That sums it up very well. I am shocked that creationsists, who claim to be Christian, defend their faith by sinning. After all, we are call upon not to bear false witness. Biologists know the limits of their knowledge regarding evolution and do not misrepresent their knowledge. Creationsist must use lies and deceit, right up to corrupting basic science, to make their flawed points. They are very poor Ambassadors for Christ and should be ashamed of themselves.
That sums it up very well. I am shocked that creationsists, who claim to be Christian, defend their faith by sinning. After all, we are call upon not to bear false witness. Biologists know the limits of their knowledge regarding evolution and do not misrepresent their knowledge. Creationsist must use lies and deceit, right up to corrupting basic science, to make their flawed points. They are very poor Ambassadors for Christ and should be ashamed of themselves.Absolutely. In fact, I will admit that the Christian faith that I had when I signed on to FR has been whittled away to agnosticism, as a direct result of the disengenuousness and sometimes outright block-headed stupidity of the creationists. If, as they say, either evolution is true or the Bible is true, the Bible is false, because evolution is not only happened, but we pretty much know how, too.
There is a very ancient thesis that the only secure foundation for public morality is religion. Moreover not just any religion will do -- it must have supernatural being(s) who monitor your behaviour, have standards of right and wrong that you must meet, and who act on how well you meet those standards.-- Evolution and Morality
We are, so to speak, the wayward children of the Gods who are to be loved, to be punished when we are bad, and rewarded when we are good.
Now the important thing for public morality is not whether there is such a God or Gods, but that people believe and accept that there are. Without such a guide, people naturally fall into depravity.
Mark that, for the purposes of securing public morality, it does not matter whether the religion is true or not, but only that people believe and accept it.
Let us accept this thesis as a postulate. Let us further accept the maintenance of public morality as a necessity, one that has higher priority than the determination of truth. Indeed, by evolutionary criteria it does. A minimum level of public morality is necessary for survival of a society; intellectual honesty is not.
Under these assumptions, what is the status of evolution? Why it is almost infinitely destructive. The funadmental objection to evolution is to a concept underlying it, the notion that it is permissable to use rational thought to study life and that, where rational thought and religion come into conflict, rational thought takes precedence.
Once such a pernicious concept takes hold, the psychology that permits the unquestioning acceptance of religious belief and its corresponding beneficial effect on behaviour is undermined, to the ultimate detriment of society. In other words:
Intellectual dishonesty in the name of religion is a virtue.
Copyright © 1993 by Richard Harter
You shouldn't attribute to malice behaviors that ignorance suffice to explain.
The fact is that evolution has us on the ropes, we pedestrian Christians that is. Not the science behind it, but the spin the science is given: the worldview projected onto and from the science. Nothing has undermined the faith of our children, our neighbors and our friends more than the possibility that God did not make them, that God is not their Father, but a monkey is their uncle.
I'm lucky, being a Catholic, I do not have to hold to a fundamentalists faith in the story of Genesis. I have to hold on to the Church. However, many of my brethren lost to the Catholic church have the bible alone and if they surrender one word of it, they are on a slippery slope.
The upshot is that we ordinary Christians either turn away from science as we would a persecutor or enemy, or we fight against it. "Science" has become a dirty word, along with "professor" and "doctor."
The best thing an evolutionist could do, the most charitable thing science could do, is to give back to the Christians a foothold for their faith. It's really the only thing that can avert the culture war between Christianity in America and science in America.
Please pardon me for not using macro-evolution as a technical term. I was using the term differently while mixing it with something I parroted from G.K. Chesterton in the Everlasting Man.
You're quite right, you have mountains of evidence. Unfortunately, others have used your mountains of evidence to try to destroy the faith of innocents. I'm certainly not blaming you for this, however, but you see the results are quite plain.