An article in the Louisiana Advocate recounts an exchange between their editorial staff and a local pastor is instructive in how these arguments typically go and why there is so much work to be done. They write:
The problem is that individuals such as Pastor Corie simply do not accept the empirical data. They claim that dating methods are inaccurate, that all the fossil hominid evidence is not what paleoanthropologists say it is, that the geologists are all wrong about the age of the Earth, that the astronomers are all wrong about the age of the universe, that biologists and geneticists are all wrong regarding speciation etc., etc., ad nauseam.
Finally, Pastor Corie claims that individuals like myself “will be eternally damned,” and asks God to have mercy upon our souls, since, apparently, data-based reasoning is a sin.
Yes, the gulf is that wide.
These type of exchanges are so disheartening for me. I used to post regularly on ChristianForums.com, in the creation vs evolution section, where I was one of the few Christians who defended evolution and tired to explain Christianity to the non-believers and evolution to the believers alike (I was not very successful). Over and over again I would see this exchange were a frustrated Christian would finally declare, "Look, evolution is a lie and if you don't come around you will burn forever". This is being said to people who do research in genetics and paleontology, who actually understand what evolution is and what evidence there is for it. And yet the guy who has revealed he is a total amatuar who knows nothing about actual common descent and has never worked a day in the field in his life just declared that God is going to burn them forever for trusting empiracle observation and reason. No wonder they are atheists, who could conceive that such a God would exist.
ReplyDeleteWhat is interesting is that even from Genesis, we learn never to judge God by his believers. As I have said, many Christians don't want to hear about it because they have always associated it with atheism and, lets face it, most people have very limited science education and don't understand that the same scientific methods used to test whether or not that chair they are sitting on is going to fall are the same methods that hypothesized that the remains of an animal like Titaalik rosae would be found in shallow Devonian sea deposits in Greenland, showing the link between the late fish and the earliest tetrapods.
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