swamidass
September 22, 2018, 4:31am
6
We do not have a Newton day.
Darwin did make a profound difference. There is some oddity here, both in the irrational opposition he calls down:
There is so much horrendously false and extremely unfair propaganda constantly spewed about Darwin, as if he originated racism.
On the other hand, there is also some irrational veneration of him. If it is merely because he was a great scientist, why don’t’ we also have an Einstein, Kepler, or Hubble day? Why is he the only scientist that is granted a day of celebration? Can you help me make sense of that?
Yes, there is some irrational veneration of him, especially in the US. Why not a Copernicus day? Since Copernicus had as profound effect on our thinking as Darwin. After Copernicus, Earth and Earthlings no longer had a special place in the universe. We were just the 3rd planet from the Sun, and we orbited it. We were nothing special in the universe after Copernicus.
The irrational veneration of Darwin, I believe is in some ways for secular humanists of the Enlightenment to get back at the Catholic Church’s treatment of science and scientists. Copernicus destroyed our being in a special place in a God created universe. Darwin, specifically by showing that all living creatures on Earth are related through common decent, destroyed the specialty of human beings. We are just another animal species without souls like all the other animals. It was Darwin who destroyed Adam. So the irrational veneration of Darwin is for doing that to the oppressors of science and Enlightenment thinking and reasoning.
@Patrick , I think this reveal your earlier posts on this thread are to be provocative.
As a side note, at PS, we are stealing back Adam from Darwin. So hopefully evolutionary science will be theologically “defanged” in a helpful way, so there is less reason for religious people to oppose it.
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