There are three things I wanted to bring to the attention of everyone:
First, an article from a lifelong Christian turned atheist about the compatibility of Christianity with science. Here’s an excerpt:
“The evolutionary creation of humanity upends the traditional Christian understanding of sin and atonement. Traditional Christianity asserts that people are fallen from a perfect state and chose sin willfully to rebel against God. God created only good: people introduced evil. But this does not at all match the creation of humanity as we now know it. Evolution honed our awareness and expectations, intentionality and skill, on the stone of survival needs in such a way that sin is part and parcel of who we are. We are struggling animals, not fallen perfection, and this makes better sense of human failing than Christianity. Just as important, if God created us that way, he is at least a partner, if not perpetrator, of evil, not just natural evil, but the evil we bring on each other.
“This should change how incarnate God approaches sin; at a minimum it should obviate addressing evil with eternal punishment. But Jesus’ treatment of sin and evil and their source and cure are not compatible with evolutionary development. It portrays a dualist understanding of human nature in which evil is an occupying force–and an invited one, at that–more than something built in that we struggle with. And his solution for evil is more like ridding the world of sinful trash than healing brokenness that is part of God’s handiwork. God Incarnate would not speak to us or about us this way, or threaten and condemn us to eternal punishment this way.”
The author has a point here that I had not thought of before: the bible does indeed portray human beings as having been perfect at one time and at a later time having being imperfect by choosing to sin. This is true whether you believe in a literal Adam and Eve or take it metaphorically and cast Adam and Eve as being an Everyman and Everywoman. However, the theory of evolution seems to imply that many of the moral shortcomings of human beings are the result of evolution, and that these characteristics evolved long ago in our pre-human ancestors (examples: murder, rape, theft, etc. have been observed in non-human primates, and such behaviors seem to be inevitable or nearly inevitable if natural selection alone produced us, see The Selfish Gene and The Moral Animal).
Second: Christopher Hallquist has made his book UFO’s, Ghosts, and a Rising God available online for free! It’s a great read for anyone interested in the subject. Be sure and send Chris a thank-you.
Third: the debate over whether Ethics is a science has once again erupted amongst religious skeptics. Here’s something I wrote about it:
In my opinion, Ethics is a study that has one foot in science and the other in philosophy.
Science is capable of showing us which action will best fulfill our goals. Science cannot, however, dictate what our goals are. Figuring out our goals is a matter for philosophy.
Example: some libertarians are opposed to wealth redistribution, and say they would maintain their opposition to it even if wealth redistribution would make a lot of people really happy without making anyone unhappy. They believe in the moral principle that you should not forcefully take anything from anyone to give to someone else, and that no ends just the means. I disagree with the libertarians who think this. The reason I bring up this example is to make plain that some ethical disputes don’t have anything to do with science, rather, they have to do with a disagreement over which goals we should be pursuing. Extremist libertarians believe we ought to uphold our committment to letting people keep what they earn, whereas most people would be more committed to overall societal health and happiness. How can we decide which of those two viewpoints is correct? I think we’d have to use philosophical arguments, and, as it turns out, there is a good philosophical argument that would settle this dispute: That moral rules and principles ought to only be upheld to the extent that they create human happiness, because happiness is what we are truly after, and so any rule or principle that doesn’t ought to be thrown out completely or at least neglected in cases where it does not produce happiness. Ergo, the non-libertarian position is correct.
