Martha Segoe writes:

>Ward,
>While I personally lean toward evolution, and am an agnostic, I think your
>implication that belief in supernatural intervention is not logical is pretty
>insulting to those who believe in a personal god.  Or did I read you
>wrong?

Sorry, Martha, I did not mean the message to be insulting, but frankly
there is little way around stating that the choice between evolution and
creationism does come down to whether one believes in supernatural
intervention or not. It is also time, I think, that we stop tippy-toeing
around looking at the logic of religious beliefs.

This is a cultural taboo I do not agree with, especially when a theory
borne of religion tries to set itself up as "scientific"--as creationism is
bound and determined to do. When that happens, it is perfectly fair to
subject such belief systems to the test of logic. Creationism cannot try to
be scientific and then feign exemption from logical criticism just because
the beliefs it wants accepted as scientific have a religious origin and
explanation. If one is going to step into the scientific arena, you can't
have it both ways.

There is, however, a way of sorts to have your cake and eat it too if one
believes in a supreme being, where evolution is concerned, or--if you want
to be more philosophical about it--you might term it a "creative matrix"
that gives rise to the universe. I happen to be an agnostic too, so I am
not entirely unsympathetic to such desires.

Among creationists, you have the "old-earthers"--those who are perfectly
willing to admit to the evolutionary mechanism for explaining the changes
in the fossil record over time. They simply look at the evolutionary
process as "God's glorious handiwork" so to speak. No problem there, I
suppose. But the problem comes in if you are averring a *personal* God,
because this tends to relegate the Creator to a role of having started the
whole thing in motion and then gone into semi-retirement, only to come out
of it every so often and, abracadabra-like, zap into existence a new set of
fossil bones for scientists to puzzle over. Or if not that, a God who
continuously moves his hand in the unseen areas that science cannot yet
explain.

But the latter has come to be known as the "God of the Gaps" theory in the
evolution vs. creationism debate, because each time science extends its
reach and successfully explains further mechanisms, the hand of God is
forced to retreat still further into still smaller gaps in the fabric of
scientific explanation.

The "young-earthers"--those who believe literally in adding up all the
"begats" in the Book of Numbers to come up with a date of birth for the
earth of around 4,000-ish B.C. (the more recent ones making it more
scientific by saying "plus or minus 50 years or so" :-) )--often attempt to
get around the old-fossil-bones problem by casting aspersions on scientific
dating techniques as erroneous or unreliable, etc. This of course ignores
that the same science that gave us nuclear physics and atomic bombs,
nuclear power, and so forth, has also given rise to radiocarbon dating,
thermoluminescence dating, electrospin resonance dating, and so forth--all
dependent and springing forth from the same physical principles of nuclear
physics.

So unless one wants to be absurd enough to deny that we have figured out
the mechanisms that drives nuclear explosions and nuclear power, then one
will be hard put to explain away the dating techniques that put the age of
fossils at any older than 4,000-ish B.C. Therefore, if you are
young-earther, you have to be grossly inconsistent logically to maintain
your belief system, and by and large young-earthers tend to believe in a
personal God. There's no way around stating this.

However, "the way out" is simply to be a pantheist, kind of like the
Taoists. I.e., if you want to have an immanent God of some sort, you just
make the tautological equation that God = universe; God is imbued in every
movement of the universe, etc. But to do this, of course, you have to give
up the idea of a discretely identifable, personal God. Now science may say
a tautology like that is meaningless, but to the person making the
tautology, of course, it does imbue the universe with a sense of meaning,
and does change your psychological experience if nothing else. I certainly
don't deny that, and it may even be a perfectly valid way of looking at the
universe.

I do not begrudge people their right to have a personal God, but when
someone says, as Bob Avery did, that evolution is "only" a paradigm, we
ought to be clear that *every* type of theory or belief is a paradigm, and
you can choose to either be logical about them or not. Now of course,
knowing Bob as I do as a good friend, I seriously doubt he himself
subscribes to the idea of a personal God, but it seems only fair to point
out that if one is going to cast aspersions on evolution by calling it
"only" a paradigm, one also ought to be aware of what the only other basic
alternative paradigm in this arena is.

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS