Thinking to Believe

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln must be rolling over in their grave.  A U.S. District judge in Wisconsin has declared that national days of prayer are unconstitutional because they violate the separation of church and state.  

Those like this judge are very confused about the first amendment.  What was intended to grant the freedom of religion is being used to guarantee a freedom from religion.  The 1^st amendment did not demand that the government be purely secular with no mention of, or interaction with religion.  Washington and Lincoln et al proclaimed national days of prayer and fasting, and no one ever thought of these acts as being unconstitutional.  In fact, for more than 200 years no one thought so.  The text hasn’t changed, so how did we discover something that those who penned and ratified the amendment didn’t know about?  

These kinds of rulings are clearly not based on the text of the Constitution, because the Constitution does not prohibit religious expression, even by the government as the government.  It only prohibits Congress from passing a law establishing a particular religion as the nation’s religion.  It does not proscribe government officials from speaking about religion, or establishing a day of prayer.  After all, no religion is established as our nation’s religion by proclaiming a national day of prayer.  Prayer is common to many religions.  This ruling is based on the secularist philosophy of the day, not the Constitution.

President Obama has instructed the Health and Human Services Department to draft rules that grant patients the right to designate who can visit them in the hospital.  Not only would this open the door for non-relatives to visit their loved ones in the hospital, but also gay partners.  I support this law for several reasons.  First, I have always found it ridiculous that hospitals, not patients, determine who can visit the patient.  Secondly, this will remove one of the standard arguments for same-sex marriage (SSM).  Many proponents of SSM argue that SSM is necessary to give them the right to visit their partners when hospitalized.  Apparently, SSM isn’t needed for that after all.  Like so many other practicalities, these privileges can be ascertained via other legal means wholly apart from marriage.

(Read parts 1 and 2 in the series)

The heart of the neo-Darwinian synthesis is that evolution advances via the process of natural selection working on random mutations (RM+NS).  Natural selection itself lacks any creative power – it only eliminates what doesn’t work.  Eliminating the unfit, however, does nothing to “explain the origin of the fit”![1]  The burden falls entirely on RM to create the biological novelties required by Darwinism to drive evolution forward.  It must be asked, then, whether RM has the creative power required by Darwin’s theory.  Can RM produce the new biological information necessary to drive evolution forward and explain the diversification of all life?  What exactly can RM do? 

When the neo-Darwinian synthesis was set forth some 70 years ago, answers to these questions could not be ascertained.  While the theory was plausible on a conceptual level, there was no real way of testing its biological plausibility.  Over the last 30 years, however, we have been able to observe both the power and limits of RM+NS at the biological level.  What have we discovered?  We discovered that while RM can produce variability within an organism, it is not capable of producing the kind of changes required by Darwin’s theory.  RM is severely limited in what it can accomplish. 

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