Creationists Say the Darndest Things
I'm enjoying my latest lot of marking, for a change. One assignment they had was to visit a creationist website, read a few articles and write about what they learnt. I got a full spectrum of responses. Below are some choice quotes (bad spelling and grammar in original):
...one of the few things that evolutionist and creationist agree on is that the world is round.Those last two bother me in a different way to the straight-up creationism. Many of the students chose to reveal their personal beliefs and occasionally their church attendance habits but there was no one admit to being an atheist or even agnostic.
According to Morris [in heaven] each person will get their Garden of Eden to look after on one of the many galaxies... I don't know which interpretation is right but I do know that heaven is going to be breathtaking.
The general impression I got from the five articles I read was one of defensiveness, negative statements, and a general unwillingness to compromise... Apologies if I seem particularly irked by these writers. I seems to me that there was absolutely no attempt by them to be objective in their articles, which I suppose should be expected, as this is an interest group with an agenda... there was no chance I could trust anything I was reading...
The thing that really caught my attention while I was reading through the articles, was the thorough, and well-organized argument that the authors wrote with. There was no mindless arguing.
He states that evolution is not observable science because we cannot observe the process today, and we were not in the past to observe what occurred then... I think what he says is bit hypocritical because we were not living when God created earth...
...there is no right or wrong religion to teach children, there are only more accurate versions.
I've learned about evolution since the seventh grade and I still go to church, worship God, and live a Christian lifestyle.
The shit may hit the fan tomorrow (here's hoping!) when we talk about whether atheism necessarily follows from evolution. Of course I'll say that it doesn't. But I will ask them, "What would be so bad if evolution did lead to atheism?" I guess I've identified as an atheist long enough now for the word not to have the negative connotations it once had for me. (I am a little sensitive to those claims that morality requires religion in particular.)
posted by Nick @ 11:12 pm
4 comments
4 Comments:
Does atheism necessarily follow from evolution? I'm glad you're saying it doesn't. I hope you're not just saying that to be polite.
If atheism did necessarily follow from evolution, would that be a bad thing? Maybe not for you, but for people with religious beliefs it would be. Religion is not simply an intellectual idea, though some critics think it should be. If you've been living your whole life for a certain reason or purpose, and that is taken away, of course that would be upsetting.
What if evolution were to be discredited, and biologists had to totally change their ideas and figure out how to reinterpret everything they'd already thought. Would that be a bad thing?
By the way, I'm reading Alister McGrath's book Dawkins' God at the moment. It's very interesting.
Polite, me? I'm saying that it doesn't follow simply because it's not a logical relationship. Of course I believe that there's overwhelming evidence against the existence of gods, and evolutionary biology is part of that, but it's not the only conclusion one could draw. But those are metaphysical questions.
On Friday the class all decided William Provine's argument that atheism follows from evolution is no good. So I had to play devil's advocate and "pretend" to be an atheist, arguing for a Dawkins/Provine sort of realism whereby atheism seems to follow. But I did emphasise that that is philosophy, not science. (The one Muslim seemed to find it quite reassuring when I told him that science passes over God in silence, that atheism is the domain of philosophy.)
It's certainly disappointing when scientific theories get falsified but a good scientist will take it on the chin. (No, I'm not so naïve to think it happens easily!) If religious people have more than a career invested in their beliefs, well, that's a shame. Luckily I didn't. Losing my faith didn't leave me with a sense of meaninglessness. I never believed that God was necessary for ethics, the way some of the nastier fundamentalists try to claim.
Some might say, "That's not where it's at, you had no faith to lose." I don't know.
If religious people have more than a career invested in their beliefs, well, that's a shame.
What about someone who found out that the man they thought was their father actually wasn't - they were actually born through IVF with an anonymous sperm donor?
I'm just trying to come up with an analogy to explain why it would be a problem for a religious person, such as a Christian, to find out that evolution necessarily entails atheism (assuming evolution is true, of course!)
I think the problem with that analogy is that it only holds for an instrumentalist belief in God. That is, one could say that it doesn't matter who one's biological father is because they love the man who raised them. They might even prefer not to know the truth in such a situation. That would be fine because both men exist and the daughter has a real object for her filial affections. Likewise, the paternal affections have a real source. But we're debating the very existence of God here. You don't seem the sort of Christian who'd want to say, "God is real for me."
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