Surely no one bet against that. From Ryan Cross at Science:
More widespread support comes from the Clergy Letter Project in Olympia, a group of some 14,400 ordained clergy members that supports teaching evolution and climate change. Founder and executive director Michael Zimmerman says a survey of the group’s members showed strong support for the march. Negative responses mostly came from people who said they believed the event wouldn’t change anything, and might even further polarize science, Zimmerman says. “The new slightly more political focus of the march might have turned some members off,” he says. (In contrast, he notes, responses in favor of supporting the People’s Climate March were unanimous.)
The Clergy Letter Project is best known for supporting Evolution Weekend at churches, which is just what you probably suspect it is.
Many faith groups and individual churches that Science spoke with expressed disappointment that the March for Science and the People’s Climate March were not combined into a single event on Earth Day. Faced with a choice of putting their efforts into backing just one of the events, the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco chose to support the March for Science. Ellen Clark-King, executive pastor of the Episcopal church, says she doesn’t think that choice shocked church members, who regularly see the stained-glass likeness of Albert Einstein and astronaut John Glenn in their cathedral, alongside Biblical characters and saints. More.
No wonder the Episcopal Church is mostly history now (“uninterrupted decline”). They put Einstein and Glenn in their windows because they have lost all sense of their own mission. Princeton and NASA, after all, are not going to give equal time to the saints. Nor should they.
Dam fine condos those church properties tend to become. Private builders don’t build like that any more.
Also:
In the crowd will be Brian Sauder, who grew up in a deeply religious Anabaptist community in rural Tazewell County in Illinois, where he passed time fishing and hunting. Now a minister in Chicago, Sauder is just one of many faith leaders who are planning to join the march, and see little conflict between faith and science.
Actually, almost no one does think there is such a conflict. If Ryan Cross were writing a serious story, he would interview people who wouldn’t take part for religious reasons or religious people who won’t take part because they think that the issues are likely to be misrepresented in such a venue. Or people who think that religious people shouldn’t be allowed to take part. But the story he wrote is much easier.
Science historian Michael Flannery writes to say,
This piece points out a central problem, namely, the conflation of Darwinism with “science.” I would be interested to know if Brian Sauder has drunk the Darwin Kool-Aid. If he has, then his church and science compatibility is not what needs explaining (few doubt the mutual compatibility of faith and science and Dawkins is among a very small minority of others who still beat the old warfare thesis drum).
What needs explaining is how a personal and providential God operates by and through a wholly random process.
If his answer is something on the order of, “God can do anything,” then I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis who said: “His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.” He added, “meaningless combination of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’.
It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” So how is a God personally interested and providentially involved with His creation reconciled with a theory rooted in chance?
Put another way, in this so-called march for “science,” precisely what kind of “science” are we talking about?.
Actually, the marchin’ churches don’t have to explain anything. If they are truly cozy with Darwin, they don’t have to believe that they are life forms capable of making a rational decision. Which solves a lot of problems that used to vex the ages.
See also: Atlantic: March for Science misunderstands politics This sounds like just another riff on: The public can’t make good decisions. One expects to hear that often now. And again, one wonders, would Dr. Jowett like to comment on recent trends in which post-normal, post-truth, and post-fact science seem normal now and objectivity is seen as sexist or worse?
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