I belong to a local "Forum on Fath and Science" that has done a lot of study of the supposed battle between faith and science. After most of a decade we generally agree that good scientists and good theologians love to spend time together because they look at the universe so differently; neither use the same tools and each set of tools has limitations as to what it can accurately study.

Any scientist that steps outside of the bounds of what the rules of science can be used to legitimately study is being (knowingly or unwittingly) dishonest. Any theologian who does not learn the rules of science and apply them properly is displaying the same failing.

As both astronauts and many leading scienctists would say of some theologians, like the creationists, "Your God is too small!" This is a marvelous universe but it takes a lot of training and effort to study even small parts of it in a competent manner. Theologians who have not even properly studied theology (and the limits of what they can legitimately study) should but out of science.

The trouble with Christianity is that people prefer magic. The bible was written for primitives who knew no more than what we'd call household language and ideas and used allegory instead. A “divinely inspired” storyteller needed to trick dummies into understanding, and mostly the dummies turned it into magic and passed it along as such.

Genesis explained Adam’s creation Twice! Two trees in the Garden; tree of life, tree of knowledge. Two different floods: 40 days, and 100 days.
Explaining them twice in different ways indicates DO NOT TAKE THIS STUFF LITERALLY! But what does ‘literal’ mean to an illiterate? Obviously, the Bible's first lesson is still unlearned!

I suggest that it means Adam was created twice; first as a man living in the wild as an animal, second as a farmer in the age of agricultural revolution, a home- farm- city dweller with a permanent wife. The story was told at that time for those people.

The trees of life and knowledge represented those ways of life. Jesus in his own time understood this, proposed another stage he called the New Covenant (be fair with your peers and competitors). A third “creation”?

The two floods (40 days/ 100 days) might represent those epics of change. (Yeah there was a known flood but give us a break- polar bears, giraffes, kangaroos on a boat ride).

What I am suggesting is that creationists take a good look at the Bible.

In the 19th century, when Darwin put forward his claim that living things had not been created, that they had emerged by coincidence, and that the human being had a common ancestor with animals and had emerged as the most highly developed organism as the result of coincidence, perhaps most people could not imagine what the results of this claim would be. But in the 20th century the end result of the claim was lived out in terrible experiences. Those who saw human beings as a developed animal, did not hesitate to rise by treading on the weak, to find a way of disposing of the sick and weak, and to carry out massacres to get rid of races which they saw as different and inferior. Because their theory with a mask of science told them that this was a "law of nature." The disasters Darwinism brought to the world began in this way, and gathering speed, spread over the whole world.

Darwin's close friend Professor Adam Sedgwick was one of the people who saw what dangers the theory of evolution would give rise to in the future. He remarked, after reading and digesting The Origin of Species, that

"if this book were to find general public acceptance, it would bring with it a brutalization of the human race such as it had never seen before."

And truly, time showed that Sedgwick was right to have doubts. The 20th century has gone down in history as a dark age when people underwent massacres simply because of their race or ethnic origins. Darwin claimed that the "fight for survival" also applied between human races. "Favored races" emerged victorious from this struggle. According to Darwin the favored race were the European whites. As for Asian and African races, they had fallen behind in the fight for survival.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

What racist claptrap.

My comment applies, of course, to that by "Darwin was right", not to the original article.

Paul, let us argue just the facts. What are the factual reasons that you disagree with Darwin's brilliant analysis.

Paul: There has been plenty of study on intelligence between the races, and so far there has been absolutely no link shown between a person's race and their intelligence. Racism is just as (un)scientific as creationism.

Moreover, evolution is a scientific theory - it's an explanation of facts, not a moral guide. Using evolution to prove an "ought" instead of an "is" is wrongheaded.

v thomas: I'm not an expert, but from what I've read, the academic consensus is that the duplications in the Old Testament myths are due to the work of a compiler who, on finding multiple stories in the tradition, generally decided on fullness of data instead of absolute consistency. Therefore, you shouldn't try to read too much into it; it's a human-made book, and if you get something good out of it, then that's wonderful, but there doesn't seem to have been any deeper, overarching purpose to the replications.

"There has been plenty of study on intelligence between the races, and so far there has been absolutely no link shown between a person's race and their intelligence. Racism is just as (un)scientific as creationism."

Aaron: This is the very point that I was making.

It is the job of science to answer the "what, when, and how?" questions, and religion's job to concern itself with the other questions that science can't answer, "who and why?". It is the height of arrogance to concern oneself only with one set or the other, while denouncing those who concern themselves only with the other set. Genesis 1:1-7 pretty much agrees with the scientific view as to the order of the evolution of the universe. To me, it is remarkable that the writer could be so right in so few words.
I have been driven to the belief that God is us, not just caucasians, humans, mammals, animals, and plants, but dirt and rocks as well. Perhaps God can be seen as the energy that has condensed into the array of forms we see and don't see around us. Condensation and re-heating is the mechanism of creation, as is simply described in Genesis 1 and the newest theories of science. The crucial question in religion is "does this energy/god have personality?" We humans are the most sentient creatures ever formed, as far as we know, and it is our responsibilty to demonstrate the personality of God as we are able to discern it in ourselves. If we care only for our own survival and priviledge, if we scorn justice and revert to fascism, then there is little hope that God has personality or cares about America or democracy.

Aaron, God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.
Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

"As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics," Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the "burning bush," suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.

"The Bible says people see sounds, and that is a clasic phenomenon," he said citing the example of religious ceremonies in the Amazon in which drugs are used that induce people to "see music."

He mentioned his own experience when he used ayahuasca, a powerful psychotropic plant, during a religious ceremony in Brazil's Amazon forest in 1991. "I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations," Shanon said.

Mathis states that there has been a systematic exclusion of any origin theory which proposes the idea that there is design in the universe that may be better explained by an intelligent source, rather than from random processes. As an example, he talked about the recent controversy involving Guillermo Gonzalez, astronomer and author of The Privileged Planet. Mathis said Gonzalez, the author of 68 peer-reviewed papers, was denied tenure at Iowa State University because of his views on intelligent design.

Mathis cited other cases of academic discrimination, including one involving Baylor University's Robert Marks, who was told to shut down a website he created which challenged Darwinian evolution. Mathis also discussed Richard Sternberg, who came under fire for publishing a paper by intelligent design advocate Stephen Meyer in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

The Bible is a compilation of creation myths and history. If you look at other local civilizations contemporary with the early Jews, you will see the basis for many of the tenets handed down from God. Take for example the Ten Commandments. If you read the Egyptian "Book of the Dead", which pre-dates Moses, you will see 10 testaments to give as an honorable person before you die. Those testaments are extremely similar to the Ten Commandments.

To those who take the bible literally---are we to be doomed to a 3,000 year-old world view? Why deny the obvious--work on ways to make your faith fit the 21st century.

You are right Laura. The Jews came up with nothing new. They just borrowed ideas from their neighbors and then claimed that it was their own. Isn't that what Obama did? What a fraud.

What are you; blind?

Evolution IS intelligent design!