Blue Collar Scientist

The Panda’s Thumb has helpfully posted several examples of Christian churches and clergy members making statements in favor of evolution. This sort of thing helps to make clear that among the religious, only religious extremists, and those deceived by them, have a problem with evolution.

Currently in Florida, extremists are telling county school boards that teaching evolution violates the Establishment Clause of the constitution. How does that work? They say that teaching evolution demands and establishes an atheistic mindset:

It will demand that the concept of “God” be banished from the mind and replaced by atheism; It will displace any idea that there is purpose for man except to discover what it means to be human; It will demonstrate that other species of animal life have as much value and right as man; and it will require a mind devoid of biblical theism—devoid of any concept of God.

(I suppose that to find this line of argument at all compelling, you’d have to be aware of the extremists’ assertion that atheism is a religion. I guess you’d also have to believe it.) If this is all so, however, how is it that so many Christian churches and clergy accept evolution?

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church says:

“[T]here is no contradiction between an evolutionary theory of human origins and the doctrine of God as Creator.”

Pope John Paul II, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1996, said:

“In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation…. Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies — which was neither planned nor sought — constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.”

Note well - the Catholics have understood for fifty-eight years that evolution in no way contradicts the faith. That’s almost three generations.

The Clergy Letter Project has gathered over 10,000 signatures from Christian ministers, pastors, and priests who agree with this statement:

“We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as ’one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator…. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”

Although it would not do to confuse Judaism with Christianity, it is well to note, given that many extremists loosely couple “Judeo” with “Christian” as a way of co-opting a different tradition to support their own, that the Central Conference of American Rabbis has said:

“[S]tudents’ ignorance about evolution will seriously undermine their understanding of the world and the natural laws governing it, and their introduction to other explanations described as ‘scientific’ will give them false ideas about scientific methods and criteria.”

I’m not apologizing for Christians here. I believe that, too often, mainline churches sit idly by while extremists of their own faith carry on in outrageous ways. By ignoring this, allowing it to go on without comment, they provide the cover of legitimacy to those who lack it. Still - here are some exceptions to this general trend. Some Christians whine and carry on in an attempt to get special rights for their beliefs, government subsidies for religious educational materials, and forced religious education in public schools, but most Christians are against this kind of excess.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under evolution, stash-o-facts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.