[asa] Crossing the Divide

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 Evolution: Crossing the Divide?

 I don't have permission to copy the whole article but here are a few snippets, including a quote from ASA's Denis Lamoureux.

I particularly wanted to flag the comment "no one to turn to". I think this is a key function for ASA and the reason we need all you folks and your friends signed up for ASA so we can build a network and help folks know who they can turn to.

Randy

 EVOLUTION:
Crossing the Divide

Jennifer Couzin

Like others who have rejected creationism and embraced evolution, paleontologist Stephen Godfrey is still recovering from the traumatic journey

....

Powerful emotions bind together young-Earth creationists, members of a movement making inroads from Kenya to Kentucky, where a $27 million Creation Museum opened last year. Scientists and educators have responded mainly by boosting biology's place in the classroom and building rational arguments for evolution. But reason alone is rarely enough to sway believers. That's because letting go of creationism carries enormous emotional risks, including a loss of identity and community and an agonizing, if illusory, choice: science or faith.

People like Godfrey tend not to advertise their painful transition from creationist to evolutionist, certainly not to scientific peers. When doubts about creationism begin to nag, they have no one to turn to: not Christians in their community, who espouse a literal reading of the Bible and equate rejecting creationism with rejecting God, and not scientists, who often dismiss creationists as ignorant or lunatic.

.....

Although creationism might seem bizarre to individuals who have never believed in it, for those who do, its power is almost beyond words. Alters remembers, as a young teenager, sitting in on a sermon by Robert Schuller, a televangelist whose California church is fairly liberal. Listening to Schuller endorse the views of scientists who consider rocks to be millions of years old, Alters began to cry, horrified that the preacher would lie. "It was almost as if he stood there and said Jesus Christ didn't exist," he recalls. For biblical literalists, belief is generally an all-or-nothing proposition.

...

Parents often cannot cope with such an upheaval in a child. "The day I had to tell my mother I wasn't a young-Earth creationist was the scariest day of my life," says Denis Lamoureux, who teaches science and religion at St. Joseph's College in the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. His mother was so embarrassed by his work in biology that she told her friends her son was still in the profession he once belonged to: dentistry. Some compare these conversations to informing fundamentalist Christian parents that they are gay--but perhaps even more wrenching.

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Received on Fri Feb 22 15:09:13 2008