Now for God created to become the dominate view.
Whatever makes you think that it isn't? That is not a rhetorical question!
In the general public, most are theists and I believe that Christians enjoy a bare majority in the USA and Canada. Which would mean that most believe in "God" (whatever that might mean in the many different forms of monotheism out there) as "the Creator". Which would make "God created" the dominant view.
Several years ago, I met on-line a fundamentalist Christian, Carl Drews, who is an opponent of "creation science". He and his family had found a fundamentalist church that they liked and whose outreach programs they really liked. But when his pastors advocated the teaching of outright lies (ie, "creation science"), he found that he had to leave that church. His entire story, in his own words, are at
http://www.theistic-evolution.com/mystory.html.
Part of his story concerns his earliest exposure to this "issue" (in quotation marks, because any "controversy" is purely of creationist manufacture) -- of course, since you have the link to that page, you can read it in its entirety rather than have to rely on my abbreviated quoting of it:
quote:
I went to good public schools. I remember Mr. Reed, my 8th-grade science teacher, explaining to us about science and religion. He told us that science is not qualified to speak on matters of faith, and demonstrated this with a few gedanken (thought) experiments. He explained some of the differences between the two realms.
It wasn't until sometime in high school that I first heard the idea that the theory of evolution and the Bible are in conflict. This idea puzzled me. "What's the problem?" I thought. "God said, 'Let there be light, earth, plants, and animals' and evolution produced all these things." I didn't know it at the time, but that was my first simple definition of theistic evolution.
I graduated from Stanford University in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, with a concentration in Computer Science. I've worked professionally developing software ever since.
In about 1985 I was attending a Young Singles Bible Study at my church when creationism first came up. Someone had brought in a small pamphlet attacking evolution. It was a comic book featuring an overweight goateed college professor and a clean-cut handsome male student who easily refuted all the professor's teaching about evolution. "I've seen that one!" reported a friend named Rick gleefully. "That guy really slams evolution!" I volunteered to check it out and report back to the group. My attitude was, "I knew that evolution had some holes in it. Let's see what he found." I went to the public library to look up the references that were cited in the pamphlet.
The first citation wasn't quite what the original source had said. The second one contained some distortion, too. So did the third. It got worse and worse. None of the original authors would have agreed with the conclusions drawn in the pamphlet. I was shocked and upset! This Christian pamphlet contained substantially wrong information! I was able to locate most of the references, and all the ones I found had twisted the meaning of original information. I remember that in one example the author had neglected to mention the chemical benzene that was involved in an experiment to form oil quickly.
I brought my findings back to the Young Singles group and presented them. I tried to be gentle, but the writing was on the wall. The group was shocked, surprised, and angry. Afterwards Rick said in a small voice that he thought that somewhere there was some information that could disprove evolution.
I wrote to the publisher of the pamphlet and asked them why a Christian would put together such a poor pamphlet. I got a fairly lengthy response that admitted no wrong, misinterpreted several things I had said, defended the pamphlet, and supplied additional examples to replace the ones I had rejected.
This experience was so upsetting to me that I refused to discuss evolution for many years after that.
Basically, religion tells you "what" happened and "who" had dunnit, while science tells the "how." Science cannot and does not have anything to say about religion, but it most definitely has a lot to say about how the universe works. You want to promote a "God created" viewpoint? OK, fine, so do it! Science has nothing whatsoever to say about it, though people and groups with views that differ from yours may have something to say, though when they do so then they also are dealing outside of science. Though, of course, when you make false statements about what science should show if your particular excessively narrow religious ideas were true, then you should not have the audacity to act surprised when the evidence contra-indicates your claims.
To reiterate, what Carl Drews was taught was that while religion deals with "who dunnit", science deals with "what actually happened, including how it was dun." As a basic approach, I think that should work well to show that there really isn't any actual conflict between science and religion. The only conflict happens when religion decides to decree that reality must be different than it actually is, which is now the standard creationist position.
BTW, that pamphlet Carl mentioned was the original Chick Pubs tract,
Big Daddy? I had also read it, back circa 1970; since then, a second edition has come out which appears to have been written by Kent Hovind. Back circa 1970, my high school best friend's mother and a few other family members converted to Christian fundamentalism as part of the "Jesus Freak Movement" of that time. As "fellow travellers" (a term I borrow from McCarthyism's anti-Communism -- though HBO's most excellent
Hemingway and Gellhorn, currently showing, indicates that the term also applied much earlier, both before and during WWII), we not only learned what fundamentalism taught (and which we disagreed with), but we also were free to peruse their propaganda, including countless Chick Pubs tracts. Those were the most hilarious things that we had ever read! Many years later, I found some Chick Pubs tracts in public restroom stalls. My reaction was that they were sorely inadequate as an alternative source of TP -- I have receive instruction on how to convert a page from the Sears and Roebuck's catalog to serve as TP; you need to crumple it up a lot.
OK, so more scientists are skeptical than is the general public. But how much is that due to religionists' falsely insisting that any naturalistic explanation is an argument against God? You want to falsely force scientists to choose between God and science? You know what's going to win! Instead, why not couch it in
real terms?
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