I'll have a cappuccino with you. Please do not construe this as an attack. I'd just like you to consider the following.
What do you think you would have believed if you were born a Yanomamo in the Amazon rain forest? Or a Maori in 500 BCE? Or a member of one of the many primitive peoples in the Nigerian jungle?
Whatever the different beliefs of these people are, they cannot
all be true. If you'd dismiss the idea that the world is made of ants' excrements - the primitive Nigerian's opinion - I'd say that you were right. But if the Nigerian would laugh away your version of how the world came to be, I'd find that equally OK. And that's because there is no reason to favour either one of your stories.
You see, the fact is that neither of you has a smidgen of evidence going for your particular account of what happened. And that's where the story of evolution has the advantage. It is corroborated by an overwhelming amount of evidence, from very different branches of science, all of which points in the same direction. The only thing christian creationism can present is one book of tribal myths.
I wouldn't hold it against you if you think of me as one of those militant atheists you mentioned, but the fact is that the reason why I don't think the christian God had anything to do with how the world came to be is the same as why I don't hold with the ants' poo theory: there is simply no corroborative evidence. And if I had to incorporate God into the theory despite the lack of evidence, as you seem prepared to do, then I wouldn't know why I should not accomodate every other creation myth people have ever believed in as well. Do you understand the difficulty?
Thanks for the coffee.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins
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