| luinil said: 1. Doesn't it take more faith to believe in something that happened perfectly randomly than to believe that One Intelligent Being created life? Just saying that there are things that science can never explain, but will try regardless and will be accepted. 2. Also the movie was brilliant in showing the logical steps that evolutionary theory has had on history and the thinking of (wo)men. If you carry evolution out to its logical conclusion, then there is no morality, no right or wrong, no meaning, etc. Therefore the evils in the world have some reason to explain away their own guilty conscience (ie. Nazism in Germany, Eugenics, Euthanasia, and many many more). 3, The movie also mentioned that the old scientists believed that science and religion were not mutually exclusive like most scientists seem to believe today. If you believe in one, you cannot believe in the other in good conscience. |
1.
Evolution is not concerned with the origin of life, although it fits together flawlessly with the best of our current understanding of it. There's also nothing random about it, so you might want to go through the basics again.
2.
The word you're looking for is not "logical step", but "excuse". There is nothing in "we have evolved from beasts" that says we should act like them. Darwin himself said that civilization has moved beyond survival of the fittest, although it could be argued that we have merely changed the meaning of fittest from "biggest badass predator" to "best team player", and that all of our religions and philosophies really come down to how to be the fittest in civilized society.
Loyalty, love, and compassion are all things that strengthen the community, and make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. Does acknowleding this make me less likely to feel them? I don't believe so in the least.
But hey, let's be hypothetical and pretend "it could be used for evil!" is a valid reason for something being bad. Better smash all our computers so they don't get used to calculate nuclear weapon trajectories, and refuse to use nuclear power because it's based on the same theories that were used to make nukes.
Using this train of logic, I could go on for hours about how much crap religion has been used to justify, but that probably won't be necessary.
3. It's well documented how many of the great pioneers of modern science have held some extremely questionable beliefs. For example, the legendary Newton was a huge fan of alchemy, and never thought he was inventing something new, but rather rediscovering The Wisdom of The Ancients that the prophets of the Old Testament and philosophers of ancient Greece had known.
This is going almost off-topic, but I just have to share my all-time favorite piece of early modern pseudo science. From Wikipedia:
Olaus Rudbeck (also known as Olof Rudbeck the Elder, to distinguish him from his son, and occasionally with the surname Latinized as Olaus Rudbeckius) (1630-1702), Swedish scientist and writer, professor of medicine at Uppsala University and for several periods rector magnificus of the same university.
Sounds cool, doesn't he? Apparently he was one of the greatest botanists of his age, and first discovered the lymphatic system, whatever it is.
Between 1679-1702, Rudbeck dedicated himself to contributions in historical-linguistics patriotism, writing a 3,000-page treatise in four volumes called Atlantica (Atland eller Manheim in Swedish) where he purported to prove that Sweden was Atlantis, the cradle of civilization, and Swedish the original language of Adam from which Latin and Hebrew had evolved.
Even if you don't accept belief in a god to be on the same level as belief in Atlantis or alchemy, I would say these examples pretty much disprove the whole "but people used to believe in both!" argument.
