home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!philjohn
- From: philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu ()
- Newsgroups: talk.origins
- Subject: Re: Book: The Creationists
- Date: 8 Jan 1993 15:05:32 GMT
- Organization: University of California, Berkeley
- Lines: 34
- Distribution: world
- Message-ID: <1ik57s$m3q@agate.berkeley.edu>
- References: <1ii7c8INNknc@crcnis1.unl.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu
-
- The final paragraphs of George Marsden's review of Ronald
- Numbers' book "The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific
- Creationism" are particularly interesting:
-
-
- "One lesson implicit in this history is that some scientists
- too have been guilty of posing stark alternatives. Evolution has
- often been used to ridicule any traditional faith. Some
- secularists have been all too ready to accept flood geologists'
- claims to speak for all 'creationists,' and then to dismiss even
- more nuanced arguments that belief in a creator might be a useful
- hypothesis for understanding the Universe. Those who insist that
- nothing could ever be clarified by positing the existence of a
- higher intelligence are in a formal sense something like creation
- scientists. They are so committed to a community that finds this
- secular faith immensely useful that they are convinced that they
- *must* be able to find an exclusively naturalistic explanation
- for everything.
- "Unless we suppose that natural science of the past century
- has somehow settled all such issues, we might expect that in the
- future there would be wider acceptance of a variety of hypotheses
- about the possible relationships of natural phenomena to higher
- creative intelligence. Those who insist on the extremes,
- however, may delay any such evolution of scientific thought."
-
-
- George Marsden was an expert witness for the *evolution* side in
- the Arkansas case that led to Judge Overton's famous opinion. He
- testified that creation-science is religion, not science. He is
- currently Professor of History at Notre Dame. The review appears
- --
- Phillip E. Johnson
- School of Law, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720
-
-