Amanda L. Townley: Evolution Education and Science Literacy in the South

Amanda L. Townley draws on her experience as a former middle school and high school teacher and work as a professor in science education to raise the next generation of educators.

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to get misguided Christians to be at ease with evolution you have to ask them if they really think the bible really meant God was sitting at the riverbank making mud pie humans. It is a poetic description of reality that can be understood by illiterate and intellectuals alike to allow them to form a worldview that gives them a meaningful interaction with reality. being acquainted with the scientific understanding of reality gives one a more complex picture. Once as a Christian you understand that survival fitness is not the ability to feed and f*** fastest but the ability to love thy neighbour like thyself you can accept evolution as the execution of the word of God it allows them to be more positive towards the process.

2 posts were split to a new topic: How do you talk to friends at church about science and evolution?

wondered why I never heard of this topic again. Must have missed the topical split at the time.
It should be easy to make evolution acceptable to a Christian once you get over the misunderstanding of survival fitness to be about power and uncontrolled and random. To resolve the discrepancy between scientific understanding of a reality based on logical causality and the materialistic interpretations of a miraculous God who is going to impress us by ignoring his own laws of logical order and causality is impossible. Its like selling Boris Johnson as omnipotent because he ignored his own laws about not having parties in times of a highly infectious pandemic in order to impress us with his powers.
The interpretation of miracles as events that profoundly changed our understanding or interaction with reality is a way that allows miracles to be explained in logical context of the given reality. To make them events of magical interference of God in material processes to give us an outcome that appeals to our wishes based on a materialistic value scale is like offering us a fruit from a tree that we should not eat from. If we are offering those tempting fruits to our children we will be abandoned by them for other tempting fruits that makes them Gods to themselves, and there are many.

Let us fist address some fundamental science and logic conflicting miracles like the immaculate conception. Apart from the fact that “virgin birth” exists in nature, just not observed in humans, it makes Mary an A-list celebrity. Who would not want to be mother to the son of God? It gives rise to a celebrity cult of a woman that won the lottery, not a woman that showed us what the word of God is about. Is it our human desire for a God bending the rules of nature that makes us belief there was magic at work, not a God that puts in place the rules of nature and interferes to turn our evil intentions into positive outcomes to declare his glory.

When one says that a virgin becomes pregnant one would not imply that she is still a virgin after becoming pregnant but it states that she was a virgin until conception. That she will then give birth is a natural consequence of falling pregnant. If she was not an adulteress (which would have been a death sentence) nor got married the father (the usual custom if two Jewish people not already promised to someone had engaged in sexual activity), the logical interpretation would be that she was a victim of rape, most likely by a soldier of the occupying army, a common form of oppression under occupation. Despite the common attitude of chronological snobbery, the contemporaries of Mary would have been well aware of the concept of reproduction and not been convinced by magic pregnancies. Does anyone think this would not have been a common excuse at the time when you turned up pregnant at your wedding because they all believed in magic?
In todays society we would be very unlikely to tolerate such pregnancy and struggle to imagine how parents can love such neighbour like their own / thyself. As Christians we should ask ourselves why we would be or are offended by such interpretation of the son of God being put on Earth this way. Does it hurt our romantic feelings about reality? Does it offend our value scale of human heritage? Would such a child and mother not be worthy of our admiration. Is a rational and natural explanation not worthy of Gods interference with reality? Do we look for a supernatural=metaphysical interaction of God with reality or do we look for a supernatural=unnatural God? What is a divine being and why would such child not be divine?
The miracle of turning an act of hate and oppression into a beacon of love and hope is a stronger sign of God than a hardware failure in the reproductive system.

Similarly we can look at Jesus first miracle. Why would we want Jesus to create a fake reality to hide the fact that there was not enough wine there for greedy party goers. Would we really think it to be worthy of our God to hide the lack of wealth of the groom or that it was worthy of divine intervention to avoid the “shame of society” upon the groom not to have enough alcohol on offer? Why would it be worthy of praise that the groom was honest and did not offer the cheaper wines after they had enough to drink and would not notice if he could afford it anyhow, having still better wine in store? It would have been logic to figure out that he did not need to. And last but not least, why would we expect Jesus to defile those vessels for ritual purification by filling them with wine - or make someone declare a fine wine the most valuable drink you could serve instead of telling them that the water of purification would be the most valuable wine you could ever drink. After all, its purpose was to make you presentable to God, which is not a value attributed to alcoholic drinks. If I were at a wedding after I had a lot of Good wine already and was given another fine wine it would only make me drunk, if I was suddenly be served the purest of waters - not just tap water :slight_smile: that I would recognise as such, it would make me think. As a potential follower of Christ at that wedding, would I have followed a teacher that tries to impress me with an act of magical power to satisfy peoples greed or a teacher who impressed me with an act of logic to embarrass the greedy? But then I probably do not fancy alcohol that much.

Once we teach that miracles are not events were God brakes his own laws he imposed upon nature, as the proponents of an irrational God demand, but events that point at Gods glory, we will be able to appreciate quite normal things like the birth of a child as a miracle again. perhaps that should be our educational goal to explain that science is a miracle of God

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