If Dowd was only in Charleston to support evolution, then many of us could agree with Sgt. Joe Friday’s inimitable words in Dragnet: “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Dowd clearly wanted to take us beyond the facts.
He paraded before us a great number of scientific and religious figures who supposedly support his thesis that traditional religious concepts, especially those describing God, are part of “private revelation” and therefore not based on hard evidence. In their place, he says that there is such a thing as “public revelation.”
Read it all from the faith and values section of the local paper.
For the purposes of debate, I wish Christians would reserve using Genisis and attack evolution where it is weak – causation. Are mutations really random? How do we know this? How does natrual selection work in complex organisms such as bat sonar? If it looks like design, why is design excluded as a possibility?
An excellent article by Peter Moore. Dowd has proposed nothing new but something as old as the hills. As C.S. Lewis said in Miracles (Chapter XI, ‘Christianity and “Religion”‘), “Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are. . . It is the attitude into which the human mind automatically falls when left to itself.”
On the matter of evolution, like Peter Moore I have no difficulty at all with the theory of evolution when it is left as that. Christians who do may want to direct their questions to the forum at Biologos.com. Christianity and evolution are not antithetical. Pantheism and Christianity, however, definitely are.
Ross
correction: That’s Biologos.org