Yesterday, I received a note from a high-ranking editor at Christianity Today who was pretty annoyed at what I wrote about the magazine’s June cover story on BioLogos. He hasn’t replied to my suggestion that I publish his note and my reply. So I will publish my reply here, with a couple of comments, and link to the pieces posted here at UD.
First, one comment: He thought it a “slur” to predict that the magazine could end up endorsing euthanasia. I confess to not knowing why it is a slur. Consider abortion and other traditionally prohibited lifestyle practices many nominally Christian groups do end up endorsing by word or silence: They believe themselves to be moral people, and some members have informed me that they are more moral than me. I am not inclined to dispute the matter. One wonders how many Evolution Sunday churches sing those tunes?
At any rate, many folk have told me over the years that they thought Christianity Today, for which I used to write, was slowly heading to the junction of Aimless and Liberal. The cover story’s apish Adam and Eve feels like that sort of watershed. I rarely read the mag any more and the mag isn’t important enough to the folk who told me that to justify the trouble of slander. They simply sense it is true, and change the subject. Anyway, I wrote:
I was sent the story and tried to make sense of it for what it is. For the message it gives, taken by itself, as I have every right to do, since most readers will.
And if you end up where I suggested, you’ll think it right to be there, little by little and step by step. So it won’t even be a slur. Look what Francis Collins endorses! And he is Mr. US Evangelical Scientist. If you doubt that personally, can I quote you? Can I quote this correspondence? [Apparently not. – d.]
A friend, a faithful Christian in science, was dismayed by the story. He is an information theorist. … The genome, to take one small point, is full over overlapping codes. (It’s as if a short story read backwards is a flawless different short story, and sections of it, read letter by letter down the right hand side are a flawless paragraph.)
Then I turn to Giberson and Collins and – straw men jousting at straw enemies. 78% of evolutionary biologists are “pure naturalists” (No God and no free will).And G and C are telling us that we should defer to the authority of science about what random processes can do, when I am hearing so much real science showing conclusively what they can’t do.
I thought Ostling did a superb job of allowing people to realize what they are choosing to embrace, and I especially loved the artist’s grotesques. It figures, in the new view, that God, if he exists and if he created Adam and Eve, would create them like that, so that we are superior to them instead of inferior.
And isn’t that the real point of Christian Darwinism?
Okay, so I am not on that guy’s Christmas list.
My posts on Christianity Today here:
Christianity Today on the BioLogos vs. orthodoxy “crisis”
Christianity Today article on BioLogos: A
Darwinian, not a Christian view of evil is floated, in defense of Christian Darwinism
Dumped Biologians could make own film
Ninety-nine per cent chimpanzee rides again? In a Christian rag? Well, maybe only 96%?
Prediction: Based on Christianity Today’s article on Darwin-friendly Adam and Eve