Evolution vs Religion article: What do YOU think?

[littleamazon]

Below is the whole article but for those that want to go to the website, here is the link:
http://www.slate.com/id/2124297/

the big idea
Evolution vs. Religion
Quit pretending they're compatible.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2005, at 12:30 PM PT


Listen to a podcast interview with Jacob Weisberg here, or sign up to get all of Slate’s free daily podcasts.


President Bush used to be content to revel in his own ignorance. Now he wants to share it with America's schoolchildren.

I refer to his recent comments in favor of teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution. "Both sides ought to be properly taught … so people can understand what the debate is about," Bush told a group of Texas newspaper reporters who interviewed him on Aug. 1. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."

The president seems to view the conflict between evolutionary theory and intelligent design as something like the debate over Social Security reform. But this is not a disagreement with two reasonable points of view, let alone two equally valid ones. Intelligent design, which asserts that gaps in evolutionary science prove God must have had a role in creation, may be—as Bob Wright argues—creationism in camouflage. Or it may be—as William Saletan argues—a step in the creationist cave-in to evolution. But whatever it represents, intelligent design is a faith-based theory with no scientific validity or credibility.

If Bush had said schools should give equal time to the view that the Sun revolves around the Earth, or that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, he'd have been laughed out of his office. The difference with evolution is that a large majority of Americans reject what scientists regard as equally well supported: that we're here because of random mutation and natural selection. According to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject (2004), 45 percent of Americans believe God created human beings in their present form 10,000 years ago, while another 38 percent believe that God directed the process of evolution. Only 13 percent accept the prevailing scientific view of evolution as an unguided, random process.

Being right and yet so unpopular presents an interesting problem for evolutionists. Their theory has won over the world scientific community but very few of the citizens of red-state America, who decide what gets taught in their own public schools. How can followers of Darwin prevent the propagation of ignorance in places like Kansas, whose board of education just voted to rewrite its biology curriculum to do what President Bush suggests?

Many biologists believe the answer is to present evolution as less menacing to religious belief than it really is. In much the same way that intelligent-design advocates try to assert that a creator must be compatible with evolution in order to shoehorn God into science classrooms, evolutionists claim Darwin is compatible with religion in order to keep God out. Don't worry, they insist, there's no conflict between evolution and religion—they simply belong to different realms. Evolution should be taught in the secular classroom, along with other hypotheses that can be verified or falsified. Intelligent design belongs in Sunday schools, with stuff that can't.

This was the soothing contention of the famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that science and religion were separate "magisteria," or domains of teaching. The theme appears frequently in statements by major scientific organizations and wherever fundamentalists try to force creationism or its descendents on local school boards. Here, for instance, is the official position of Kansas Citizens for Science, the group opposing the inclusion of intelligent design in the state's science curricula: "People of faith do not have to choose between science and religion. Science is neither anti-Christian nor anti-God. Science denies neither God nor creation. Science merely looks for natural evidence of how the universe got to its current state. If viewed theistically, science is not commenting on whether there was a creation, but could be viewed as trying to find out how it happened."

In a state like Kansas, where public opinion remains overwhelmingly hostile to evolution, one sees the political logic of this kind of tap-dance. But let's be serious: Evolutionary theory may not be incompatible with all forms of religious belief, but it surely does undercut the basic teachings and doctrines of the world's great religions (and most of its not-so-great ones as well). Look at this 1993 NORC survey: In the United States, 63 percent of the public believed in God and 35 percent believed in evolution. In Great Britain, by comparison, 24 percent of people believed in God and 77 percent believed in evolution. You can believe in both—but not many people do.

That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries. In reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote that the religious view of man as a creature with free will was "utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God." (The passage is quoted in Daniel C. Dennett's superb book Darwin's Dangerous Idea.)

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the archbishop of Vienna, was saying nothing very different when he argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on July 7 that random evolution can't be harmonized with Catholic doctrine. To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who believe in God, and even Darwinists who call themselves Christians. But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better answer to the question of how we got here than religion does. Not a different answer, a better answer: more plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous body of evidence. Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which can explain the emergence of the first bacteria, doesn't even leave much room for a deist God whose minimal role might have been to flick the first switch.

So, what should evolutionists and their supporters say to parents who don't want their children to become atheists and who may even hold firm to the virgin birth and the parting of the Red Sea? That it's time for them to finally let go of their quaint superstitions? That Darwinists aren't trying to push people away from religion but recognize that teaching their views does tend to have that effect? Dennett notes that Darwin himself avoided exploring the issue of the ultimate origins of life in part to avoid upsetting his wife Emma's religious beliefs.

One possible avenue is to focus more strongly on the practical consequences of resisting scientific reality. In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs, can the U.S. afford—ethically or economically—to raise our children on fraudulent biology? But whatever tack they take, evolutionists should quit pretending their views are no threat to believers. This insults our intelligence, and the president is doing that already.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

[byblos]

I know I'm going to get creamed for my views but here they are anyway. Let me start by saying I am Christian (Catholic) and my most basic belief is this: I believe in God, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, period.

As to how we were put on this earth, I'm no scientist and I'm sure there are many people who are infinitely smarter than I am (particularly on this site) who will argure for or against a young earth and both sides can present scientific evidence proving their case and discounting the other.

To me, whether earth is 10,000 years or 15 billion, is utterly irrelevent. I can accept both because neither changes my belief. Granted, my view is a rather simplistic one but it works for me.

There was a moment in time when God decided to breath conscience (or a soul, if you wish) into a living thing. Now if that living thing was created at that same instent or was created 15 billion years earlier makes absolutely no difference to me.

Human beings were given a conscience, from that sprung the power of reason and logic, the power of decision-making (as opposed to instinctive reaction), the distinction between right and wrong (i.e. moral values), and so on.

That's it. Not very complicated yet it bridges 2 seemingly unbridgeable ideas. I believe it is called 'theistic evolution' but this is what I believed long before I found out there was a name for it.

As for the Bible and the New Testament, while I do consider them the word of God, I don't think they should be taken literally (I could hear the gasps). They are both full of stories that are meant to teach by example as in the many stories Jesus recounted to his desciples.

Please forgive me if I offended anyone. That was not my intention. I was merely stating a personal belief.

[psaturn]

Byblos,

That was fine, it was not offensive. It was an honest reply to what you believe.

And many people think that way too.

The challenge for me is this:

I am Christian, I was raised Catholic by my strongly Catholic mother and went to Catholic school in a Catholic country.

My mother told me when I was a kid, God created the Earth and He created Man.

I accepted it.

One day at the Catholic school, a new priest taught the religion class and announced to the class that God did not create Man. Man evolved from monkeys. In my child's mind, that was totally against what my mom taught and what I was taught until then at the religion class. My whole worldview was shaken at that time. I questioned if my mom knew anything. I sure was confused !

It was during junior high school and high school that I had to deal with the reality of God. One month after I finished high school, I was at the basement of the local Catholic church and I had a personal encounter with the living Christ. Then I knew that Jesus was not longer a person in the history book. He was not a theory but a reality.

Then I had to deal with my Science knowledge. In high school I loved science classes. Of course they were all peppered with references to Evolution and all that...I chose Biology as my major in college since I was strong in high school with that subject and I wanted to be a doctor.

I definitely noticed the evolutionary mindset in all Biology classes but there were never evidences that convinced me...they were all looking through the atheistic prism. That God must not be involved in the Creation.

The more I studied Biology, the more I was amazed at the handiwork of God. Everyone else just thought it came by pure chance...Yeah Right !!! Just give a monkey a typewriter and see if he can come up with a work like Shakespeare !!! Oh, let's make it easy and see if he can even come up with a simple sentence !!! What is the chance of that happening ???

That is why Evolutionists depend on the millions of years to explain away the ridiculous thought things came by chance. Of course they do have an interesting point that stars are millions of light years away and the fact that we see the light now, it must have taken million years and so on and so on and they totally reject any theory that could explain the other side...

And Science is supposed to be neutral, not taking sides. If a theory is supported, then that must be it.

No.

A theory is BEING PUSHED. To the rejection of any other thinking that could refute that theory.

[Awesome]

"Being right and yet so unpopular presents an interesting problem for evolutionists. "

What a statement. [img]/forum/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img]

edit:

I remember months ago there was a post on how one of the world's largest believer in evolution, switched over to a creationist view. Now when there's someone who believes in something, most likely even more than you, and certainly knows more than you on the situation...you have to start to question yourself and your beliefs....

[byblos]

I completely understand what you're saying, being the cartesian product of Catholic school myself and from a deeply religious family. In my limited theological and scientific mind, I could not reconcile the differences between the theory of evolution on one side and the seemingly contradictory creationist theory on the other. They both present compelling arguments. The only way they both could make sense to me is if I could find a way to bridge the 2. Hence my views above which , simply stated, explain evolution as the work of God.

[byblos]

[ QUOTE ]
Hey bro, feel free to PM or email me with any questions you may have concerning evolution. As you know, it is a topic I have studied extensively. I'd be more than happy to help. [img]/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

Joe, thank you. I will certainly take you up on that.

[byblos]

[ QUOTE ]
byblos, the reason why this arguement is relevent is because if the evolutionists or "old age" theorists are correct, then that means that Jesus Christ is a liar. If he is a liar, he cannot be God, if he is not God, then we aren't Christians. [img]/forum/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img] So it is quite a big deal. [/quote)

Joe, I'm not sure what you're referring to here but this is the issue I always struggle with. Why if one side is correct the other must be automatically invalidated? We can always explain whatever Jesus said as being said according to the times and due to the limited knowledge people had at that time. If it is taken universally and out of that context it would lead to a lot of confusion about many things that Jesus said or did.


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Either way, I support Bush's proposal. [img]/forum/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

So do I.