SCIENCE PREJUDICE

CreatorGate

Darwin would have a problem if he tried to publish his "Origin of Species" today.  Sara Kaplan of the Washington Post authored an article in today's Kalamazoo Gazette (Page A6, March 17, 2016) entitled "Science meets God in CreatorGate" that described the establishment science uproar over the use of the term Creator in describing the long evolutionary process of the formation of the human hand.

The Chinese authors' article had "Creator" used in a translation describing the amazing natural evolutionary process of formation of the human hand.  It was too close to the use of Creator in Creationism and Intelligent Design arguments that are anathema to many in science.  Their article was in PLOS One (a free online open access journal in which PLOS stands for Public Library of Science).

Applied prejudice and retractions

If such diligence in seeking strict conformance to rules and prejudices of science had been applied to Darwin, he would have had to retract his first edition of his book.  As it was he took out one of his references to the Creator in the final sentence of later editions of his book.  see  http://evolutioninsights.blogspot.com/2013/06/darwin-and-god.html

If the people demanding retraction, which already has happened, knew the scientific atrocities infecting some revered studies in their scientific disciplines that have not to my knowledge been retracted, they would hang their heads in shame.  I have described some of the errors in two such articles needing retraction in a post that my records indicate has only had about ten direct entries in almost three years as measured by use of the following entry
http://evolutioninsights.blogspot.com/2013/05/science-screw-up-no-1.html

The lull in the Creation/Evolution debate [ http://evolutioninsights.blogspot.com/2015/07/creationevolution-debates.html ]  may be temporarily over but the cognitive dissonance aspect of it will probably make peaks and valleys of concern continue.

Too bad I don't have the Twitter and Facebook skills to respond to critics of the PLOS One article.

Joseph G. Engemann    Kalamazoo, Michigan     March 17, 2016

DARWIN AND GOD

Darwin and God as shown in his writings

Darwin’s belief in God was something I initially inferred from the last sentence in The Origin of Species.  It was “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

The accusations that he became an atheist were somewhat supported by the fact that after attacks by some religious leaders and enthusiastic support of his work by atheist friends he deleted three words from the sentence in later editions of The Origin of Species.  The three words were “by the Creator”, and in the paragraph above, I underlined them.  From his autobiography and letters [the Darwin Compendium, 2005, Barnes and Noble, 1874, including an excellent introduction by Brian Regal] we see the atheist allegation in unjustified.

In an 1876 portion of his autobiography [intended for his children] his writing is informative, for example.  “Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight.  This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.  When thus reflecting , I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.”

Regarding religion, Darwin wrote in a 1879 letter, that he had never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God, but that his judgment fluctuated, and more and more as he grew older (but not always) had an Agnostic state of mind.  His son said Darwin “felt strongly that a man’s religion is an essentially private matter, and one concerning himself alone.” 

Darwin, the person

To get a sense of Darwin as a real person with a passionate concern for other, and not a scientist remote from others, a starting point might be to read the last few pages of his Voyage of the Beagle, beginning with his remarks about his August departure from Brazil.  From another angle, his children’s perceptions of him as a father, incorporated in his Autobiography show another personable side of him.

Joseph G. Engemann       June 12, 2013