There are religious people who accept evolution. Not enough of them. But many of them.
Art is one example. He accepted evolution even after he became a Born-Again Baptist. In college, though, he realized he was making the mistake of taking it on faith. It took a more scientifically-versed friend to fully explain the implications of the theory.
Very cool story. In the excerpt below, he talks about a discussion he had with this friend.
Anyway, back to second year college. Since we were into intellectual intercourse more than anything else, it was inevitable that we’d bump into evolution as a topic in one of our bus rides. And since I was pro-evolution, I thought we’d see eye to eye on all levels.
“There’s really nothing different between us and apes,” she said with her trademark cool candor. “Or between us and cockroaches, for that matter.”
Something twitched in me. Denial. Outrage. The need to feel special. Something like that.
“No, wait. It can’t be that simple,” I objected. “We’re way different from all those other animals!”
“Are we really?,” she challenged.
“Yes! We can think! We’re creative! We can plan!” We have a soul, I would have said, except that she was an Atheist.
“It’s incremental selection, that’s all,” she said in her matter-of-fact way. “Somewhere along the line, we were just fortunate to have developed more complex brains and social structures. But other than that, we’re all alike. We and all the other animals.”
…
It was then that I realized how little analysis went into my thinking process. I blindly accepted Evolution without bothering to think about all of its implications. I was an Evolutionist who believed in the existence of a soul. Wasn’t there a contradiction there somewhere?I was neither here nor there. I was a fence-sitter. Ugh…
Art is now trying to diffuse the tension of opposites between being no different from other creatures and being “special.”
Where should he go from here?
[tags]atheist, atheism, creationism, science[/tags]