… and I presume that the elect are wending their way home from the “I do, I do, I do, I do, I DO believe in Darwin!” praise festival. Guitar chords, someone? I understand some Darwinists like to get folksy when fronting the message …
Why, exactly, they do believe in Darwin will be long debated by social historians. I’d just shrug and say “Darwin feeds their inner ape,” and – more practically – their many genteel endowments. The ol’ Brit toff understood that sort of thing precisely, if nothing else. He got rich off Wedgwood pottery.
Okay, well the (cue evil music!) Discovery Institute sent me this, about Wallace, Darwin’s co-theorist (remember, the theory could have been called Wallaceism, but Wallace was an abashed working man and a field biologist):
Intelligent Evolution: How Evolution’s Co-Founder Can Help Religious Believers Find Peace in the Evolution WarsBirmingham, AL – Just in time for “Evolution Weekend” (Feb. 11-13) when hundreds of churches will celebrate the birthday of Charles Darwin, a new Gallup poll shows that Americans are as divided as ever when it comes to Darwin’s theory of evolution.
But University of Alabama at Birmingham professor Michael Flannery hopes that a new book and educational website will help convince people that evolution and religion need not be in conflict after all.
The key, according to Flannery, is to disentangle evolution from Darwin’s view of the history of life as an undirected process and to embrace the alternative vision articulated by evolution’s co-founder, Alfred Russel Wallace.
Long acknowledged as the co-discoverer of natural selection, Wallace had a sharply different take on evolution than Darwin, one that might have prevented current hostility between faith and science according to Flannery.
“Darwin insisted that evolution is an undirected process,” says Flannery, “which set up the toxic conflict between evolution and faith that we see today. Wallace, on the other hand, came to believe that evolution is purposeful and required intelligent design.”
Actually, peace to Discovery Institute, there is no “toxic conflict” between evolution and faith.
Many “Churches That Nobody Goes to Any More” (in the words of a friend) are into their inner ape. Surviving churches are not. This I didn’t need to be an Institute to figure out. Just yer hack on the desk. Always glad to help.