I get frustrated when atheists point to the dumbest Christians they could find and as soon as they express a lack of education in an advanced scientific area, claim to have discredited Christianity. But it’s equally frustrating when a Christian thinks that because the idiotic statement “the 2nd law of thermodynamics disproves evolution” stumps the most uneducated atheist he can find, he’s made steps towards anything.
Yes, yes, and yes. This has been a great frustration for me for the last decade and a half, and as usual, Matt sums up in two sentences what I’ve been trying to say for several years. I really wish the scientific establishment would stop treating believers as young-earth rubes. There are many of us who believe the Bible and yet remain comfortable with the idea of aeons, dinosaurs, and australopithecus (if you get my continental drift). “Middle ground” between science and religion doesn’t discredit or weaken either side. The religion camp should not be afraid at all of scientific truth, because truth is truth and future generations may look at us as provincial in light of new knowledge (just ask Urban VIII how he feels about that old earth-centered view).
Dangit, that still took me four sentences.
For a heaping helping of Deep Thoughts, don’t miss Matt’s new blog.
But the thing we must all bear in mind is that these people need each other. There are rabid anti-truth Christians who imagine that 5000 years ago God planted into the earth the bones of dinos that didn’t exist. (Why? because He knew we’d be using petroleum! True. I had a *minister* tell me that.) And there are rabid anti-wisdom atheists who would never say there’s no Shakespeare just because they discovered that “Hamlet” is made of words and letters, but have no trouble leaping to that conclusion about our universe.
And the thing is, they need each other desperately, just like Michael Moore needs Ann Coulter, just like the guy in the asylum who thinks he’s Jesus needs the guy who thinks he’s Pontius Pilate. It’s a bloody battle, and it’s almost impossible for us to win, except of course that we do have Time on our side.
No one now, for instance, would ever ask you, “Do you believe in a loving God who put the earth at the center of all things, or are you a godless atheist who thinks this is all chance, and that the sun is at the center?” But that’s what they were saying to Copernicus.
The fact that Copernicus was wrong and that there were holes in his theory (the sun *isn’t* at the center) is immaterial — he was on the right track.
Frustrating to me are the Christians who find holes in Darwin’s theories and think that’s proof that the earth is at the center. They seem to think that the best proof of God’s existence is that he’s responsible for all the stuff we can’t explain with science. This leads them to not want science to explain much more than it has, and, more toxically, to believe in a God Of The Gaps, a God who merely fills in what we can’t account for. Well, I don’t need a God like that either.
But then again, those arguments are all the yin-yang of a meme that wants to survive — that science and religion are opposed. And all the while, there’s a giant group of people who, every time we discover that God’s universe is even more amazing than we imagined, have the imagination and the humility to simply say Wow.
Comment by barrybrake — January 4, 2008 @ 1:47 pm