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I admit that I got a little pissed off the other day when I commented on a post over at the RightWingNutHouse on the continuing debate over President Bush’s desire to see Intelligent Design taught in public school alongside evolutionary theory.

I …

What is the problem? Learning, especially about science, includes the free and open exchange of information and ideas. There is nothing wrong with including some philosophical debates as the Theory of Evolution will never answer every question.

I am a molecular biologist, an honorary medical geneticist, and a dedicated Roman Catholic, who sees Genesis stories as just that: valuable myths told to Man by God about his origins, the right story at the right time. (Plenty of other cultures have their parallel creation stories, and all in context.) What has unfolded as Scientific Objectivity vis a vis Man’s growing capacity to understand his own vast domain called Universe has, basically since the enlightenment (give or take), increasingly striven to deny God a role in this Universe other than perhaps a silent observer. (Though Darwin and Einstein, the two fathers of 20th Century science, were fierce believers, if I’m not mistaken.)

To deny God a role in Creation is, for a Believer, illogical. And, there are ever so many believers out there… so what to do? Simply find that all believers must be illogical? Are we all wrong, because there is no “objective” proof of God’s existence? (Yea, and I’d like to see some objective proof for String Theory, or it’s latest mathematical enabler, Membrane Theory.) Or shall we believers simply hush up, go underground, pretend there is no God when it comes to Science?

Methinks we who care about this issue should, as Bergbikr suggests, go read Teilhard. Me also thinks, as Rick does, that biomedical science is clearly the very backbone of our economy ca. 21st Century.

However, as a scientist I see utterly no threat from ID. The argument that fundamentalist zealots will undermine science education is hogwash. Science is about being excited by your world and wanting to learn more. Both my children are terribly fascinated with their world, as my wife and I were as kids, and we both read plenty of Bible Stories as children… as ours do now.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Believer that I have faith in Mankind’s power to put the puzzle together in the ways that are necessary to cure cancers, better understand what genetics are behind predisposition to heart disease and stroke, help the Parkinson patient to walk again, create bioprocessors far faster than silicon chips, engineer crops to feed a hungry third world (if the freaking moonbats will let us do it, that is!).

And improbable as it may seem to some, I guarantee it’s true that none of this future technological glory will be threatened or precluded by a belief that God Himself intervened with that last, crucial step that got those monkeys to figure out that the bone was a tool, after all. Because that’s what I see this whole argument is about, after all: becoming human. And human pride.

Do I resent those who have summarily dismissed me and my brethren as ignoramii? Not really. The intellectual challenge is fun (more so when free of insults, but no matter). Rather, I am cheered to imagine God smiling down, watching with love and pride as we little humans, with all our egos, pick around His wondrous creation and piece the puzzle together, in between bickering.

I’m also pleased to know of so many biologists, physicians, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians who are Believers and even still don’t let it get in the way of their goal: to be the very best they can be at pushing back the frontiers of the Scientific Enterprise.

That was a very impressive post! Thank you for bringing actual facts to the discussion. Emotion tends to rule this discussion (for reasons that will be left unsaid), hmmm…

From all this sturm und drang one can conceive of a coordinate from Creationism out to Scientific Evolution to visualize our developmental past. Then in between somewhere drop in Intelligent Design as an attempt to patch up differences and smooth the transitional bump. No wait, that doesn’t work very well — different categories of concepts and embarrassing contradictions. !@#$%^&*

OK start again. Problem is we’re mostly dealing with folks who essentially believe the Genesis Creation story (and there are other such ‘myths’) while rejecting the secular mutterings of Evolution ‘Theory.’ OR We are seeing the Science of Evolution (within Biology) churning along the experimental route while discounting as childish those religious nuts’ beliefs. Intelligent Design really can’t bridge this gap, indeed only intensifies the gulf.

My experience: I remember well decades ago when a fundamentalist Christian type of colleague (patent lawyer) and I, a Catholic and Caltech bred chemical engineer, went backpacking in the high Sierra. Imagine racking out in sleeping bags, looking up into the stars and discussing Creationism vs. Evolution. I drove him nuts positing the reasonableness of both - concurrently. “Not in the Bible,” sayeth he. OK, sez I, but God is a clever Guy and imagine the elegance of setting Creation up like a big ol’ partial differential equation. Set the Initial Conditions (Big Bang?) and the Boundary Conditions (daren’t presume here) and let the equation run through time - but maybe, here ‘n’ there, perturb the system with a shot of self-consciousness and eventually ’soul.’ That is elegance!

A French Jesuit-Scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was able to capture these concepts in a marvelous fusion of evolutionary science (paleontology) and theologically informed philosophical speculation. His seminal work is “The Phenomenon of Man.”

This work outlined a sweep of ongoing creation, of a developing universe. In particular, he speculated on the progression of an inanimate earth to the generation of simple life and then the growth of cognition and finally the ultimate complexity of spiritualization. From alpha to omega, Himself (Herself?). This is indeed the flight of time’s arrow, pointedly urging onward the upright ape, scampering up-slope to human heights and embracing ultimately beatific holiness and the union of all creation with God. Now, that is quite a mouthful and mindful!

And get this, boys and girls, we see here no animosity between Creation and Evolution, but by thinking outside the box Teilhard de Chardin has encompassed both and taken them to a higher level. Unfortunately atheists and agnostics deprive themselves of the big picture.

Rick Moran over at Rightwing Nuthouse has a followup to his previous IE vs. Evolution post.