Pope for sound stewardship
| December 12, 2007 | Posted by DLH under Creationism, Darwinism, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Off Topic, Science |
Pope Benedict XVI has formally challenged governments to address the moral issue of placing humanity above the environment. He calls for political decisions to be based on sound science, not political agendas. His challenge to sound science over ideological pressures parallels issues in the origins debate. Note particularly the parallels between differing presuppositions versus consequences of Darwinism, Intelligent Design, and Creationism. The Pope’s message highlights the importance of sound science in following the truth wherever the data leads, versus political environmental movements with explicit or implicit agendas diverging from or running contrary to the data.
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UPDATE: The Pope’s message advocates responsible stewardship based on prudent policies undistorted by ideological pressures. The post title was changed to reflect the Pope’s emphasis compared to the news article below.
See source: MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE WORLD DAY OF PEACE 1 JANUARY 2008.
See especially: The family, the human community and the environment, Sections 7, 8.
For the human family, this home is the earth, the environment that God the Creator has given us to inhabit with creativity and responsibility. We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. . . . Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow. It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances. . . . One area where there is a particular need to intensify dialogue between nations is that of the stewardship of the earth’s energy resources. . . .
See full message.
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The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom
Last updated at 14:48pm on 12th December 2007
“Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.
The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.
His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.
The 80-year-old Pope said the world needed to care for the environment but not to the point where the welfare of animals and plants was given a greater priority than that of mankind. . . . ” See Full Article
49 Responses to Pope for sound stewardship
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PlatosPlaything, I am not sure why you are confusing global warming by mixing it with mysogyny, and with the funny hats, because the latter two have nothing to do with this topic. This could be some sort of stupid provocation, but just in case it isn’t, I will answer. (I have serious doubts about you being a committed design theorist, if you are, prove it.)
This forum is wisely continuing to pursue global warming as bad science and pseudo-science, because it is interested in exposing this sort of “quasi-reasoning” and propaganda as fallacious. So thank you DaveScott for pursuing this and finding interesting links and facts. (I wanted to express my kudos in an earlier thread, but couldn’t because of the Posting Too Quickly server error.) After all, this pseudo-scientific hoax will have huge consequences similar in scale to Darwinism being showed down our throats.
But, since you mentioned them, allow me to briefly address your misconceptions by knocking the funny hat off your head.
The pope, Jesus, and the Catholic Church do not hate women. The proof is in all those multitudes of women who understand this rather simple proposition and willingly go to churches all around the world to pray. In fact, those who understand this, understand it because Christianity has been the only social force that has truly dignified women and freed them from male domination. No other culture or religion has done that. For example, Hindus abort their girls because they don’t value them. Or Muslims would rather put their women into harems, and generally treat women with harem mentality. And all the modern secularist freedoms of liberated “Playboys” have liberated women to be just sex objects in porn magazines, strip-clubs, filthy movies and brothels.
If a “Mother Earth” feminist who calls herself a Plaything is attacking the Church by trying to knock the pope’s hat off, and by accusing Christians of stealing feminist cults, it only shows how ignorant and confused she is.
BTW, if Earth is like your “mother”, why is she so cruel to us? Have you ever wondered why this “mother” is killing her children on a massive scale by all sorts of natural catastrophes, from hurricanes to ice storms to forest fires?
Bah, religious left. Kind of like communist entrepreneur…
I think that GW is one of those things that people are just not looking at reasonably. First you have to subtract almost all of the media mention the “theory” gets because the media’s scientific method is “if it bleeds it reads.” Then you need to realize that 99.9% of all people who believe in it have no reason to because they are just merely repeating what someone else has said and have no scientific credentials at all. That leaves us with the scientific community which is by and large dependent on grants and loans for studying this “phenomena” that has been going on sense the dawn of time. And right here is over 19 thousand educated people who reject the argument-
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p357.htm
All of the physical evidence, at the very least, does not contradict evolution.
The physical evidence cited to support evolution cis what? The fossil record? The molecular clock?
The fossil record does not show gradual change of one species into another, rather it shows entire new species appearing out whole cloth.
The molecular clock was predicated on a constant DNA replication error rate across all species. That has been found to be untenable.
But when these things fail there is always a rationalization as to why they do and the theory still has to be true.
UN Climate Change Conference based on flawed science and economics
Skeptical scientists have challenged both the scientific foundations for the UN FCC in Bali, and the economics of the proposed solutions.
Don’t fight, adapt We should give up futile attempts to combat climate change
In an open letter to the UN and heads of states, 100 scientists and economists have challenged the current science and proposed strategy.
These foundational issues parallel ID – what to do when scientists believe the majority is wrong on the science, and/or when the proposed solutions (e.g. Elementary Darwinism only public education) are believed to be counterproductive.
Off topic:
absolutely amazing christmas lights show
http://video.google.com/videop.....;plindex=9
Amazing Christmas Lights; Reflections
http://video.google.com/videop.....;plindex=7
The global warming is a bit different than the ID debate. If global warming is true then the world may be doomed. If global warming turns out to be false then a lot of money would be wasted. There’s a sense of fear and immediate urgency and that tends to lower the bar for actual evidence.
ellazimm,
How many times do we have to tell you before it sinks in. Evolution happened. Few here are denying that. What is undetermined is the mechanism for the appearance of new species.
There is no evidence supporting any specific mechanism including gradualism or ID. One has to come to a conclusion based on the forensic evidence available. Gradualism as an explanation except for trivial stuff is untenable because it predicts a massive number of intermediary forms and constant pressure to create new species but none have been found. What has been found is always massive discontinuities.
The most persuasive evidence for each position is negative evidence against each of the other positions. Since gradualism proclaims a specific mechanism for new species, one that would leave lots of traces during life’s history and there is no evidence, then it can be ruled out immediately.
All Darwin saw was the trivial and no one since has seen anything but the trivial. Hence gradualism is a bust. The argument for ID is based on probabilities. No natural process has been able to create the specified complexity seen in life except for an intelligent process, the logical conclusion is that until shown otherwise an intelligent process was involved in life’s origin.
Believe what you want but there is no empirical evidence for a naturalistic process at the moment. Whether one will eventually show up will be in the pudding but as of the moment none exist nor are there any good prospects but you can still have faith that some day there will be one.
Keep the faith.
Evolution *means* that there must be a natural mechanism in order to infer descent.
Arifreeom, get real Evolution means “change over time” period. And global warming is a bunch of BS. Once again, the world will get a lot warmer than it is today eventually, as well as it will get a lot colder eventually and neither change has any correlation with human activity. If weak evidence was really a substitute for really important dangerous “possible” challenges – then we need to start spending millions of dollars building a device and deployment system to take out giant asteroids because they are bound to hit the earth probabilistically in the future and will cause massive extinctions. No one though is talking about those asteroids or meteors because the research grants aren’t as big and you cant use them to wage war on the industrial sector all the while making huge bucks forcing everyone to change to worthless expensive green economic vehicles and energy technologies.
Just so everyone knows, I just checked the banned list and ellazimm was added to it by one of the other moderators.
Anyway, to answer the question: One of the central tenets of the “modern synthesis of evolutionary biology” as celebrated in 1959 was the idea that macroevolution and microevolution were essentially the same process. That is, macroevolution was simply microevolution extrapolated over deep evolutionary time, using the same mechanisms and with essentially the same effects. A half century of research into macroevolution has shown that this is not the case. As such, Darwinism does not have exclusive positive evidence for any mechanism to explain evolution, and scientists are in the middle of formulating a new hypothesis, while ID has exclusive positive evidence that intelligence is capable of producing such mechanisms. In addition, ID also has the design detection method EF, which also provides exclusive positive evidence for ID since it has never produced a false positive (and if it has it should be simple to provide an example along with the relevant calculations). There’s also IC. I could go on but it’s rather obvious at this point that ID has exclusive positive evidence for it while Darwinism does not. And, no, universal common descent is not exclusive positive evidence for Darwinism since UCD is also compatible with ID.
Evolution means “change over time”? That’s a pretty vacuous definition. We already know from the 2nd law of thermodynamics that everything will change over time…towards maximum entropy.
I should point out that the global warmers pull off a similar trick. oh it’s now cold? well aha you see the real problem is “climate change”
I find it very hard to believe that an ape could give birth to a human being. How? Immaculate conception? And even if it could, I doubt that such a “freak” would last very long, let alone take over a population.
ari-freedom,
If you stick around here a while, you will see that not only is evolution preposterous on first glance, it is also preposterous on all levels of evidence that are scrutinized.
The dictionary definition of evolution:
1. A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. See Synonyms at development.
2.
a. The process of developing.
b. Gradual development.
3. Biology
a. Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species.
b. The historical development of a related group of organisms; phylogeny.
ari-freedom,
I suggest you come up with a definition of evolution. The official one of neo Darwinism and used in biology is a change in the allele frequency of a population over time.
Despite what neo Darwinism claims, evolution has a direction. While some species persist for tens of millions of years without any visible change others appear and the new ones seem more sophisticated. The number of cell types for example has gone from about 30-40 during the Cambrian Explosion to about 220 today. Each new cell type represents a new capability for the organism.
So there is two ways to look at evolution. Find your own way but don’t beg the question of what causes it by your definiton.
This really should be not part of this thread since it is on the pope and global warming.
Jerry, there is a reason why global warming is on an ID blog.
Both camps like to switch back and forth between 2 claims. First, environmentalists will claim that humans are causing global warming. When it turns out that there is no global warming, they switch to the second claim that humans are causing ‘climate change.’ Heads I win, tails you lose. The first claim, that they can explain an upward trend, is the hook.
ari-freedom,
This site may help understand the implausibility of evolution from the information standpoint.
Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA
By William A. Dembski, Michael Ruse
http://books.google.com/books?.....2QYXaXbOHE
Actually, I have never read ID books from the ‘standard’ IDists (Dembski, Behe, Wells, Denton etc) So, I have a major reading assignment
I have Spetner’s Not By Chance and ReMine’s Biotic Message. I’m not a ‘standard’ guy so I’ll probably read Sanford’s book next.
Joseph D’Hippolito has a good followup editorial:
The Pope vs. Global Warming
The politicization of science has serious consequences that hinder finding the truth:
[St. Paul/Minneapolis archbishop]
“Flynn’s dogmatism reflects the totalitarian attitude of his fellow activists. Skeptical scientists are called “deniers” and treated as if they were denying the historicity of the Holocaust. Worse, they are increasingly unable to procure research funding.”
Some evidence not being heard:
“Dr. Vincent Gray, a climatologist who reviewed all of the IPCC’s drafts since the panel was formed in 1990 and who shares a Nobel Prize awarded to the panel, was even more emphatic:”
And yet the UN FCC supertanker was refueled in Bali and is proceeding with incredible inertia!
This has amazing parallels with the politicization and funding of evolution vs seeking the full truth.