Do you believe in evolution?” It’s an incredibly common question in the church today, and at first glance, it may seem perfectly straightforward and innocent enough.
But it isn’t. Because, unfortunately, it is informed by a presupposition that is completely and utterly false. You see, the underlying assumption here is that accepting evolution is merely a matter of personal preference, along the lines of “Do you like Taylor Swift?” or “Are you a fan of ‘The Walking Dead’?” It implies that there is no objective truth in the matter to speak of, which reduces it to a toss-up, a question of “belief” and personal choice: “Do you choose to believe in this story, or do you choose to believe in this other story?”
We don’t do this to other scientific questions. We don’t ask people if they “believe in” gravity, or ultraviolet light, or atoms and molecules, or exoplanets, or germs. But, for some reason, we think evolution is a different animal.
Well, it’s not. There is enough evidence for evolution by common descent to fill libraries and museums all over the planet (and, in fact, it does). The evidence for the ancient age of the earth and universe is even stronger; indeed it is — quite literally — written in the stars.
This new atheism isn't nearly godless enough for me. Its proponents seem somewhat obsessed with the quite unremarkable fact that God doesn't exist. Indeed, it seems so central to their identity - they seem to substantially organise their lives around it - that I find it hard to tell the difference between them and religionists.
Certainly one can't distinguish them straightforwardly in terms of 'unbelievers' vs 'believers'. These atheists are believers. They hold very strong religious beliefs - about the existence of God, the divine nature of the universe, the proper interpretation of sacred texts, and so on. The fact that they are all negative in content doesn't mean that they aren't powerful religious beliefs. After all, negative beliefs are central to many religions (e.g. that there is no more than one god, or, in some versions of Buddhism, that there are no gods).
"Camels probably had little or no role in the lives of such early Jewish patriarchs as Abraham, Jacob and Joseph, who lived in the first half of the second millennium B.C., and yet stories about them mention these domesticated pack animals more than 20 times. Genesis 24, for example, tells of Abraham’s servant going by camel on a mission to find a wife for Isaac.
"These anachronisms are telling evidence that the Bible was written or edited long after the events it narrates and is not always reliable as verifiable history. These camel stories “do not encapsulate memories from the second millennium,” said Noam Mizrahi, an Israeli biblical scholar, “but should be viewed as back-projections from a much later period.”
Footprints left by ancient humans 800,000 years ago have been found in Britain, the earliest evidence of such markings outside Africa.
Researchers discovered the footprints, which were left by both adults and children, in ancient estuary mud at Happisburgh in Norfolk in eastern England.
The only older footprints found so far are at Laetoli in Tanzania, at about 3.5 million years old, and at Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya at about 1.5 million years, researchers said.
"This is an extraordinarily rare discovery," Nick Ashton of the British Museum, who led the research team, said.
The find came at an archaeological site that has yielded several previous discoveries of stone tools and fossil bones, including mammoth remains.
The researchers found the prints at low tide when waves washed away much of the beach sand to expose the silt below.
"At first we weren't sure what we were seeing but as we removed any remaining beach sand and sponged off the seawater, it was clear that the hollows resembled prints, perhaps human footprints, and that we needed to record the surface as quickly as possible before the sea eroded it away," Dr Ashton said.
The group of early humans that left the footprints appeared to have consisted of at least one male and several smaller people believed to be females and youngsters, the researchers said.
"They are clearly a family group rather than a hunting party," Dr Ashton said.
For the record, here's what it means to be a Neville Chamberlain Atheist. It means you're happy to attack Intelligent Design Creationists like Micheal Denton (Nature's Destiny) and Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box) for mixing science and religion. But, you don't say a word when Ken Miller (Finding Darwin's God), Francis Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief) and the Rev. Ted Peters (Evolution from Creation to New Creation) spout equally bad religious nonsense in the name of science.
The Neville Chamberlain Atheists object when Behe talks about intelligent design but mum's the word when Ken Miller talks about how God tweaks mutations to get what He wants. Hypocrisy is a strange thing to be proud of.
He must be joking, right?
I hope Ken Miller, Francis Collins, and Simon Conway-Morris are listening. They are not on my side in this war.
