bound to obey and serve ([info]elfundeb) wrote,
@ 2005-11-18 20:06:00
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Intelligent Design
From today's Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701304.html

Evolution for believers, eloquently and succinctly written.

I wish I'd read it before the conversation I had last week with my Christian fundamentalist uncle.

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[info]siriologist
2005-11-18 05:55 pm UTC (link)
Here! here! I'm a geologist and a christian, why should those two be mutually exclusive.

PS hope you are surviving your fall sprots season. OUrs is winding down from a 6 night a week schedule to two nights after this week...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

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[info]psychic_serpent
2005-11-18 07:34 pm UTC (link)
As a member of a church on the Penn campus I can tell you that we not only have many, many students who attend who see no conflict in being religious and believing in evolution but many professors as well, including well-respected professors of biology. I have never known any of our pastors to be anti-evolution; the 6 or so pastors we've had in the 21 years I've been a member would all have laughed at the idea of taking Genesis's creation story literally and disregarding science.

In fact, before the current pope was elected the Vatican had made a statement many years ago about why the theory of evolution was not incompatible with the Roman Catholic faith and kids who went to parochial schools were often far more likely to be taught about evolution than kids at public schools in the same area if the local school board had been taken over by fundamentalists. (Then again, before the current pope was elected the Vatican also came out with a statement about Harry Potter not being incompatible with Catholicism either.)

The way my husband put it, if you believe that any gaps in the archeological record can ONLY be explained by the intervention of God, if more digs are done and those gaps are filled then your God gets smaller and smaller until your God disappears altogether. ;) If, on the other hand, you see a difference between knowledge and faith then there is no such conflict and God's existence isn't dependent upon humankind's continued ignorance. :D

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[info]sageofgodalming
2005-11-19 03:50 am UTC (link)
I doubt it would have made any difference, to be honest. I think that to have any credibility with the other side in that debate you first have to demonstrate that you 'get' fundamentalism, and the article doesn't really aim to do that.

There are books for the fundamentalist Christian which aim to show that evolution (and non-literal interpretations of the Bible) are compatible with divine authorship of the scriptures, but they are not easy to get hold of, at least the ones I know of.

An interesting reversal of the situation among Christians, who debate the extent to which you have to earn respect among non-Christians before being able to win them over.

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