At 09:48 AM 10/30/97 -0600, Eduardo G. Moros wrote:
>Hi Glenn,
>
>1) I must confess that you know of these things more than I do.
>2) I must also confess that I see you struggling in establishing some people
>and their theories to be right and some other people and their theories to be
>wrong. IMHO, this attitude comes across in a negative way.
[Intensity mode on; soap box mode on]
This I want to respond to. I will tell you why I do what I do. I became a
christian in college before I knew anything about geology (I was a
physicist). I was taught that the Bible required an anti-evolutionist view
point. I was further told that it required a young-earth view point. I
went along. But then I went into geophysics and began to learn geology.
NOTHING I WAS TAUGHT BY YOUNG-EARTH CREATIONISTS ABOUT GEOLOGY TURNED OUT TO
BE CORRECT. Every time I tried to verify a detail, I found out that the
evolutionist was telling me the truth! Every time it was the atheist who
informed me of new data which contradicted by views, not the
anti-evolutionary christian in his writings. When I would go on a field trip
and look at rocks, I would see data that no YEC would talk about and which
contradicted my viewpoint. I nearly became an atheist because of this.
I then decided that if they were so wrong in geology maybe I better
look a bit a biology. I learned of pseudogenes from atheists. I learned of
speciation events from atheists on Talk Origins. I decided to look at
anthropology. All the non-evolutionary christians were saying that
spirituality began either at the Upper Paleolithic transition 40 kyr ago or
at the origin of H. sapiens 100 kyr ago. They would say that there is no
evidence of Culture among H. erectus. But this isn't true as I recently posted.
My point is this. We Christians have a bad habit of ignoring any data that
contradicts our position. We justify this because we believe that our
theological position is correct and will be verified in the future.
Christians MUST live in the world as it IS, not as we WISH it to be or HOPE
it will be in the future. Until we can become honest with the facts as
reported by honest scientists we have no right to claim moral superiority.
If this seems "negative" then so be it. I can not see how Christianity is
helped by ignoring the huge gap between what IS and what we teach!
[intensity mode off; soapbox mode off]
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm