Wave Maker: "Why I Birdwatch"

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Wednesday, May 04, 2005

"Why I Birdwatch"

All of this examination of bird plumage and language has had me thinking more critically about evolutionary scientists who (so arrogantly) denounce their brethren who are looking for deeper answers to the intricacies of life’s creations.

Outside the Beltway had a post yesterday by Steve Verdon that scoffed at “ the latest gimmick of the anti-evolution crowd,” a story about the efforts of some intelligent design scientists to probe the accuracy of the evolution curriculum. Their “10 questions to ask your science teacher” focus on some of the apparent weaknesses of evolutionary science, but to Verdon they represent “pretty much the same old crud that one can expect from creationists.”
Groan, more name-calling.

I posted the following comment to his piece early this morning at 7:00 am:

“As a non-religious, non-creationist, I am increasingly dumbfounded by the intransigence shown by evolutionists in their refusal to entertain legitimate scientific inquiry. The more I read about the concept of random mutation, the more I wonder if evolution isn’t the theology.”

I confess, my aptitude is not heavily slanted to the sciences (to say the least), but I do have common sense and an open mind, and something tells me the inquiries being made deserve more credit than being called “the same old crud.” So I was delighted to read later in the morning another piece from Ambivablog, in which my intuition received some much desired support:

Boston Globe writer Peter Dizikes, reviewing the soon-to-be-released The Evolution-Creation Struggle,
by Michael Ruse:

“Provocatively, Ruse argues that evolutionism has often constituted a '’religion’ itself by offering 'a world picture, a story of origins, and a special place for humans,' while its proponents have been 'trying deliberately to do better than Christianity.’”

I’m with Amba:

"Ruse emphatically does not believe in Intelligent Design. He wants to keep it out of the science classroom. But by the same token, he emphatically doesn't want science to be turned into a religion, with its own dogmatically-held materialist origin myth and survivalist explanation of ethics. As noted in my previous post about Dr. Francis Collins, one way for science and religion to coexist peacefully is for each to stick to what it does best: for science to confine itself to investigating the material "how" (out of modesty, not a philosophical hidden agenda of proving that's all there is) and leave the metaphysical and moral "why" to faith. "

It’s much more fun to birdwatch when you can contemplate that there may in fact be some deeper meaning to it all.

Posted by: Wave Maker / 11:36 AM/ |