The Journal of Islamic science could have written your statement in that muslims and christians show how similar they are.

alas, your statement is as nonsensical as it is common among fundamentalist believers.

a. on the incompatibility of religion and science a lot of philosophy has been written, I won’t close the debate here for sure. Methodologically they are obviously incompatible: religion proceeds by revelation, which,supposedly, was direct for the prophet and thereafter becomes simple hearsay …”sentito dire”…science mainly proceed by observables and hypothesis falsification, the opposite.

This does not exclude that many scientists may be true believers, as the human brain can perfectly hold two contradictory thoughts at any time and still work fine, not even realizing it. self consistency is not a property of our species (so, evolution tells us, there must be some adaptive advantage to this!). but that does not abolish the contradiction though!

b. your understanding of evolution is confused at best. but you are not a specialist, so here we go. for one, in science we never speak of “truth”. Truth is an obsession of you faith heads! also, natural selection is a deterministic, not random, process. evolution, mutation, genetic drift are random. but who said that chance alone leads to complexity? actually, when natural selection is relaxed, complex structures (e.g. the eyes of cave dwelling organisms) degenerate because of fixation of neutral mutations by genetic drift.

that there is a common origin of all life forms is a direct prediction of evolution not creationism! we have residual bacterial and viral DNA in our own genome! we have evidence of an early RNA-based biological world! you never find complex organisms in rocks older than those containing only simpler organisms. that tells you that things didn’t just come to be the way they are now overnight. also an intelligent creator would have found better ways of designing organisms unless he is totally stupid: what’s the point of having euk. viruses, viroids, catalytic RNAs, inactive pseudogenes, selfish transposons, vestigial organs during embryogenesis, evolutionary convergent characters associated to geographic insulation, independent evolution of complex organs….and on and on and on.
for being a designed world this that we inhabit is a totally fucked up one, dear!

all of this stuff only makes some sense under an evolutionary hypothesis.

c. evolutionary biology is a classical example where religion acts as a science stopper: by seeing god behind any fact and factoid, you are lead to stop investigating such facts, because you already found your explanation: god! talking about compatibility between religion and science seems a joke in this context!

d. speaking of true science as opposed to false science reminds me of socialist science under Stalin as opposed to capitalist science. it’s an old vice of all dogmatisms to avoid the debate on inconvenient facts and find refuge in convenient absolute untestable, revealed truths.

e. evolution is a science no less than any other natural science. it is your definition of science as absolute truth that is flawed and wrong.

most science is based on testing the hypothesis against the prediction they make. sure, evolution of higher taxa has not been observed over the course of the past 100 years, and it is not reasonable to predict they would have been observable. earth evolution spanned 4×10^7 times this short span of time when we have become aware of this hypothesis: a drop in the ocean. but new species have arisen over the past 100 years,, modest intraspecific changes have been observed, new microbial pathogens have emerged,; evolution predictions are testable and falsifiable and they have been for 100 years…or they would not have made it into peer reviewed journals for so long…

on the other hand I still have to see a single creationist paper published in mainstream peer reviewed…well of course exception made for the journal of islamic science, silly me!

let’s put it this way: you find a rabbit in a precambrian rock and i would be ready to reconsider the correctness of the evolutionary hypothesis! this is more you will ever be able to concede about your god and your faith and it is witness of the biggest divide between scientists and believers and their respective antipodal mindset.

(don’t have time to revise this, so tsake it as it is…I’m writing holding my sleepy kind on one arm…)

help!

@ Max:
scienza e fede sono spesso ritenute in antitesi. Invece sono strettamente collegate e moltissime sono le verità scientifiche che dimostrano che l’origine di tutti i viventi sulla terra, dai microbi all’uomo,non è frutto del “caso”.
La tesi evoluzionista non può nemmeno essere considerata una branca del sapere che abbia dignità scientifica.
La vera scienza non solo NON SI OPPONE alla fede in un Dio creatore , ma spesso la conferma, ne POSTULA l’esistenza, anzi la ESIGE!

a creationist web site and a talk by an engineer is hardly a good start for a conversation about evolution…

aren’t you catholic? you may want to know that your own church accepts evolution of the species as a fact. so get over it. you once were a chimp…only fundamentalists, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads still babble about creationism as if they were actually making any sense…

“Bishop DiLorenzo of Richmond, chair of the Committee on Science and Human Values in a December 2004 letter sent to all U.S. bishops: “…Catholic schools should continue teaching evolution as a scientific theory backed by convincing evidence.”

A proposito di Darwin, ho trovato il sito “SULLE TRACCE DELLE ORIGINI”.
Se qualcuno vuol darci un’occhiatina…

@ Max:
Max ha scritto:

(PS: Max, Massimo, dude, dogg… whatever!)

uahuah dehiho!
@ angia:
angia ha scritto:

che ne pensi, Albé, il creatore ha creato tutto l’universo solo per noi, oppure siamo co-inquilini di qualche simpatico E.T.?

che bello, senza di voi mi annoierei in vacanza!
ET, perchè no?
;-)

che ne pensi, Albé, il creatore ha creato tutto l’universo solo per noi, oppure siamo co-inquilini di qualche simpatico E.T.?

well, even getting at some deeper meaning, let me tell you something it won’t shock you at this point:
a complex creator living in the sky and bothering with our mundane existence in a remote section of our galaxy, one little and relatively insignificant among 125 billions, is hardly a good explanation for anything I can think of…no matter how you want to repackage it! actually, I think it is symptomatic of the narcissism of our species deluding ourselves that a benevolent god may exist at all…

(PS: Max, Massimo, dude, dogg… whatever!)

@ Massimo o Max?:
come dici tu sono libri dell’epoca del ferro… non ti puoi aspettare spiegazioni “scientifiche” ma di “senso”…
;-)

@ Alberto:
>Per me è un racconto che ti sta dicendo qualcosa >di importante delle nostre origini, sono racconti >EZIOLOGICI, ovvero che hanno il fine di spiegarti >da dove veniamo, dove andiamo, perchè l’uomo e la >donna, perchè il male etc. fino al 10° cap. della >Genesi, poi incomincia la storia dei patriarchi >(Abramo e comp.)

alas, like anything in the bible, the explanation is not explaining anything at all…