But what percentage of them claim to be CHRISTIAN?
Evo:"Most of the people on the evolution camp here on FR are theists."
Elsie: But what percentage of them claim to be CHRISTIAN?
A high percentage, as far as I have been able to see. But that wasn't the original question posed by flightdeck, who I think quite carefully posted a different question?
I guess we can expand a little on this. Allow me to declare first-off that I am an atheist (weak atheist, Elsie, not strong atheist, so don't ask the boring "how do you have that much faith?" question yet again) so flightdeck can take my opinion on this with a pinch of salt if flightdeck wants to.
In another response in the subthread resulting from flightdeck's original question Elsie quoted copiously from scripture to demonstrate that in Elsie's opinion there is a dichotomy between Christianity and evolution. One may be true, or the other may be true, but in Elsie's opinion both cannot be true.
That belief that evolution and Christianity are mutually exclusive is quite common on FR and presumably elsewhere, but it is espoused almost entirely by those American Christians and Arab Muslim fundamentalists who reject evolution, and hardly at all by those who accept evolution of all faiths or none. In fact I don't think there is a single evo Freeper who believes that evolution is exclusive of original creation, and a majority of biological scientists claim religious belief.
Elsie and other religious people who typically have a very literal interpretation of their Holy Book proposes a syllogism:
That syllogism has an unfortunate problem, that I have pointed out to Elsie previously. If Elsie manages to convince anyone interested in the physical evidence in propositions 1, 2, and 3 (and the entire argument rests on the validity of those initial propositions) then the syllogism has a different outcome:
This may not be the conclusion that Elsie wants drawn, but it is the inescapable result of Elsie's propositions, and observation of the physical evidence.
In fact there is an ex-christian on these threads (narby) who claims to have left Christianity because their faith was shaken by this very argument. Previously they had reconciled their Christian faith with evolution, but the arguments of Elsie et al were persuasive, and led to the conclusion that Christianity is false.
I have to confess that I also find Elsie's argument somewhat persuasive. The theory of evolution cannot and does not speak about the existence of deities in general. But we can compare its conclusions (and the conclusions of many, many other scientific fields) with the claims made by specific religions. Science says that the first c. 15 chapters of Genesis are not literal truth; they are falsified by atomic physics, astronomy, paleontology, genetics, biology, geology, hydrology, cosmology (amongst others) and can only be read as allegory, unless you want to reject pretty much the whole of science and 300 years of accumulated cross-correlating physical evidence that the history of the world is not as described in Genesis. To answer Elsie's question in her oft-repeated scripture post, "Yes, Paul was wrong."
I guess that what I am saying is that if you want to accept evolution, and be a Christian then you don't really have an argument with me. Who am I to say that a Christian has to accept the opening chapters of Genesis.?But you do have an argument with a lot of other people like Elsie who are Christians, and who appear to think that you cannot be a "proper(?)" Christian if you accept evolution.