From: Ceri 
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MM All,

Now for a change of topic... Another care of WitchVox. VERY interesting ideas...

Rai

http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/opinion/60882.php

Section: Opinion

Andrew M. Greeley: Creationists assault freedom of others

Slightly more than half the American people reject evolution. During the
last decade, the General Social Survey conducted by National Opinion
Research Center (and directed by my colleague Dr. Tom M. Smith) has asked
whether a respondent thinks humans are descended from animals.

Fifty-two percent said either this was definitely not true or probably not
true. Ever since they won the battle but lost the war in the Scopes trial
of 1925, conservative Christians have waged intensive war against
evolution.

Despite repeated court decisions insisting evolution must be taught in high
school classes, conservative Christians have managed to keep one form or
another of "creationism" alive and well as an alternative in the
minds of many Americans

This includes 62 percent of black Christians, 52 percent of mainline
Protestants, 42 percent of Catholics and 26 percent of Jews. (Seventy eight
percent of conservative Christians reject evolution).

Evolution, they insist, is only a theory and one that has a lot of holes in
it. Moreover, it is godless, indeed it is part of an assault by a liberal
elite on the beliefs of a God-fearing people.

Their assaults are especially effective in smaller towns and rural areas
where teachers and school administrators are subject to strong pressure
from these God-fearing people.

For their own protection, many teachers, according to a recent article in
The New York Times, skip over the chapters on evolution in the biology
textbook.

Indeed in Cobb County, Ga., they forced the schools to put a sticker on the
cover of a text book asserting that "intelligent design" was an
equally valid theory.

"Theory" is not a good word because it implies doubt. The
Copernican theory about the motion of planets around the sun and the big
bang theory of the origin of the universe are models that in their broad
outline are simply true.

However much remains to be explained within the model, they fit the known
data so well that they are not in danger of rejection - especially when
there is no alternative theory that even begins to fit the data.

So, too, is evolution a model that fits the data, even if there is still
much exploration to be done within the model. It does not follow that there
is any other model available that fits the data.

"Intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution implies that
if one believes in God, the evolutionary "theory" is unacceptable
no matter how powerful is its explanatory power.

In fact, belief in "intelligent design" is completely compatible
with scientific acceptance of evolution. The design is inside the model,
not something intruded from the outside.

It is not up to science to validate such design. It merely reports what it
sees and leaves to the religion and the religious believer to judge whether
it was a wise God who launched the process, just as she launched the
"big bang" with the polymers and parameters for human life on
this planet built in.

Science can't say whether God did that or not - and moreover shouldn't.

Bible Christians cannot accept such a perspective, because they must
necessarily believe the Book of Genesis, word for word inspired by God, is
an accurate and literal book of science.

It is clear to the rest of us that Genesis teaches that God created and
established order in the cosmos, religious truths indeed that go beyond the
realm of science but not against it.

The evangelicals are entitled to their beliefs, but they have no right to
try to impose their view of creation on the rest of us and to deprive the
children of other people an accurate picture of how science models the
emergence and development of life - or an alternative view of the literary
nature of the book of Genesis.

One can understand their effort to fight scientific modernism. If literal
interpretation of Genesis is taken away from them, then their entire
religious edifice is shaken to its foundations.

But when in their battle against modernism they deprive the children of the
rest of us of a proper education, they violate our freedom of religion.


Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, author and sociologist. He
teaches at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona; e-mail:
agreel{at}aol.com . 



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