[Elsie]

To me, it is absurd to try to take Genesis as if it were a science treatise, but hard line fundamentalists and atheists both seem to insist upon doing so.

and atheists??

[Rockingham]

I have more than once heard atheists insist that if Genesis or some other part of the Bible is wrong as narrative history or as science, then Christianity is fatally wrong and, by extension, God does not exist. The fundamentalist doctrine of Biblical inerracy invites such a position. On examination, the formative religious experience of many scientific atheists is their personal rejection of Biblical inerrancy and the narrow religious and cultural values of their family.

As a Catholic of the old school, the evolution debate often seems to me to be a fight not so much between faith and science as between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist former Christians who became fundamentalist scientific materialists. "Take that, Mom and Dad! I threw over the traces when I went to college! I've drunk alcohol, danced, read Playboy, and dated loose wimmen! There were no lightning bolts from the sky to punish me and I've learned about e-vo-lu-tion!"