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

Hello Ted,

Let me just say that I've enjoyed your exchanges with Timaeus and your other
writings, and look forward to more.

* I'd agree that I don't think the US was a 'Christian nation' as such -
there was certainly a heavy Christian influence in America's founding, and
even the deists had a tendency to have high reverence for Christ and
Christ's teachings (Look at the Jefferson Bible, for example). But I do
think that a belief in God in some sense was instrumental to the nation's
founding. In Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and even Paine, I see a strong
current of what we saw with Locke, Thomas More, and others - an attitude
whereby religious believers of all stripes are respected, but outright
atheism is at a certain limit. And while it's impolite to say nowadays (for
some reason, considering the New Atheist line), I must admit I see something
to that. Thomas Paine himself would likely be horrified at the people
claiming him as one of their own nowadays - and even as a Christian, I have
vastly more sympathy for Paine than one might think at first. He wasn't just
anti-Christian, he was pro-God, pro-morality, and believed strongly that
both existed.

* I don't blame Darwin for our problems with naturalism. But I do blame
Christians, and even as a TE I think the TE community has dropped the ball
for a long time on issues of science and religion. Even if design cannot be
scientifically demonstrated or ruled out (and I believe this strongly),
science is not the only route to understanding the natural world - or the
only lens that should be looked to. I think TEs in particular need to put
their money where their mouth is, so to speak - and that means talking more
about the design evident in nature, from evolutionary history to cosmology
to otherwise, even with the stipulation that these observations are
themselves not scientific. Frankly, the modern world is begging for such a
perspective to be made - with so many familiar with computers, programming,
etc at least in a loose sense, we have a ripe and instructive paradigm that
Charles Babbage grasped, but few others have been willing to discuss. Again,
this is why I have such interest and sympathy for the ID movement despite my
paradoxical position - they're willing to at least talk about how the
'apparent design' in nature is actual design. I don't think God needs to be
invoked as part of a scientific explanation - but we certainly should see
more discussion about design in our universe from a God's-eye view.

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:

> 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 20:07:50 2008