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Edited on Sat May-08-10 10:00 AM by Kurt_and_Hunter
I am sympathetic to the anguish (though not the goals) of the fundamentalist evolution denier. He actually gets it.
The physicist Niels Bohr said that if quantum physics is not shocking, if it seems to make sense to you, then you don’t understand it.
Similarly, if evolution doesn't up-end a monotheist's religion he probably doesn't understand it.
The standard compromise position that evolution is God's chosen method of creation does great violence to God, evolution or both. Evolution is deeply hostile to any theory of omniscience, omnipotence, pre-destination, or purposeful creation. It cannot be successfully married to any religion featuring a god with post-big-bang opinions or agency. Using evolution to create man is sillier than financing your retirement by buying a power-ball ticket. That idea is from the era when everyone accepted evolution and nobody understood it... the turn-of-the-century idea that evolution is about progress.
I suppose evolution is compatible with the weakest sort of Deism. But the weakest sort of Deism is not a religion -- by contemporary standards, a dressed-up form of agnosticism or even atheism. (The majority of our founding fathers did not believe in God in any sense that would qualify as belief today.)
The long hoped-for, dreamed-of marriage of science and religion in the life sciences is an absurdity. Religion may be able to adopt stances out of social/practical convenience but science is not: science cannot compromise on any scientific point and has no opinion on any non-scientific point.
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