RE: [asa] Crossing the Divide

Randy said:
"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- you know your charter well. I needed something, and ASA has been
a tremendous help for me. I'm still searching and learning, and ASA is
helping tremendously. Without ASA, where would Christians, who are
willing to consider evolution, turn to?

...Bernie

________________________________

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Randy Isaac
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 12:07 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: [asa] Crossing the Divide

Those of you subscribed to Science or other access may be able to read
this article:

 Evolution: Crossing the Divide
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5866/1034?sa_campaign=Em
ail/sntw/22-February-2008/10.1126/science.319.5866.1034> ?

 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 16:17:44 2008