RE: [asa] Advice for conversing with YECs - attn John

I want to reply briefly to James' important concerns about church/state
"separation" and the origins controversy.

I won't repeat (yet again) the details of my own view (searching the ASA
archives will bring out several of my old posts) that the currently received
interpretation of the First Amendment, in terms of a Jeffersonian "wall of
separation between church and state," is not justified. What I will repeat
here, briefly, is my opinion as a scholar of this issue, that the currently
received interpretation substantially shapes this issue, though it does not
drive it. (What drives are theological and biblical objections to
"evolution," and James has already indicated that this is true for him.) I
will also repeat my belief that a fundamental injustice is being done to
parents and families whose values are undercut (in their view) by the
monopolistic nature of public education, on this particular issue. I've
voiced those views in various other venues as well, even in my review of Ken
Miller's "Finding Darwin's God" for the NCSE journal and in my review of
some ID books for Christian Century a decade ago. As long as this situation
continues--which is to say, IMO, as long as I will be alive--the controversy
about origins and public education will not go away.

As for this country being "founded by Christians for Christians," (to
borrow James' words), however, I do not agree. Did the framers intend for
various types of Christianity (such as Catholicism in Maryland or Calvinism
in Massachusetts or Quakers in Pennsylvania) to flourish, without
interference from the federal government? Absolutely, yes. The bottom
line, for them, was religious freedom--but this also definitely included the
freedom not to be religious, or to believe (as Jefferson and Franklin did)
that "reason" made Christianity untenable. We shouldn't forget that Thomas
Paine, whose pamphlets helped incite the revolution, was also a
"freethinker" who said scandalous things about the Bible. The very idea of
disestablishment (which clearly *is* the point of the First Amendment,
whatever one may say about Jefferson's "wall") originated in a severely
persecuted minority--the Anabaptists, who denied the validity of either a
state church (Luther's Germany or Henry's England) or a church state
(Calvin's Geneva) -- and was then secularized by Enlightenment philosophers
in France and Scotland. That minority was not considered to be genuinely
Christian by many of the Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists who persecuted
them.

What the founders of the various colonies wanted, James, was freedom to
practice *their particular forms* of Christianity without state
interference. They did not generally want to see other forms of
Christianity (which to them were often not genuinely Christian) flourish.
The framers of the Constitution at least did seem to want that, but they
also ensured that deniers of Christianity (such as deists and unitarians and
even the occasional real atheist) would also be just as free as they were to
freedom of conscience and religious practice (or non-practice).

Nor do I blame Darwin (as James does) for the deterioration of public
education. It's easy to invoke Darwin's name for a multitude of sins, but
I'd much rather see people identify specific problems and talk about
specific solutions. If "naturalism" is the problem, e.g., then you might as
well blame almost every scientist (Christian or not) there is, starting with
all of that atheism going on at places like NASA and NOAA, where I never see
"God" invoked as part of the explanation for next week's weather or next
month's satellite launch.

Ted

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Received on Mon Nov 3 12:29:50 2008