Hi Cornelius, I hope you’re doing fine today. Earlier, you said to Ben Kirk:
I am sorry that your experience here is not one of Christian charity. I’m afraid I’m partly to blame for that, too. That’s where Screwtape wins points, unfortunately. It was not my intention to make you feel unwelcome here. My joke using that Dutch expression was not meant to come across as harsh. I also appreciated your sense of humor in your reply to it:
Your response of hitting the windmill back sure made me laugh. It actually reminded me of the story of Don Quixote. He was jousting at windmills because he erroneously thought they were evil. In a similar way, I think the enemy you’re fighting is (at least partly) imaginary. When you try to tackle the whole evolutionary paradigm, you’re tilting at windmills, so to speak.
You see, I would not say that there is no religion involved in science at all, because science is still done by people. We all have our worldview goggles. But “involvement” is a much softer description than conclusions being “religiously motivated”. The assertion that the paradigm of common descent is religiously motivated is not fair towards all the scientists of different stripes (including Christians) who work on it. Let’s consider the large number of Christian scientists working within that paradigm. Why would reductionistic naturalism or epicureanism (or anything like that) drive the agenda of these devoutly Christian people? That just doesn’t add up. There are many Christians who appreciate evolutionary theory as an adequate scientific framework, while they flat-out reject the anti-theistic ramblings of Dawkins and other reductionists.
Blessings,
Casper