Interesting article in todays Herald by Prof. Tom Frame:
Early interpreters of Darwin’s work were plainly ill-equipped to deal with the ramifications of this potentially devastating message. Since religion based its claim for God’s existence squarely on the evidence of design in nature, denial was one of the few options available.
It took more than 30 years for theology to perceive that evolution might, in fact, disclose an even more creative God, and that Darwin had actually paved the way for more profound theological thought….
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My name is a link to a response to that article by a great many atheists, now that the comments are rolling. Not my work.
The beginning of Frame’s article is a standard compatibilist opinion piece; reconciling creation and evolution by saying evolution is one of God’s methods. Fine, if you want to give God all the credit for things which would have happened anyway.
Having made his move towards the middle, he goes off the rails completely when he tries to represent Dawkins’ position for him and ends up spouting the same slander as the film Expelled: that “Darwinism” leads to “imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide.”
Darwinian evolution by natural selection is a scientific theory. It’s an explanation of the way things have happened. It’s not also a recipe for living. Not only does it not advocate eugenics, sterilisations, etc. but it doesn’t even apply to them. They’re all forms of ARTIFICIAL selection.
This is why I think theologians like Frame still think of evolution as a competing religion. Christianity, for example, supplies both a history and instructions for the present, so they expect evolution to do both as well. Frame later chides Dawkins for also using secular humanism, as if he shouldn’t need any guiding principles from anywhere else.
Frame says he can’t make sense of his life or accept poetic truth without believing in God, souls and a spiritual component to everything. Has he ever tried? Has he never considered that poetry might simply have a wonderful effect on the human brain, exciting that part of the psyche we call the superego?
Finally Frame throws in the argument that evolution can’t account for life’s origin. Evolution can’t account for gravity either, for the same reason: it doesn’t try. It’s concerned exclusively with changes between life forms. The natural origin of life is a separate topic in molecular biology called abiogenesis. A scientific theory which explained everything would be a Grand Unified Theory or Theory of Everything, and we’re not there yet.