Word: darwinians
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...problem of religious literacy is so great that it is oftentimes not even recognized. Ask yourself: How many Harvard students can explain the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni? How many understand why most Americans reject Darwinian evolution? Probably—and sadly—not many. But this sort of knowledge is essential to understand today’s world. Religion is not, as Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker wrote, an “American anachronism.” If anything, it is Harvard that needs explaining in our persistently religious global society...
There are two great debates under the broadheading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of "intelligent design" (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed...
...foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins' expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University...
COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible--not just...
...Dawkins explains that morality developed in a similar vein. Morality—in the form of kindness, altruism, generosity, empathy, and pity—is nothing more than “misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes,” he explains. Morality is the by-product of kin altruism, which was once beneficial to the survival of our prehistoric ancestors. Unlike religion however, morality is a beneficial result of evolution...