galileo later began peering at the night sky through his telescope, Copernicus’ religiously inspired aesthetics were found to have led him to truth about the structure of the solar system! Empirical evidence came after Copernicus had already proposed his theory on religious grounds, not before.
“A Mean Opinion of the Divine Wisdom”
A second example comes from the work of a lesser-known figure, 18th-century Scottish astronomer James Ferguson. Ferguson, like Copernicus, contradicted the religious orthodoxies of his day by suggesting that the stars that light up the night sky represented bodies like our sun accompanied by their own planetary systems and perhaps even extraterrestrial life. Orthodox beliefs of the time viewed the heavens as existing entirely for the aesthetic pleasure of humans on Earth. But according to Ferguson:
It is no ways probable that the Almighty, who always acts with infinite wisdom and does nothing in vain, should create so many glorious Suns, fit for so many important purposes, and place them at such distances from one another, without proper objects near enough to be benefitted by their influences. Whoever imagines they were created only to give a faint glimmering light to the inhabitants of this Globe, must have a very superficial knowledge of Astronomy, and a mean opinion of the Divine Wisdom.2
Clearly Ferguson possessed no empirical evidence suggesting the existence of planetary systems revolving around extra-solar suns. But his religious reasoning led him to propose that such things should exist. And here we are today with 21st-century technology continuing to empirically confirm the existence of extra-solar planets on a nearly daily basis!
Science and Aesthetics
These examples challenge any notion that religious thinking can never lead to true understandings about the nature and structure of the physical universe. Interestingly, aesthetic sensibilities continue to drive science in the case of theoretical physicists’ fascination with elegance, simplicity, and grand unification as a criterion of fundamental truth (even if this aesthetic sensibility has been divorced from its religious roots).
ID is not religion. But even if we were to concede falsely that it is, such a characterization is irrelevant to the question of whether it is true. Religion may not always lead to truth about the physical world, but it is patently false to say that it never has or never can.
Notes
1)Bruce Wrightsman, “The Legitimation of Scientific Belief: Theory Justification by Copernicus” in T. Nickles, ed., Scientific Discovery: Case Studies (D. Reidel, 1980), 62.
2)Quoted in Michael J. Crowe, “Astronomy and Religion (1780-1915): Four Case Studies Involving Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life” in John Hedley Brooke, et al., eds., Science in Theistic Contexts, Osiris 16 (2001): 212
