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should have been written "should inform their families and friends" to explore both possibilities"
" then they at least owe it to their families and friends to explore both possibilities."
why?
should have been written "should inform their families and friends" to explore both possibilities"
o smeagol,
Never heard that term before. Looked it up and will respond to it if need be.
Thanks
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/
washingtonpost.com
Verbatim: Noodle This, Kansas
Sunday, August 28, 2005; B05
There's been no lack of commentary since the Kansas State Board of Education began debating whether to teach "intelligent design" alongside evolution in the public schools. One of the more unusual submissions to the board came from Bobby Henderson, a 24-year-old graduate of Oregon State University with a degree in physics. Eliciting no immediate response, Henderson posted his letter on the Internet in June. It soon attracted a large audience: Henderson said last week that the Web site has gotten more than 14.5 million hits and was currently getting 750,000 a day. He has since received e-mails from three Kansas education board members, which are posted -- along with scores of others -- on Henderson's site,http://www.venganza.org(named, for reasons that will become clear below, after a Spanish pirate ship).
==========================
Open Letter to Kansas School Board
I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.
Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.
It is for this reason that I'm writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I'm sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but [is] instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.
Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don't understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.
I'm sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory. It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don't.
You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.
In conclusion, thank you for taking the time to hear our views and beliefs. I hope I was able to convey the importance of teaching this theory to your students. We will of course be able to train the teachers in this alternate theory. I am eagerly awaiting your response, and hope dearly that no legal action will need to be taken. I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.
Sincerely Yours,
Bobby Henderson, concerned citizen.
P.S. I have included an artistic drawing of Him creating a mountain, trees, and a midget. Remember, we are all His creatures.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
No No No No No.
Please do your research before you decide to keep spreading bigoted false histories.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06342b.htm
The New York Times
August 28, 2005
Show Me the Science
By DANIEL C. DENNETT
Blue Hill, Me.
PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."
Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.
First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: "Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which certainly do work..."
Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don't have to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all reasonable doubt.
With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.
A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:
Test Two
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]
If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:
Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.
Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing en ies must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.
Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end.
But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while.
We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.
All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements ac ulate - this was Darwin's insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.
Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.
If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with "Orgel's Second Rule": Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural selection to "discover" an "ingenious" solution to a design problem posed in the lab.
This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two. When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.
Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.
Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.
The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.
To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.
Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.
Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a anic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.
William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.
In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.
To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.
To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet:
About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.
If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued.
We'd still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.
But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report.
It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students.
SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.
The Discovery Ins ute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.
Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.
Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Ins ute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.
For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Ins ute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."
Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?
Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is the author of "Freedom Evolves" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
...has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Strawman #1.
...which has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Strawman #2.2. Some argue that the earth is 4 billion years old. This is not enough time for evolution to have happened. The rate of mutations likely to be helpful is not large enough to explain the development of all things, especially the first cell from non-living chemicals...
...which is unrelated to the theory of evolution. Strawman #3.3. No model has ever succesfully been given for the evolution of the first biological cell from random chemical reactions over a long period of time...
Well, frankly, they are all over the place. This is sort of like the atheist who would ask for "evidence" of ancient biblical manuscripts in the original languages.3. The fossil record speaks against classical Darwinian evolution, not in its favour. Where are all the transitional fossils?
Physics has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Strawman #4.Some Biological Problems of the Natural Selection Theory - Dr. Jerry Bergman
4. If any of the constants of physics were just a little different, Life would be impossible for many reasons. But why do the laws of physics exist? And why are these constants just right for the existence of life? Has someone "monkeyed with the constants of physics" to make life possible?
That last sentence is what one might call a "non sequitur."5. All the so-called "missing links" between apes and man are either frauds or pure speculations based on very scanty "evidence". The earth should be replete with them if millions of small changes between man and ape account for the evolution of man from apes.
What exactly is the queen bee then?6. Some creatures, like the honey bee, just can't be accounted for by the theory of natural selection, since the honey bees themselves don't pass on genetic information.
I'm glad my faith is secure... otherwise, "evidence" like this might cause me to doubt it.
The theory of evolution is NOT some all-encompassing atheistic metaphysical explanation of the universe. It is a theory that describes the mechanism by which organisms diversify and specialize over time.
The theory of evolution does not disprove the existence of God. Nor does it disprove Christianity, nor does it disprove the Bible, nor does it disprove an inerrant Bible. All it disproves is the notion that the first two chapters of Genesis are historical prose. I would have thought that the style of writing would have made that clear anyway.
Biblical literalists don't even bat an eye at the obvious symbolism and poetic license in the Psalms and much of the prophetic writings in the Old Testament. To make the Gospels harmonize, you have to admit that writers take great liberties with chronology for the benefit of making theological points. There must be at least 100 topics that the inspired biblical writers took greater interest in than the traditional accounts of first things. And yet, so many Christians will expend so much energy making specious argument after specious argument to defend a very Western reading of Genesis 1 and 2 that flies in the face of everything textual critics know about the way the ancient Hebrews wrote.
This controversy just never seemed to make sense to me.
I did do my research, from my History book;
And how dare you call me a bigot!!!In 1633, the Italian scientist Galileo was put to trial by the Catholic Church for maintaining that the sun was the center of the universe and that the Earth moved around the sun. Galileo, who was sixty years old and in ill health, was kept waiting for two months before he was tried and found guilty of heresy (the holding of religous doctrines different from the official teachings of the church) and disobedience. Completely shattered by the experience, Galileo condemned his supposed errors: "With a sincere heart I curse and detest the said errors contrary to the Holy Church and I swear that I will nevermore in future say of assert anything that may give rise to a similar su ion of me." Legend holds that when he left the trial room, Galileo muttered to himself: "And yet it does move!" (referring to the Earth).
Last edited by E20; 08-29-2005 at 10:35 PM.
Originally posted by jochhejaam : 1. The Big Bang theory is based on solid data and would show that the Universe had a finite beginning in time (about 15 billion years ago) - before that it didn't exist. How did everything come out of something that didn't exist, if there is no God?
Way to edit the information out of it's original context to fit your arguement. Evolution is not based on a beginning? And the question posed is how did everything come out of nothing? Poor response Stout.Originally posted by Extra Stout : .1. The Big Bang theory... .."has nothing to do with the theory of evolution". Strawman #1.
Stout's Strawman #1 reasoning debunked .
If that was your source then I apologize for the remark.
But your source is not correct.
It's crap like that that perpetuates the "The Catholic Church Is Anti-Science" bull and I won't sit quietly and let people get away with it anymore.
No, it isn't. The theory of evolution does not address the origins of life. It can go back to single-celled organisms, but it doesn't really explain how the first single-celled organisms formed. Abiogenesis is a different theory, and a weaker one.Way to edit the information out of it's original context to fit your arguement. Evolution is not based on a beginning?
The question of how everything comes out of nothing is indeed a good question, and one for which every time science sheds a little light, it only creates even more questions.And the question posed is how did everything come out of nothing? Poor response Stout.
But that is not the theory of evolution. The scope of that theory is limited to the changes and diversity in organisms over time. It does not address the origins of life, much less the origins of the universe.
You are arguing against atheistic naturalism, not evolution. Atheistic naturalism states that there is no God, everything that is came about as a result of mere chance, and that naturalistic mechanisms which developed randomly can explain all observable phenomena in the universe.
Atheistic naturalism is not a scientific theory because it is not falsifiable. It is a philosophy. Followers often use the theory of evolution to argue their belief. They are really good at baiting Christians into arguing against the theory of evolution, which is among the strongest natural scientific theories, rather than arguing against athetistic naturalism, which isn't really that strong at all.
When Christians argue against evolution, they create a very strong case against their faith among uncoverted educated people. Not only must those people throw out the entire body of mainstream science to accept Christianity as it is presented to them, they must also ignore the reality of all the technology that has been developed based upon mainstream science.
They have to believe that everything we've developed with regard to everything from medicine to agriculture to energy is just lucky guesses because the entire foundation of knowledge those things come from is false.
It is as if you are telling them that Christianity says the sky is red, and you can't be a Christian unless you believe that, even though anyone with eyes can see the sky is blue.
That is not "faith." One can believe in things unseen, but that doesn't mean that one has to believe that this reality is a false one. Many a heresy has been born upon the notion that this reality is an illusion. God isn't trying to trick us.
It is very difficult to regain hold over the culture when the educated and professional classes are at best skeptical of your views. Christians wonder why the culture has been slipping through their fingers for 100 years, and I can assure you that the sorry state of the evangelical mind in this country is one of the reasons. There are far too few Lewises and Bonhoeffers and Barths right now in this country. Christians once upon a time were at the forefront of culture and knowledge. Now they lag the secular world by a century or more, and pat themselves on the back for their anti-intellectualism. I understand that the Bible says that a man's faith should be like that of a child, but I think that means one should trust God as a child trusts his father, not that one should go through life thinking like a 4-year-old.
The body of Christ wouldn't work well if it were entirely cerebral cortex, but neither does it work well without that part.
excellent posts Stout
Jelly, you da man!
no, I'm theJelly, you da man!
funnily enough, I'm eating a banana right now.
Thanks. If only I were as benevolent as I am articulate. People tell me I am the most well-spoken evil person since Hitler.excellent posts Stout
I wish I were as articulate and as evil as you Stout.
Excellent post!
Last edited by smeagol; 08-30-2005 at 07:12 PM.
jochhejaam <----covering eyes and ears. "lalalalalalala lalalalalala, I'm not listening."
Thats twisted Stout. I suppose if Christians presented the theory of evolution as the 11th Commandment "Thou shalt not believe in evolution" then it could have an effect on the responsiveness to Christianity, but they don't, and it doesn't.Originally posted by Stout : When Christians argue against evolution, they create a very strong case against their faith among uncoverted educated people. Not only must those people throw out the entire body of mainstream science to accept Christianity as it is presented to them, they must also ignore the reality of all the technology that has been developed based upon mainstream science.
Evolution itself is what's problematic regarding Christianity in that it denies the Genesis account of creation and has therefore pitted itself against Christianity, not the other way around. The "standard scientific theory" of evolution is "that `human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process. -Shermer-
"There are two forms of atheism: theoretical atheism, which claims there is not a God, and practical atheism, which does not actually deny that God exists but rather that God does not do anything that has any bearing on
human affairs". -Mautner-
Yet you state that Christians have erected the wall between the elite intellectuals and Christ? No Stout, it's obvious that they haven't. Christianity was around long before the atheistic/agnostic theory of evolution came into fruition so it's a blatant fabrication to suggest that the any anti-evolution influence against Christianity falls at the feet of Christians.
Evolutionists' suppression of the teaching of theism is atheistic
While atheism is not officially taught in public schools (e.g. in the USA), if God is omitted from accounts of origins, then students will take that as implying that God had no part in such origins which is effectively atheism. For the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that theism is religious, while its alternative is not, is anything but neutral . It is "as if in a debate the judge were to decide for the negative, not because its arguments were stronger but because the affirmative's arguments were ruled out of order"
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Last edited by jochhejaam; 08-30-2005 at 08:23 PM.
After reading through this thread, I've come to the conclusion that jochhejaam > MFD. But that isn't saying much.
You may be getting fed up, Manny, but remember who you used to have to deal with.
No comparison. Pat Robertson > MFD
And us who have to deal with Manny?
Sorry. Not true. The majority of Christians (including myself) have no problem reconciling a Creator God with evolution.
^^^^^^^I'm not sure how you came to your conclusion that I inferred that Christians can't reconcile evolution and God. Read it again travis.Originally posted by jochhejaam: I suppose if Christians presented the theory of evolution as the 11th Commandment "Thou shalt not believe in evolution" then it could have an effect on the responsiveness to Christianity, but they don't, and it doesn't.
Based on this post you missed the point of my post. I'm not sure how you interpreted my post to say that Christians cannot adhere to or consider the theory of evolution. That's not implied.
I strongly disagree with Stout's assertion that Christians who reject the theory of evolution have impaired the elitist intellectual from being able to accept Christianity.
If their so intelligent or intellectual then they would explore for themselves the tenets of Christianity and come to their own conclusions and not be swayed by Christians that don't buy into evolution. True? Of course it is.
Eternity with or without God will be determined by ones belief in God's plan of salvation for mankind, not by ones belief of disbelief in evolution.
I have a problem with a theory that dismisses with disdain the intelligent design of all of creation by my God according to Genesis.
Evolutionists are exclusionary, not God. If they want to incorporate Intelligent Design into their theory fine, but until then, for me, they've set into action Murphy's Law that states "for every reaction there is an opposite and equal reaction". They don't believe in God's creationism, I don't believe in their unproven theory of evolution. God is their Creator, do you believe this or do you think He's a liar too? They're the ones that are unwilling to reconcile.
Evolution is neutral on the subject. Some scientists choose to interpret the theory in that manner.
Personally...if creation happened exactly as Genesis states, in that order, 6000 years ago, then that makes God the liar. Not evolution.
The evidence for a "big bang" beginning for the universe (unrelated whatsoever to evolution) is damn near conclusive.
The evidence for a 4+ billion year old Earth and for evolution is also there. It is the absolute best explanation at this time for the data.
For God to create a 6000 year old earth, with everything as it is now...and with stars out there with distances that are obviously in the millions and billions of light-years...in other words, created to look like it's old when it's not...sorry, that makes God a liar. I refuse to believe that.
As Galileo is quoted as saying..."I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
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