May I be so cynical as to possibly suggest that the following actually
serves your purpose in a way that Paul might not realize. See below at end
of your note:
At 11:39 AM 4/16/98 +0100, William B. Provine wrote:
>Bravo, Paul.
>
>Your dialogue is lovely. Evolutionists prefer these days not to ruffle the
>feathers of religious folk, who are vastly more numerous and elect
>representatives who control the funding for science. So evolution and religion
>are "compatible," as long as the religion cannot be distinguished from atheism.
>
>I have had the same dialog with some distintinguished evolutionists (most are
>ouright atheists or agnostics) and their response is exactly as your rendition.
>Their "compatibility" runs about as Carl Sagan's views: "many religions are
>compatible with evolution." (He enumerates, though Christianity is not among
>them). But when asked, are any of these religions worth anything, he happily
>volunteered "no."
>
>I can understand why you and Phil Johnson have a problem with a scientist who
>says, "I am a modern scientist. Of course evolution has natural causes, put
>there and maintained by God, who can create any way at all." Dandy fine. All my
>evolutionist friends are delighted. Here's a religion that cannot be
>distinguished from atheism, an ally in time of need, who will fight to keep
>naturalistic evolution in the schools.
May I suggest that tactically your statement above is pure genius. I wish I
could think of an equally ingenious tactic. By continuing to scare
christians that evolution=atheism, you encourage them to make many
scientifically silly statement which are observationally false. Then once
they have made these scientific blunders, these blunders can be trumpeted
loudly as examples of how stupid Christians are. This then leaves your
position in a heads we win, tails they lose situation. I admire the
ingenuity of how this works.
While I know that you are an honorable man, Will, having had many a
discussion with you, I know that you wouldn't do something for purely
cynical reasons. And you might not even have thought of the genius of your
position as easily as I, a very cynical person, does. But I couldn't design
a better strategy to destroy Christianity's credibility than the one
outlined above.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm