RE: [asa] Advice for conversing with YECs - (Christian nation?)

As I recall- Patrick Henry really lobbied hard to get America to be a "Christian Nation" but was shot down.

There's also the interesting "Treaty of Tripoli" (ratified by the Senate and President) which says we are not a "Christian Nation" (we are secular).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli
Excerpt:

Article 11 reads:

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_United_States> is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_religion>; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam>; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_world>, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries
,,,Bernie

________________________________
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Schwarzwald
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 5:07 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: 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<mailto: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 Tue Nov 4 11:37:47 2008