Evolution by natural selection is fatal to conventional religious belief, at least the Abrahamic kind.
This is manifestly a lie concocted by a few atheists who are irrational and uninformed. They want this to be the truth but it is demonstrably not the case. People (even scientists) who embrace evolution in its entirety first, come to a belief in Christianity afterwards. I am one of them, and instead of being an obstacle to me, it is in fact a necessary stepping stone. I could not believe in Christianity without evolution, because the problem of evil and suffering would be fatal to all theism in that case.
The most that evolution (and science in general) does is rule out some of the more intractable religious beliefs as unreasonable – things like a flat earth which the majority of believers never thought were true any way.
The complexity of the universe, and especially of life on Earth, seems for many to require a designer.
But the truth is that design is incompatible with the very nature of life itself.
For most of human history, those were the two apparent choices, God or random chance.
And here we see the author’s definition of “conventional religious belief” as primitive science. It is the popular rhetoric of the new atheists. But if you look at it closely it reveals the truth about these atheists. They have no real understanding of what science is and have in fact made it into a religion founded on beliefs rather than the reality based on methodology.
Religious believers who want to reconcile evolution and religion say God uses evolution to create this diversity, but honestly, there’s not much for him to do.
Incorrect. I am a religious believer who wants reconciliation but I have never said any such thing. The point of life is self creation, i.e. growth and learning. God created the conditions for life and His role and desire was always one of relationship not designer.
Once common descent is in the picture, the idea of the soul is also in trouble.
Well I certainly have rejected this non-Biblical notion of the Greek philosophers and eastern religions. But common decent is a poor excuse for ignoring the vast differences between animals and human beings – which negate the need for invented magical differences anyway.
If there’s a way to work this out that makes any sense, I haven’t heard it yet.
Not surprising. It is hard to hear or conceive something you don’t want to hear or believe.
I grant religious fundamentalists a point for noticing this problem.
The atheist agreement with fundamentalists and Richard’s use of this atheist propaganda is not as weird as you might think at first. Like the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin superficial opposites often prove to have more in common when you look at the real issues. The lust for power over other people and a basic intolerance of diversity of thought made them more alike than different with the Polish people welcoming each in turn after seeing the insanity of the other one.
Implications of this rhetoric for science.
It is to demolish the long experience in the scientific community that belief doesn’t matter. It is a methodology which can and has been used successfully by people of all religions. But as these more irrational atheists seek to make science into their religion they turn back to clock to make their atheist theology once again the queen of the sciences declaring in their dogma that a religious person cannot be a good scientist!
No. The managing editor of the atheist channel at Patheos and author of “Atheism for Dummies,” as well as parenting books for the nonreligious, most certainly is an atheist. But the fact Richard thought he wasn’t atheist is kind of funny and revealing.
