Title Author Date

Why not faith? Gallagher, Alex Sep 28, 2005

Sir,
I am aware that the false controversy over evolution, stirred up by the proponents of so-called "intelligent" design, has been raging in the USA for a number of years, and that it has specific connotations for the US Constitution and teaching in your public schools. Unfortunately the issue has now begun to invade public consciousness here in the UK, with articles by Richard Dawkins and others in the more thoughtful press. We can only hope that it is not allowed to confuse and degrade scientific debate in the way it appears to have done on your side of the pond.

As a non-scientist, I find your site an invaluable source of good sense and sound argument in refuting the unscientific arguments purveyed by ID proponents, but the thing that puzzles me most is that the Christian defenders of ID should feel the need to seek scientific respectability for their non-scientific beliefs in the first place.

Faith, not reason, is the basis for true Christian beliefs. Surely, if they truly believed in their God and His teachings, they would rely on faith to underpin their case. For Christians, the Bible is the one, true, complete and perfect word of God. Everything in it is irrefutably true, and needs no further explanation or explication. In relation to creation and evolution, the Bible tells us that God created the Earth, the Heavens and all that is in them, in six days. This "truth" has been “revealed” by God, conveyed by prophets, guarded by priests and imposed on the rest of us for millennia. The truly religious response to evolutionary science is to say; "Have faith. Ignore the evidence. God has revealed the truth to me. You must therefore believe whatever I tell you. Evolution is bunk".

It seems to me that this reluctance to inhabit their own natural ground in the argument shows that the Christian right is afraid of the implications of relying on faith to justify their position. That fear shows how weak they secretly know their position to be. Science and scientists should get off the defensive. Your Christian correspondents should be challenged on their apparent lack of faith in depending on pseudo-scientific arguments to undermine the theory of evolution. I, for one, would be interesteed in their replies.

Yours sincerely

Alex Gallagher

Title Author Date

Why not faith? TalkReason , Oct 03, 2005

Dear Alex:

There are various kinds of creationists in the USA. The older kind - adherents of what
they call creation science - indeed openly maintain that the Bible is literally true and a Christian needs no scientific arguments to sustain one's faith. They propose allegedly scientific arguments not as the main reason for their faith but just to show that discoveries of science are in fact compatible with the biblical story and when they are not it simply
means science is in error or misinterpreted. They have suffered defeats from the judicial system in the USA as their attempts to introduce their "theories" into science classes of the public schools were judged unconstitutional. The more recent brands of creationists, among which the most visible at this time are the proponents of intelligent design, hide their religious motivations hoping it would allow them to sneak into school
curricula under a disguise of allegedly sound scientific alternatives to the "atheistic" mainstream science. Their position, as you have correctly noted in your letter, is inconsistent and casts doubts on the strength of their faith.

Talk Reason