The militant attitude is harmful. I know you want to be right, but you’re alienating your fellow human beings.
It’s good theology. You don’t know theology.
I don’t think the majority of Americans are YECs. But most believe that God had a hand in “guiding” evolution along, so to speak. You will also find more reluctance to believe that evolution applies to humans than that it applies to non-human animals.
“Will”, no. “Would”, yes.
If a giant hand came out of the sky and scooped Dawkins up and a booming voice said I AM GOD AND YOU HAVE DISPLEASED ME, I’m pretty sure Dawkins would immediately renounce his atheism and acknowledge god, because, you know, there’s proof of god right there. Or at least insanity. But either way, I’m pretty sure he’d change his tune.
I hate the implication that both sides are somehow equals, that they’re both extremists that aren’t privy to the real truth. No. Dawkins is on the side of evidence and reason. Refusing to retract his no-god stance isn’t about vanity, it’s about being unambiguously correct.
I doubt Dawkins is going to retract his “Santa Claus isn’t real” or “Pluto is not made of cheese” stances either. Must be that intellectual vanity of his!
Thanks for the link. That is pretty much what I though. Der Trihs made the comment that
I’ve always taken creationism when used like that to be short hand for literal creationism, but perhaps I am in the wrong. I’d like to know what he meant.
We can quibble about what “mainstream” means, but I wouldn’t say it has to be > 50% to fall in that category. At 38%, I’d say that qualifies as “mainstream”-- ie, not just a fringe view.
Still, the idea that teachers are generally afraid to talk about evolution is ludicrous.
Hence my question to Der Trihs. You and I can make assumptions all day as to the meaning. That is the brilliance of weasel words.
Regardless, I am truly saddened by the poll result you linked and other results I have found.
Does he have a “Pluto is not made of cheese” stance? 
I really think it depends on where you go. It was “taught” in my school (and from what I can see of my kids’ curriculum, it’s much the same), but the teacher gave the barest minimum of information, got it over with as quickly as possible, and added little remarks in order to show that, while it would be on tests, and was required to be talked about, it wasn’t true. I suspect this holds true for a lot of American schools; its nearly a universal experience for everyone I know who went to school outside of a city.
Now, I live in the south, in the bible belt, and that surely affects my view of this. Although I know a couple people who grew up in a more rural place in Illinois, and they had the same experience.
Exactly the point I have been working at making. I would like to see text books that at least in the preface state that the material in the book represents mans best efforts to understand the world based on careful examination of the world.
How old are you? No snark intended; it’s a genuine question. I’m 29 and my K-12 education was at (2) Catholic schools. Your experience is the polar opposite of mine. I was taught very early on that the creation storIES (there’s more than one in the Bible, people!) are metaphorical; I specifically remember the first simplified explanation being that “one day” actually meant billions of years, since wouldn’t that seem as short as a day would to us? Tiny kids had no problem accepting that idea. As we got older, explanations became more nuanced and evolution was taught as soon as we had science classes. We also had the scientific method drilled into our heads.
Hell (;)), in high school we were flat-out encouraged to doubt and challenge Catholicism and its beliefs, even if it meant we decided we didn’t agree with it. If a person’s faith can’t even withstand the slightest criticism/doubt, then it’s not worth much at all, they explained. Kinda like how it’s better to look around and see that your house is made of Popsicle sticks and paste now and either rebuild it (question your faith, get answers and have it strengthened) or move the fuck out to a better structure (question your faith and reject it after true contemplation) before a hurricane comes and blows it to smithereens just when you needed it most.
I’m 23,* and my high school education was crap. The only teachers who were worthwhile were the math teacher and the english teacher. Science was particularly bad. My first year was the previously mentioned creationist. Sophomore year science was taught by the school secretary. (I skipped it that year and took chemistry at the public high school across the street.) Junior year we got a massage therapist/nurse turned teacher who was a fundamentalist christian. Senior year, someone must have sobered up because we got an actual science teacher for Physics, which was great. As far as I’m concerned, there will have to be murders in the hallways before I would consider taking any hypothetical kids I may have out of public school and into parochial.
All that being said, my elementary and middle school years were fine. Apparently all the crazies just gravitated to the high school. But my point is that it’s all well and good for some muckety-muck to mouth a platitude or two but if you really want to see what’s up, you gotta get into the nitty-gritty. Don’t assume that because there’s a papal encyclical about it, your school doesn’t have its head up its ass.
*In a strange coincidence which I’m sure no one cares about, 23 was how old my teacher was when she made that comment. There’s a whole story there that interests probably no one and lies outside the scope of this thread, but the confluence amused me.
Edit – never mind, what I misread what Inner Stickler said. But the fact is, your teachers were wrong, Catholicism doesn’t teach that Evolution is false.
I’m 33, and we learned about Evolution (well, the bare bones, as this was elementary school), in school. When I was in fourth grade, our science teacher, a nun, had someone from the local museum come by to talk to us about how the earth was formed and all that.
I’d remind that official Catholic dogma is that evolution happened, but lay parishioners have all sorts of stupid and insane beliefs. Most Christians don’t read the bible. They have a cluttered and imperfect idea of what their particular sect says is right.
As for Der’s claim that most teachers stray away from teaching evolution:
Piffle. Evolution was the default position of the American public until the 1970s.
Sure, I do. That took place in the 1920s in Tennessee and when they made a play and a movie about it, the “winners” of the contest were on the side of evolution–and both the play and the movie were huge hits, not scorned by the public.
Of course, while that has happened, it is more frequent, now, than it ever was, historically. You are acting pretty much like the Christian believers in the Rapture: they pretend that their 1830s theology has been a big part of Christian belief for 2,000 years and you pretend that 1970s Creationism has been a big part of American education for the last 150 years. You are both wrong.
Not true, sadly.
Scopes’s conviction was a foregone conclusion.
My comment was specifically in regards to the movie and play in which, despite the conviction, Darrow wreaked havoc on Bryan and Fundamentalist biblical belief was held up as ridiculous, hence the quotation marks around “winners.” (For that matter, newspapers of the time were nearly unanimous in their ridicule of the prosecution; the wholesale turn to Creationism by portions of the U.S. outside the Bible Belt has occurred subsequent to the rise of the Religious Right.)
Horseshit. Based on decades of debate with Christians who are serious enough about their faith to participate in such debates, I’d say that most Christians are no more aware of the conflict in Genesis 1-2 than they are of the conflicting genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. And as with the genealogies, most of the minority who actually are aware of them will tell you that they are not really contradictory at all, but merely different perspectives.
Horseshit again. You keep trying to make it sound like Augustine considered Genesis allegorical. Far from it. He considered it factual. His admonition against excessive literalism was directed against people whose interpretation differed from his literalism.
Here’s a passage from his “City of God,” explaining how he knows when the angels were created :
‘…this very book itself begins, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, so that before heaven and earth God seems to have made nothing. Since, therefore, He began with the heavens and the earth—and the earth itself, as Scripture adds, was at first invisible and formless, light not being as yet made, and darkness covering the face of the deep (that is to say, covering an undefined chaos of earth and sea, for where light is not, darkness must needs be)—and then when all things, which are recorded to have been completed in six days, were created and arranged, how should the angels be omitted, as if they were not among the works of God, from which on the seventh day He rested? Yet, though the fact that the angels are the work of God is not omitted here, it is indeed not explicitly mentioned; but elsewhere Holy Scripture asserts it in the clearest manner. For in the Hymn of the Three Children in the Furnace it was said, O all you works of the Lord bless the Lord; and among these works mentioned afterwards in detail, the angels are named … Here the angels are most expressly and by divine authority said to have been made by God, for of them among the other heavenly things it is said, He commanded, and they were created. Who, then, will be bold enough to suggest that the angels were made after the six days’ creation? If any one is so foolish, his folly is disposed of by a scripture of like authority, where God says, When the stars were made, the angels praised me with a loud voice. Job 38:7 The angels therefore existed before the stars; and the stars were made the fourth day. Shall we then say that they were made the third day? Far from it; for we know what was made that day. The earth was separated from the water, and each element took its own distinct form, and the earth produced all that grows on it. On the second day, then? Not even on this; for on it the firmament was made between the waters above and beneath, and was called Heaven, in which firmament the stars were made on the fourth day. There is no question, then, that if the angels are included in the works of God during these six days, they are that light which was called Day, and whose unity Scripture signalizes by calling that day not the first day, but one day. For the second day, the third, and the rest are not other days; but the same one day is repeated to complete the number six or seven, so that there should be knowledge both of God’s works and of His rest. For when God said, Let there be light, and there was light, if we are justified in understanding in this light the creation of the angels, then certainly they were created partakers of the eternal light which is the unchangeable Wisdom of God, by which all things were made, and whom we call the only-begotten Son of God; so that they, being illumined by the Light that created them, might themselves become light and be called Day, in participation of that unchangeable Light and Day which is the Word of God, by whom both themselves and all else were made. The true Light, which lights every man that comes into the world, John 1:9 — this Light lights also every pure angel, that he may be light not in himself, but in God; from whom if an angel turn away, he becomes impure, as are all those who are called unclean spirits, and are no longer light in the Lord, but darkness in themselves, being deprived of the participation of Light eternal. For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name evil.’
If you can get through that without either falling asleep, or laughing yourself silly, you will see that he considers Genesis 1 not only factual, but infallible. His quibble about literalism is merely over whether the word “day” is the standard 24-hour day, but I don’t see how anyone can read this and think Augustine would not oppose Darwin.
That’s not what he says. But he does say because evolution is true, the creation myth in Genesis is false.
And he can hardly say otherwise. Special creation is what evolution replaced. Complaining that he mentions that several times is kind of like complaining a documentary about Columbus doesn’t just stick to the profits of his voyage, and keeps bringing up the fact that the old maps were wrong.
That you have had numerous debates with American Christians only means that you have too narrow a selection from which to base an accurate claim. (For that matter, it is only the literalists who will, generally, even bother to argue the point. You say that they are “serious enough about their faith” to debate it, while my experience has been that they are the only ones with sufficient emotional investment in attacking Darwin to bother arguing the point. The majority of Christians I know recognize that arguing with fundy Christians or fundy atheists is futile and simply don’t engage in those discussions. So you are simply saying that you have spent decades arguing with the one group that is most likely to hold that position.) This hardly refutes my point.
I don’t find your exegesis of Augustine persuasive in any way. Augustine started with a text and expounded on the text in the context of beliefs. There is no effort on his part to show that Genesis contradicts the creation myths of Rome, Greece, or Egypt. There is no effort to set dates on events or to employ the myth to explain agriculture or biology or any of a hundred physical phenomena. He is placing religious beliefs into the context of the story. His admonition in Chapter 19 of On Genesis is not merely defending “days” as an unknown quantity, but a specific instuction to avoid confusing the religious message with any of the speculations of natural philosophy, (that would later evolve into science).
You cannot see it because you need Augustine to be a 19th Century Biblical Literalist, even though he is pretty clear in multiple texts that he is not.