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What one atheist learned from hanging out with creationists

By Jason Rosenhouse








And what are we to make of humanity’s significance in Darwin’s world? Tradition teaches we are the pinnacle of creation, unique among the animals for being created in God’s image. Science tells a different story, one in which we are just an incidental, unintended byproduct of a lengthy evolutionary process. It is logically possible these stories are just two facets of the same reality, but there appears to be serious tension here nonetheless. Nor should we ignore the pernicious effect of evolution on the traditional argument from design. To accept evolution is to accept that if we are the result of a divine plan, it is one that was set in motion billions of years ago. For many, such a God is simply too far away.

Many Christians have resolved these issues to their own satisfaction. The literature defending “theistic evolution” is large and erudite. I can understand, though, why so many people are not impressed with such efforts. Too often the arguments therein just seem hollow, ad hoc or even desperate. They seem like so much armchair philosophy, as though the writer thinks the task of reconciliation is accomplished when a logically possible scenario containing both God and evolution, no matter how implausible, is produced. More than anything else, my time with the creationists has shown me that the task of reconciling science with faith is far more difficult than is sometimes pretended.

If, indeed, it can be accomplished at all.

Jason Rosenhouse is associate professor of mathematics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. He is the author of The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math’s Most Contentious Brainteaser, and co-author (with Laura Taalman) of Taking Sudoku Seriously: The Math Behind the World’s Most Popular Pencil Puzzle, both published by Oxford University Press. His most recent book is Among the Creationists: Dispatches From the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line, again published by Oxford. This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

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Recent Comments

  1. Sy Lazovik

    It is shocking and sad that the greatest nation in the world, the same nation that sent humans to the Moon, that gave many scientific discoveries to the world and contributed so much at the advancement and improvement of humanity…is giving diplomas and doctorates to people that believe in stone age legends and myths, people for whom the moral code of primitive slave owners of the Middle East is more important that modern day humanist values…
    As a European, I really do not understand how can someone call himself educated and still refute evolution. I’m not very educated myself. Due to financial reasons, youth stupidity and the war in former Yugoslavia, I was never able to go to college. But it took me only elementary school biology classes in order to understand evolution, and it took me only reading a few books about astronomy to take Big Bang as a highly possible explanation. Reading History taught me of the origins of religion.How it is then possible that highly educated people in America cannot understand this things? Why does the U.S. educational system allow them to have titles, diplomas and positions? A biologist that believes not in evolution is like a chemist that does not believe in atoms, or a physician that doesn’t believe in germs.

  2. Theophile

    Hi Jason,
    Isn’t the greatest leap of faith in evolution, the survival of the fittest problem? Is the need to spend thousands saving a premature(would of died otherwise) baby that will need medical assistance throughout life to survive part of evolutions equation? Then why so many healthy born babies starve to death, when the last I heard, 1% of the “wasted” food in the US would feed the world. Isn’t that “survival of the unfittest”?
    Well I probably wouldn’t fit in so well at one of these “conservative” answers in Genesis group, as I would suggest the book of Enoch has plenty answers to past “extinct” unexplainable species. Along with the “all flesh” had been corrupted statement in Genesis.
    As a mathematician You might appreciate how back in the 60’s evolution/solar system forming, educational films, shown to students, started out with “Some scientists believe, around 4-5 million years ago….” Now its exactly 4.5 billion years ago! In the 70’s a living mollusk was carbon 14 dated as being 1400 years old, a few months after Mt St Helen some of it’s ash was dated as tens of thousands of years old(since erupting).
    So with faulty dating methods, and claiming millions of years, while scientists try furiously to gene splice a new species, they have decided to stretch it out to billions of years. Even if they can gene splice to “create” a new species, it will not prove evolution, because their result would be as “naturally evolving” as a ingot of Aluminum, and they needed pre engineered dna.

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