It seems that the whackiness of the American Fundamentalists (aka Creationsim aka Biblical literalism) is coming to Europe. Soon heated debates between Creationists and Darwinists are to be expected. But, in truth, the debate is futile, even from the standpoint of a believer. One thing is the supreme force responsible for the creation (God) of life and all things, animate and inanimate, and another thing the way this process of creation (through how many stages, from which species some other proceeded etc.) happened, how God created the earth and everything.
But the tyranny of words (as I already explicated it earlier, in other threads) is here at work. More important are words and/or slogans than the essence of things itself. In reality, behind the word "Darwinism"/"Evolutionism", there hides, in the public-mediatic discourse, not some concrete scientific explanation of life developed by Darwin and his successors, but in fact the militant Atheism. If you subscribe to Darwin/evolution, you are necessarily atheist and crass materialist by definition. On the other hand, if you are a believing Christian, you must necessarily subscribe to the literalist interpretation of the Old Testament, although all Church tradition, from Philo onwards, always tended to interpret it metaphorically. It was Protestant Fundamentalists from America (although it could be found in some fringe religious movements of Europe as well) who started to insist upon the extreme literalist interpretation of the Scripture (seven days of creation and stuff) and call it the essence of "Christianity", and thereafter to export it worldwide, like Coca Cola.
In reality, both an atheist and a believer can be good scientists, as many examples show. The scientist (and also biologist) explores how the world is working, on grounds of observable facts. The primary cause of everything is not a matter of scientific enquiry
sensu stricto. Ever since Descartes (who was not an atheist), one of the founding fathers of the modern scientific method, who stated that the
prima causa is not to be an object of empirical-rationalistic research.
But this new totalitarianism expects from you to decide yourself, which side you are on. Needless to say, in both cases you end up being part of their System. It is as false dialectic as that of Left/Right and its voting herds. It is on the one side a sign of stiffening ideological atmosphere in the modern West (in classical ideological empires, like the USSR, you had explicitly only one permitted thought, here you have also one, but disguised as two, how wonderful), on the other side of terrible lowering of the level of culture, knowledge and education, even among the self-styled "educated elites" (in fact, it is only specialized knowledge that prevails and general education is shunned).
This is how Bryan Appleyard nicely put it:
Quote:
Knots need to be unpicked. First, the world is purposefully designed. Sharks have teeth to capture their prey and trees have leaves to capture sunlight. In the absence of any competing hypothesis, it is rational to assume that an intelligence, God perhaps, is at work.
Enter Darwin. He said that, once a stable replicative process is established in nature, then errors will occur. A few beneficial errors will render replicators — organisms — better adapted and, therefore, better able to reproduce. Over billions of years, this simple process will lead to the variety of life we see around us today. Note that Darwin did not say how this system works nor how it began. He had no idea.
Since then, we have begun to understand how evolution works. DNA is the replicator at the heart of the system and errors in the transcription of this molecule result in mutations, most of which are harmful but some of which are beneficial. The combination of Darwinism and molecular biology has created the orthodoxy known as neo-Darwinism.
None of which has — or should have — the slightest consequence for religious belief. Indeed, to a Taoist, Hindu or Buddhist, Darwinism must appear irrelevant, trivial or obvious. Even a Christian shouldn’t really be bothered. Of course, Darwinism shows the Bible is not literally accurate if only because it requires the earth to be billions rather than thousands of years old — but treating biblical stories as metaphors, not literal truths, is a commonplace of Christian theology.
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Just wait for debates over such trivia, debates which will try to avert attention from more important matters, like the fact that the process of enslavement into the global-megacapitalistic-police state is underway, as well as ethnic replacement through mass immigration.