aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Evolution: like realizing the Earth is not the center of the universe

The NYTimes had a special Science section on evolution today. Science of the Soul? ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ Is Losing Force was one of the articles in it:

Challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the center of the universe, [Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary] writes in her book “Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies?” (Cambridge, 2006). Just as Copernicus knocked Earth off its celestial pedestal, she said, the new findings on cognition have displaced people from their “strategic location” in creation.

Another theologian who has written widely on the issue, John F. Haught of Georgetown University, said in an interview that “for many Americans the only way to preserve the discontinuity that’s implied in the notion of a soul, a distinct soul, is to deny evolution,” which he said was “unfortunate.”

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth.