Are You a Man or a Mouse? (Chimeric experimentation produces Human-Animal Hybrids)

Guardian Unlimited ^ | 03/15/05 | Jeremy Rifkin

[orionblamblam]

> If you are a believer in God, then I'm surprised you don't already understand.

Explain to me why a believer in God would be upset at medical experiments upon mice that would aid humaity.

[MEGoody]

"Explain to me why a believer in God would be upset at medical experiments upon mice that would aid humaity."

Experiment on mice all you want. But trying to 'create' new creatures, particulary in using human DNA, is the created trying to usurp the Creator.

The sin of pride is the downfall of many.

[orionblamblam]

> But trying to 'create' new creatures, particulary in using human DNA, is the created trying to usurp the Creator.

Humans have been "creating" new creatures for 10,000 years. We're just getting better at it.

Secondly: why do you think that this or any other work with DNA or biogenesis is an attempt to "usurp the Creator?" Where do you read that these tens of thousands of scientists working in this field are all out to replace God?

[Aquinasfan]

> The thing that interested me in engineering was the assumptions that began every problem. Most of these assumptions are philosophical assumptions that engineers are habituated to ignore.

Because these "assumptions" hold in the real world.

Yes, but science by its very nature cannot explain why and how. How, for example, do scientists know that the universe is intelligible and ordered? This assumption, which gave rise to the natural sciences in the West, is a particularly Christian belief, and is the reason why science arose and became a self-sustaining enterprise in the West.

How can you explain the fact that the evidence of your senses is reliable? If you're a materialist, you can't, since your brain must reduce to a machine. Under a materialist rubric, there exists no means for determining whether or not your mind is malfunctioning at any given moment. Moreover, if mind is reduced to matter in motion, the collision of atoms in my brain cannot be any more "true" than the collsion of atoms in your brain. Therefore, there would exist no means for determining whether your belief that "materialism is true" and my belief that "materialism is false," is true.

We start from the assumption, for example, that F=M*A isn't going to just change to F=M*1.2A for the hell of it. Engineers leave such assumptions to the Creationists.

How do you know that this law functions everywhere in the universe? Have you been everywhere in the universe and observed this law?

The terms "genus" and "species" are derived from Aristotle's philsophy

Big Deal. "Easter" was derived from "Ostara." Does that make Easter dependant upon pre-Christian pagan Europeans?

No. But the terms "genus" and "species," as used in everyday language, refer to natures or essences (i.e., dictionary definitions). Materialism rejects essential natures necessarily. Yet materialists hypocritically use dictionaries.

Incorrect. I regard as "Liberal Arts" crap things which are "Liberal Arts" crap. Such as this meaningless discussion. Shall we now discuss the philosophical ramifications of the fact that Dog and God are the same word, just spelled differently?

You operate as a naive realist, yet positively adopt false philosophies like materialism. This makes your thought inherently contradictory and confused, particularly regarding the most important issues in life. This can have profoundly damaging effects in your personal experience.

Studying Aristotle would be worthwhile

Studying Archimedes even more so.

Why?

You're a nominalist, whether you recognize it or not.

Meh. And you might well be a Hoosifrudgian, for all you know, in the view of the Circling Poets of Arium. Does it make a difference to you?

Yes, because, for example, I know that God exists with certainty. I also know the true purpose of life with certainty. Therefore I can order my life toward its objective purpose without hesitation, as long as I don't reject the grace to do so.

You can't achieve happiness in life without knowledge of what true happiness consists. You can't achieve eternal happiness without knowledge of what eternal happiness consists, and how you can get there.

Does that snippet of knowledge effect whether you get up and go to work, whether you think the sky is blue, or what your mood is?

It effects every aspect of my life, every moment of my life.

[orionblamblam]

> science by its very nature cannot explain why and how.

Yes, it can, and often does.

> How, for example, do scientists know that the universe is intelligible and ordered?

Observation. Followed by hypothesis and experiment.

> This assumption, which gave rise to the natural sciences in the West, is a particularly Christian belief

Actually, arose in Greece rather a long time before Christianity. The Ionian tradition of naturalism and science gave the world the concept of "cosmos," the notion that the universe was ordered and harmonious. Sadly, the Ionians were beaten by the mystics such as Pyhtagoras and Plato, who greatly affected the first thousand-plus years of Christian thought.

For a good summary:

---

http://physics.gmu.edu/~jevans/astr103/CourseNotes/ECText/ch01_txt.htm

"According to Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the dawn of systematic scientific thinking began in the sixth century B.C. in the Hellenic cities of Ionia in western Asia Minor. The times were those following the Homeric period (900-700 B.C.) when the eastern end of the Mediterranean was in great upheaval because of the invasion and destruction of the highly developed civilizations of Knossus, Mycenae, Pylas, and others. This era can be compared to that following the re-emergence that took place in Europe centuries later after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Ionian cities were prosperous and involved in wide-ranging commerce. Unfortunately little remains of their written texts from that period. What we have are commentaries by later writers, such as Aristotle, of the philosophical activities that began in Ionia. Even though we have only fragments of their work or hearsay reports concerning these pre-Socratic philosophers, enough of Greek philosophy of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. has been passed on so that various themes can be traced.

"The first Ionian philosopher of whom anything is known was Thales (632-546 B.C.) of Miletus. He said that water is the fundamental substance and all things are derived from it. Exactly what he meant by this we do not know, as no written record by him remains. Aristotle is our authority on Thales and he seems uncertain himself as to Thales' meaning. We are left to guess and to surmise that what he was proposing was the concept of an a unity that permeates nature. What did Thales observe that lead him to propose such a startling idea? Was it an observation of the cycle of water falling as rain, collecting in rivers to run to the sea, there to evaporate forming clouds to fall again as rain? Or did he observe the intimate connection between biological processes in living matter and water? We shall probably never know for sure. But lacking evidence to the contrary, scholars are persuaded that the thoughts of Thales are as good as any in which to place the origin of science.

"More is known of Anaximander (about 590 B.C.), a somewhat younger Milesian. In his writings, we find a fundamental theme found in later Greek thought. He imagines the cause of things not in a mystical or mythical way. Unlike Thales hypothesis that a fundamental substance like water is the source of unity in the physical world, Anaximander postulates that a featureless matrix, called "the Unlimited" or "the Infinite," is the source of physical existence by a separation of opposites. Exactly what he means by this we are not sure. Although his world system is not rooted in mechanism as we might argue today, neither is it rooted in mysticism as his predecessors contended. Its roots are in law: All natural processes, he wrote, are governed by an overriding principle of cosmic justice, or Necessity. By denying man's preferred status in nature, he asserts that things happen because they must, which was the first step on the road to scientific rationalism."

---

> How can you explain the fact that the evidence of your senses is reliable?

Experience.


> How do you know that this law functions everywhere in the universe?

Observation. There are these things called telescopes, see...

> Have you been everywhere in the universe and observed this law?

The fundamental laws that apply here seem to apply everywhere.

> Materialism rejects essential natures necessarily.

That's so wrong it's laughable. Materialsim is quite conmfortable with the notion that assemblign matter in one way gives you a leopard, and in another way gives you a tiger.


>>> Studying Aristotle would be worthwhile
>> Studying Archimedes even more so.
>Why?

Because Archimedes was a scientist and an engineer. He formulated hypotheses and performed experiments. Aristotle did not. Aristotle sat aroudn and thought about stuff. That's nice, but it won't help me build a house or irrigate a field.


>>And you might well be a Hoosifrudgian, for all you know, in the view of the Circling Poets of Arium. Does it make a difference to you?

>Yes... It effects every aspect of my life, every moment of my life.

How odd.

> I know that God exists with certainty.

Well, bully for you.

[Aquinasfan]

Pantheism was fatal to science everywhere but in Christendom.

The Biblical Basis of Western Science

by Stanley Jaki

Science may be a refined form of common sense, but at times all-too refined. Some basic laws of science can, of course, be fully rendered in commonsense terms. One gives the full truth of the three laws of thermodynamics by saying that, first, you cannot win; second, you cannot break even; third, you cannot even get out of the game. Those three laws mean that ultimately all physical activity tends toward an absolute standstill. This is true even if the present expansion of the universe were followed by its contraction. The next cycle of expansion-contraction would be less energetic, and the one after that even less so. Physics, the most exact form of science, tells us, if it tells anything, that all physical processes are part of a one-directional, essentially linear process.

Scientists were not the first to perceive that such is the case. In a more commonsense form it was the Bible that first spelled out this unidirectional process of everything. First, there is creation, then cosmic and human history, all tending toward a final judgment and to a final consummation for all in a new heaven and a new earth.

Wherever we find this linear perspective we find the Bible in the background. This is best appreciated if we take a look at the cosmic view of all great ancient cultures. They are all dominated by the belief that everything will repeat itself to no end, or by the idea of eternal returns. Only on occasion does one hear about this. One hardly ever hears that this belief was responsible for the fact that science suffered a stillbirth, indeed a monumental stillbirth, in all ancient cultures.

I coined this phrase, the stillbirths of science, about thirty years ago. The phrase certainly did not catch on in secular academia. The reason is obvious. Nothing irks the secular world so much as a hint, let alone a scholarly demonstration, that supernatural revelation, as registered in the Bible, is germane to science. Yet biblical revelation is not only germane to science — it made the only viable birth of science possible.

That birth took place in a once-Christian West. Still today it is that birth that fuels neocapitalism that not only needs free markets, but also merchandise to bring to market, and needs that merchandise in ever larger quantities. Only science can deliver them. The rise of that science, so crucial for Western man and for the modern world, has distinctly biblical origins insofar as the Bible is a record of Christian faith.

Whether modern man would be willing to learn in detail about the dependence of science on the Bible is strongly doubtful. But Christians will overlook those details only at grave peril in a great cultural contestation where science plays such a prominent role.

GENISIS 1 AND SCIENCE

The notion of cosmic linearity, already mentioned, is rooted in the biblical teaching of creation our of nothing. This teaching is not yet present in the classic biblical document about creation, the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, or simply Genesis 1. To read that teaching into that chapter is forgivable in comparison with efforts to see in that chapter something, namely science, which is certainly not there in any form whatsoever. The sad fact is that nothing has brought so much discredit to the Bible as the chronic effort to take Genesis 1 for a science textbook. This effort did not start yesterday. But as long as this process goes on, any argument about the biblical basis of Western science will surely boomerang.

Primarily, Genesis 1 is not about creation. It is about the importance of the Sabbath observance. In Genesis 1 God is set up as a role model who works six days and rests on the seventh. But once God is set up in this role, he is to be assigned the highest conceivable work which is the making of everything.

Genesis 1 states this in three steps, each time using the same metaphor. In English we have the metaphor “lock, stock, and barrel,” or the three main parts of a rifle. We often use that metaphor to state literally that we mean everything under consideration. When the Bible states that God made the heaven and the earth, it uses the two main parts of the Hebrew world view, to convey the message that God made everything. The same procedure is repeated in reference to the work done on the second and third days, the special formation of the two main parts, the firmament and the earth. It is with the same thrust that Genesis 1 speaks of the work of the fourth and fifth days, the main decorations of those two main parts. The procedure is to assert that the object of God's work is that totality which is the universe.

The Bible nowhere suggests that the six days can be taken for six geological ages. Nowhere does the Bible suggest that we should read the modern biological notion of species into Genesis 1, where it is stated that God created all the living things according to their kind.

With all that discredit piling up on the Bible through its very first chapter, we should not be surprised that it is well-nigh impossible to sell to secular modern culture a most fundamental biblical message: the total dependence of all on God. In the Bible even the heavens and the stars are on equal footing with muddy earth in respect to their dependence on God. Within the biblical world view it was ultimately possible to assume that the heavens and the earth are ruled by the same laws. But it was not possible to do this within the world vision that dominated all other ancient cultures. In all of them the heavens were divine.

And the Greeks drew the logic of this with a particular precision, which is the reason why science suffered a stillbirth even among the Greeks of old, those mythical models of modern rationality. Within the Greek ambiance it was impossible, in fact it would have been a sacrilege, to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of an apple were governed by the same law. It was, however, possible for Newton, because he was the beneficiary of the age-old Christian faith.

The faith was Christian in that most fundamental sense, in which the Bible holds Christ to be the only-begotten (monogenes) Son of God. When faced with that proposition, a well-educated Roman or Greek had his major intellectual shock, apart from shock relating to the moral level. For in Greco-Roman antiquity, the word monogenes was an attribute of the universe itself. Therefore, such a pagan, ready to convert, had to face up to the following choice: either Jesus or the universe was the only begotten. In other words, Christian faith and pantheism were concretely irreconcilable with one another because of the concreteness of Jesus. This is why only genuine Christian faith, and it alone, can resist the modern juggernaut of nature worship.

A belief in Jesus, in whom God created everything, is the very same belief that concretely opposes efforts to take the universe as a necessary fact that cannot be otherwise. Such efforts are apt even today to lead science into a blind alley. Two thousand years ago they caused science to suffer a stillbirth among the Greeks of old.

Only one aspect of this intricate subject can be discussed here. It has to do with the Christian, biblical teaching of the creation of the universe in time. God, of course, could have created the world eternally. This is a possibility which neither philosophy nor science can determine in one way or another. Science could prove the eternity of the universe only if it were possible to perform an experiment that would extend from eternity to eternity. Such an experiment would take a chain of an infinite number of Rip Van Winkles to perform.

The Bible strongly suggests, and Christian faith explicitly states, that the world was created in time, which means that its past history is finite. How long that history has been, nobody will ever know. We know that physical processes have been going on for at least 15 billion years. But there is no science that can pinpoint that absolutely first moment of existence. For in order to do so, science would have to be able to observe the transition from non-being into being, which is not a physical process.

MAKING SCIENCE POSSIBLE

Science owes to Christian faith the very spark that made Newtonian science possible. That science is based on the three laws of motion. Once those laws were formulated, a science was at hand which from that point on developed on its own terms, with no end to its progress, with no end to its ever new findings, and with no end to the ever new merchandise it makes available for the free, and, at times, not-so-free markets of neocapitalism.

But that irresistible progress needed a spark, the idea of inertial motion, which is the first and most fundamental of Newton's three laws.

The formulation of the first law preceded Newton by more than three hundred years. It first appears in the commentaries on Aristotle's book on cosmology, On the Heavens, which John Buridan gave at the Sorbonne around 1348. By then many other medieval philosophers had commented on that book and radically disagreed with Aristotle's claim that the universe was eternal, that the celestial sphere rotated eternally. The Aristotelian world machine is a perpetual motion machine. As such it blocks the possibility of perceiving an absolute beginning for physical motion. It was, however, this perception that sparked Buridan's insight.

Unlike his many theological predecessors, he did not merely testate the fact of an absolute beginning. He also inquired about the how of that beginning. In reply he said almost verbatim: in the beginning when God made the heavens and the earth, he gave a certain quantity of motion to all celestial bodies, which quantity they keep because they move in an area where there is no friction. This is, of course, an uncanny anticipation of Newton's first law, the law of inertial motion. Only after that first law had been formulated was it possible to think about the other two laws.

Secular academia still does its very best to play down the importance of Buridan and of Pierre Duhem, who almost a hundred years ago set forth the evidence about Buridan and medieval science in huge, heroically researched volumes.

Whether a dent will be made on that resistance to the biblical origins of Western science depends, first, on the Bible being read intelligently and, second, on the history of science being studied sedulously. Both are needed if one is to make not so much a spirited, but an intellectually respectable case on behalf of the biblical origins of Western science.

In saying intellectually respectable, I also mean biblically genuine. For of all places it is in Paul's Letter to the Romans, that great document on God's grace, that we find the warning: Christian worship must be intellectually respectable. Paul's words, logike latreia, certainly do not mean logic chopping. Rather, they mean “reasonable,” or being “respectful of reason.” Why? Because God created men in his own image, an image that certainly includes rationality.

That rationality imposes nothing less than full respect for the ability and rights of reason. This is why Saint Augustine had already laid down the rule that whenever a phrase of the Bible conflicts with what can be known by reason with certainty, it is that phrase that should be reinterpreted accordingly. Otherwise, he said, infidels would raise their laughter sky high and rightly so. The rule of Augustine had already been quietly obeyed in respect to the difference between the Bible's view of the earth as a flat disk and the truth established by Greek science that the earth is spherical.

Unfortunately, Augustine himself did not exploit his rule with respect to the firmament, which he blandly located in a vapory layer in the orbit of Saturn. Nor was Augustine's rule heeded when it became imperative, through the work of Copernicus, to attribute two motions to the earth. With an eye on the Bible, Martin Luther called Copernicus a fool; later Rome condemned Galileo, again with an eye on the Bible.

A GOD OF GAPS?

The proper lesson was at long last drawn by the Catholic Church when she left Darwin alone. Darwin is still resisted by many Christians on the ground that god made all plants and animals according to their kind. They resist for the wrong reasons a Darwin who himself failed to realize that the strongest reasons on behalf of evolution were offered by the metaphysical abilities of the human mind which he tried to discredit once and for all. For only that mind can see an interlocking unity across all time and space: from subatomic particles on to the human body itself, with no gaps in between whatsoever.

Of course, evolutionary biology is far from having filled all those gaps. Some of them, buried in the past, it may never bridge. But to try to fill those gaps with a recourse to God and to the Bible, would be a most unbiblical thing. First, the history of science has provided countless examples of filling gaps of knowledge, each time exposing to ridicule a God whom some ill-advised Christians let perch over this or that gap in their science. They took improbabilities for impossibilities, which is an elementary fallacy in reasoning.

One can indeed make an impressive sport of calculating the improbability of this or that physical process. But time and again science performs the “impossible.” It should be enough to think of the synthesis of urea by Wohler in 1828, who in one stroke eliminated the allegedly absolute difference between inorganic and organic matter. After he did that the laughter of some materialists reached high heaven.

Another reason for holding evolution to be true relates to the emphatic affirmations in the Bible that all matter is good. By saying that matter is good, the Bible certainly implies that matter is not evil, but it also says that the edifice raised by God is as good as any other edifice which is good. But an edifice is good only insofar as it is compact, solid, consistent in its working. In other words, such a material edifice fully obeys the rationality of its architect. Why not say all of this, and in a superlative sense about the material universe made by God? Is God a second-rate architect, is God a second rate materials physicist or chemist, or molecular biologist who always has to improve on what he has done already?

Indeed, all the praises accorded by materialists to matter should pale beside the praises which Christians should accord to that same matter. Herein lies the reason why a Christian should be an all-out materialist, provided the human mind is excepted. This is why a Christian should be an all-out evolutionist, provided the human mind and the human mind alone is considered as a special creation of God.

Anything short of this would add to the materialists' laughter that reaches to high heaven. I hope that Carl Sagan is now in heaven. So God has the last laugh, that God whose infinite mercy has souls for its object. Even Almighty God cannot be merciful with mere matter. But Carl Sagan has the next-to-last laugh. This chief village atheist of our times, or rather the chief atheist performer of the village called evolutionary science, now can laugh fully, knowing that there is no Christian physics, no Christian chemistry, no Christian evolutionary science as long as these are science and not philosophies. But Sagan also laughs at his folly of having promoted the cause of an atheistic science.

This shows that nothing is so dangerous as to latch philosophies to purely quantitative considerations, which are the exclusive business of science. For unless we grant science everything which is its right, we cannot deny anything to science which it cannot rightfully claim.

THE BUSINESS OF SCIENCE

Nothing which is non-quantitative is the business of science. But everything which is quantitative is its business. Non-quantitative aspects of existence, such as purpose, freedom, design, honesty, cannot he handle by science because they are not quantitative propositions. But every bit of matter is quantitative and therefore the business of science. Does not the Bible say that God “disposed everything according to measure and number and weight”?

Please note that the Bible does not say that measure, number and weight, or quantities in short, are everything. But the Bible says that every thing has measure, number, and weight or quantitative properties. Wherever there is matter, quantities are present. This is what gives science its unlimited competence in everything material, whether living or dead. But this is also the reason for the radical limitation of science to what is material insofar as it can be measured.

Herein lies an apparent paradox. It will certainly bother those who do not want to use properly their God-given reason. They do not have to over-exert themselves. It is enough to consider that of the various categories of human conceptualization, there is one that stands utterly apart from the rest. That category is the category of quantities. About all the other categories, various qualities for instance, it is possible to apply the phrase, “more or less.” Goodness can be realized in various degrees, more or less. Alertness too. Any food can taste good, more or less. But it is not possible to state about the number five that it is more five or less five.

This profound difference between quantities and any other concepts may not exist for pure spirits and certainly not for God. But it exists for us as long as we are in this mortal body. Chafe as we may, we cannot do anything about the fact that God created the human mind in such a way that, for it, quantities and everything else remain in two separate conceptual compartments. In other words, what God has separated, no man should try to join, that is, to fuse together. Those busy with integrating theology and science should pause.

There were, of course, some who tried to make it appear that if you pile quantities upon quantities you get qualities and even mind and free will thrown in for good measure. Unluckily for them, they tried to write science on that basis, but only made a mockery of it and utter fools of themselves. Examples are the Hegelian Right and the Hegelian Left. They made a horrible mess not only of human life, but also of science, including the science of evolution.

WHAT DARWIN FAILED TO SEE

It matters not that Darwin's mechanism of evolution is incomplete. It may indeed be grievously faulty. It is always useful to learn about the latest fault lines in Darwinian theory, because its materialist champions love to present it as something scientifically faultless. But this leaves intact Darwin's basic insight. Only those who are inclined to resist either facts or sane philosophy or both resist Darwin. Yet nothing supports evolution so strongly as sane philosophy and especially that biblical precept that everything God made is good and that he arranged everything according to measure, number, and weight. That Darwin failed to see this is largely irrelevant. Without any doubt he proposed his mechanism of evolution as a rebuttal to belief in God, who at that time, and certainly in Darwin's broader ambiance, was equated with the God of innumerable special creations.

It was not the first time in intellectual history that God allowed a monumental half-truth so that full truth might be perceived the more effectively. The half-truth was the combination of an inadequate mechanism of evolution with a magnificent vision of the coherence of all material beings, together with a much needed radical exclusion of special creation. Darwin's greatest mistake was that he did not take that vision for what it was, a genuinely metaphysical vision.

Metaphysics, and not so much science, is the chief rational basis for stating that the material realm is fully coherent, that is, it needs no special interventions from an outside factor, such as God, to keep it running. Science is and will remain profoundly materialistic as long as it is science and not something else. Science can be materialistic only because all matter was created by God. Only a God who is a Creator was capable of giving autonomy to his material creation without suffering thereby a loss to his omnipotence. Such a God is the God of the Bible.

We shall do the worst disservice to the idea of the biblical origin of Western science as long as we hanker to find in science that “something else” on the basis of science and in its own terms. For if we take the phrase “according to their kinds” of Genesis 1 in a scientific sense, we have to take everything there also scientifically. What is sauce for the gander is also sauce for the goose. Then we must explain how visible light came before the making of the sun on the fourth day. It is rather ridiculous to claim that the light of the first day was electromagnetic radiation, let alone that it was the 2.7K cosmic background radiation. Then some explanation has to be found for the firmament and for the astronauts. The Bible deserves much better than to be exposed to endless ridicule by taking it for a science textbook. But the Bible also demands serious intellectual effort if one is to make a case on behalf of its having served as the origin of Western science.

We must make that case partly because the future of Western culture hangs in the balance. That culture needs much more than science. We must use both the best means and also the most effective means if we want to obtain a hearing for that much more. A most effective means is nowadays a reference to science. Science, unfortunately, has become one of the three most effective marketing means. The other two are Sports and Sex, writ large. Such are the three S's that rule modern life.

Science, of course, deserves much better, and it deserves the best in the way of intellectual efforts. At times it is enough to use common sense. Science may be much more than a refined form of common sense, but in interpreting science correctly some such sense is indispensable. The Bible is an unexcelled source of common sense, and also a chief depository of information about that infinitely “much more” which is the Kingdom of God. To seek first that Kingdom has been the God-enjoined method of obtaining the rest, which, as history shows, includes even science.

[orionblamblam]

No matter how long of an excerpt you post... you're not going to be able to get past the simple fact that a *pre* Christian world view was the first to embrace science. The worlds first scientists were pagans, agnostics and quite possibly atheists... not Christians. The world view that wiped out the Greek scientists was the same that held Christendom in it's grasp for centuries. The Christian world did not rediscover science until they rediscovered the works of the ancient Greeks (preserved by the Arabs).

> Pantheism was fatal to science everywhere but in Christendom.

So you finally admit it: Christianity *IS* pantheism!!

:P

[evilC]

>>>
Weissman says that he would keep a tight rein on the mice, and if they showed any signs of humanness he would kill them.
<<<

Not quite sure why, but I found that line funny!

[Aquinasfan]

the simple fact that a *pre* Christian world view was the first to embrace science.

My claim was that only in the Christian West did science become a self-sustaining enterprise, specifically because of the idea of creation in time, and the necessary repudiation of eternal cycles. It's no accident that Newton's advances in physics followed shortly after the Church's dogmatic definition of "creation from nothing."

[orionblamblam]

> My claim was that only in the Christian West did science become a self-sustaining enterprise

More than a *thousand* years after Christianity gained power. For all that time, science was frowned upon by Christianity. It wasn't until the church began to *lose* its grip on the west that science really took off.

> It's no accident that Newton's advances in physics followed shortly after the Church's dogmatic definition of "creation from nothing."

So you're saying the birth of Newton had something to do with Church dogma? Or that Church dogma helped spur his lifelong alchemists quest for the Philosophers Stone?

Well, one thing I'll grant you: Newton got his real start on developing calculus when the plague was ravaging London, and some of the blame for the plague can be laid at the doorstep of the church and those who banned cats as familiars, allowing rats to run wild and spread the disease further. So, in a way, yes, the Church helped bring on some of Newton's advances... but not in a way that would normally be considered positive.

[johnnycap]

Well one thing I can say, if any of this truly comes to pass and we see chimerics on the street going to office jobs, the ethical implications of gay marriage are going to fade into the realm of "relatively normal" behavior compared to what comes next.

(Personally, I want to marry my chimp. If you could see her through my eyes...)

[R. Scott]

However, my first thought was insert "Pinky & The Brain" joke here.

“Fusing a human and chimpanzee embryo - which researchers say is feasible - could produce a creature so human that questions regarding its moral and legal status would throw 4,000 years of ethics into chaos.”
Planet of the Apes!

[Aquinasfan]

More than a *thousand* years after Christianity gained power. For all that time, science was frowned upon by Christianity. It wasn't until the church began to *lose* its grip on the west that science really took off.

You're funny. What "science" was "frowned on" by the Church, since modern science did not yet exist? Who funded Copernicus' astronomical studies?

It's no accident that Newton's advances in physics followed shortly after the Church's dogmatic definition of "creation from nothing."

So you're saying the birth of Newton had something to do with Church dogma?

Can't slip anything past you. You can find the relevant portions in the bolded passages above, and also below.

If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.

These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.

The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church's teaching office.

The Origin of Science

Or that Church dogma helped spur his lifelong alchemists quest for the Philosophers Stone?

You're slaying me. Is this the "science" the Church "frowned on"?

Well, one thing I'll grant you: Newton got his real start on developing calculus when the plague was ravaging London, and some of the blame for the plague can be laid at the doorstep of the church and those who banned cats as familiars, allowing rats to run wild and spread the disease further. So, in a way, yes, the Church helped bring on some of Newton's advances... but not in a way that would normally be considered positive.

Did you also know that there are tunnels between the convents and rectories, and that the babies born to the nuns are killed and buried in the basement?

[bigsigh]

this stuff is old hat to me, I used to work for a few rats.

[Polyxene]

This is really scary stuff. Manimals. Message to these "scientists" -- Leave God's creations alone!

[orionblamblam]

> What "science" was "frowned on" by the Church

Virtually all forms of learning. What science was *done* in the first thousand years of Church domination?

> Who funded Copernicus' astronomical studies?

Who executed Giordano Bruno?

> "Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan..."

Wrong. Think "Thales."

>>Or that Church dogma helped spur his lifelong alchemists quest for the Philosophers Stone?

>You're slaying me. Is this the "science" the Church "frowned on"?

Nice diversion.

Church dogma didn't make Newton a genius. The lack of church domination over the mind of man *allowed* Newton's genius to blossom. God only knows how much further along we'd be if the Ionian scientists of 600 BC had been allowed to flourish, rather than being stomped by the mystics. God only knows how much further along we'd be if his fan club hadn't snuffed the light of knowledge from Europe for a thousand years.

[MEGoody]

"Humans have been "creating" new creatures for 10,000 years"

So humans have been cutting DNA from one species and implanting it into another for 10,000 years? I don't think so.

"Secondly: why do you think that this or any other work with DNA or biogenesis is an attempt to "usurp the Creator?"

'Working' with DNA is one thing. Cutting DNA out of the cells of one species and implanting it into the cell of another in an attempt to 'invent' a new 'creature' (no matter the stated purpose) is an attempt to usurp the Creator (It is an attempt that will fail, of course. No one can usurp God.)

"Where do you read that these tens of thousands of scientists working in this field are all out to replace God?"

I didn't say anything about 'tens of thousands of scientists'. And of course, no one can replace God. Doesn't necessarily stop some people from attempting to be God though. And to do that is to commit evil.

[orionblamblam]

>> "Humans have been "creating" new creatures for 10,000 years"

> So humans have been cutting DNA from one species and implanting it into another for 10,000 years? I don't think so.

Here's a hint: there's more than one way to make a critter that you like.

> Cutting DNA out of the cells of one species and implanting it into the cell of another in an attempt to 'invent' a new 'creature' (no matter the stated purpose) is an attempt to usurp the Creator

I'll ask again: why do you think that this or any other work with DNA or biogenesis is an attempt to "usurp the Creator? You're just repeating "because it is." I want to know why you think there is this particular motive.

> It is an attempt that will fail, of course. No one can usurp God.

Umm... it has *already* succeeded. Read the article, there are a number of successes already. What does that imply?

> I didn't say anything about 'tens of thousands of scientists'

There are at least that many world-wide looking at genetic modification of plants and animals, making new creatures and plants from them.

[arizonarachel]

This is just wrong. I was hoping it was satire, but it appears to be serious.

[MEGoody]

"Here's a hint: there's more than one way to make a critter that you like."

That's nice, but it doesn't have anything to do with chimera.

"I want to know why you think there is this particular motive."

The motive is probably to make a name for themselves, but ultimately, it's a pride thing - setting oneself up as one's own 'god'. I've seen some statements made by scientists about 'curing diseases' and 'creating sources for organs that can be transplanted' and blah, blah, blah. But the ends don't justify the means.