Biological evolution- why is the starting point such a big deal?

quote:

---

Originally posted by John Paul:
I guess you are talking about Creationists like Newton, Kepler, Pasteur, Mendell, Pascal et al. who were so blinded by Scripture they made no contributions to science. LOL!

---

Strange you mentioned Newton and Kepler but not Copernicus and Galileo could that be because of the treatment these got at the hands of the church?Schraf was saying that If the church is involved it tends to repress any findings it doesnt like...Not that religious people are incapable of good science... It does however require that any preconceptions (i.e. God made everything, there was a global flood etc) are not allowed to influence the study....

Yeah but the thing is their science was good because they took observations of the world created a model that worked with those observations, they may have held religious views but these were expressed more as *the thing I observed works this way, hmm maybe God is involved in this way...*Its interesting that Keplers idea that God IS the sun (not based on observation) has fallen out of favor whereas his laws of planetary motion (based on detailed observations) are still taught today...The important point is that the good science based on observation is survived, the attempt to twist this to suit a system of beliefs didnt....Oh and I think the bit about Kepler is at the bottom of the article on his mentor Tycho Brahe....

JP:
Do you know what et al. means?Joz:
Yep. I just found it interesting that you didnt explicitly mention the ones who suffered at the hands of the church...JP:
As if I have time to list all the Creationists who helped with the advance of science.Joz:
That some people who believe in a Godly creation have enriched the scientific understanding of the world is not the issue. The problem is when religious beliefs constrain the set of possible solutions considered....JP:
Did you know that Galileo was opposed by the Aristotelians at the universities? It was their influence that did in Galileo & Copernicus.Joz:
I thought it was Ptolemaic..."Greek astronomer and mathematician. He worked principally in Alexandria. It is often difficult to determine which findings in his great astronomical book, the Almagest, are Ptolemy's and which Hipparchus's. The sun, moon, planets, and stars, he believed, were attached to crystalline spheres, centered on the earth, which turned to create the cycles of day and night, the lunar month, and so on. In order to explain retrograde motion of the planets, he refined a complex geometrical model of cycles within cycles that was highly successful at predicting the planets' position in the sky. The earth-centered Ptolemaic system became dogmatically asserted in Western Christendom until the sun-centered Copernican system replaced it. His Geography contained an estimate of the size of the earth, a description of its surface, and a list of places located by latitude and longitude. Ptolemy also dabbled in mechanics, optics, and music theory. "