religion

The following thoughts are concerned with the second part of Dawkins' TV-series 'The root of all Evil?' You will find the video beneath. The thoughs are also presented in random order, maybe I will have time to systematize all of this some day.

A large part of this second TV-program consists of criticism of the Old Testament, some of it rather anachronistic, but some of it justified since there are people who still take all parts of the Old Testament very seriously and literally. I have no beef with Dawkins on most of these issues.

Even the church has acknowledged that Darwin was right - easy to check, just go to Westminster Abbey and see Darwin's thomb next to Newton's (apples do fall on the ground, don't they?).

Any discussion on this topic is simply hundreds of years too late. Darwin's theory lead to genetics, genetics lead to the discovery of the genetic code in DNA, and so on, and so on. How much more long term affirmation of a concept does one need? When Darwin discovered evolution, there was no molecular basis for it. It took a genious to anticipate back then what we now know in great detail, as the long path of discovery and confirmation of everything was done million times over. We can even watch evolution in progress, real time now, as for example bacteria mutate and acquire antibiotic resistance, and these events can be traced to a single nucleotide change in DNA.

The questions of science and religion are heavely debated these days. Are they in conflict, are they seperate domains.

And so on.

This group was created to discuss and examine these issues without cluttering zenSCI for those who have no interest in the subject.

If you write about religion and science, please join this group and assign your posts to this audience.

The eminent communicator of science, Richard Dawkins, has very strong opinions on religion. So strong, it seems, that they blind him of the wider perspectives.

He hosted and wrote the TV program 'The Root of All Evil' in which he presents his view that the world would be better of without religion.

Why the need to teach intelligent design in science classes? Because some sects of the religions in the United States feel that they have lost power and control over thier followers minds! This is a way to regain that control. It has very little to do with science, or spirituality. It is simply that someone feels that thier view point is not the top dog on the block.

Science is only one means of trying to explain the how and why of this reality, through observation of the machanics of the physical world. So we have science classes in school, to provide students with workable tools for a physical world.

Today's criticism aimed at Charles Darwin's 'Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection' is mostly religiously motivated.

So called Intelligent Design is not by any stretch of the imagination Science. Intelligent Design is the heir to Creationism sometimes, oxymoronically, referred to as Scientific Creationism.

Intelligent Design proposes that Science is not able to sufficiently explain the organisms we find in the Natural World using the data available under materialism and naturalism.