Science Diet
Every time the creation vs. evolution debate flares up, someone on the
creationism side will say that “Darwinism” is an “athiest” plot to
destroy religion. And someone on the evolution side will say that
evolution has nothing to say about God, and is quite compatible with
religion. So why don’t the creationists just accept that they can have
their cake and eat it too? That they can have both religion and the
best science available?
It’s kind of like when your doctor tells you you have to lose 40
pounds and puts you on a diet. You moan and make a face. He says,
“Hey, just because it’s a diet doesn’t mean you can’t have tasty and
filling meals.” That’s true. But it does mean that you can’t have
greasy burgers with deep-fried lard balls, or Twinkies and Moon Pies,
a fondness for which is probably the reason you need to lose 40 pounds
in the first place.
So when people say that evolution is compatible with religion, what
they really mean is that it’s compatible with religion that doesn’t
contradict reality. Creationists who reject evolution because they
don’t want to be related to monkeys are justified in seeing it as an
attack on their religion, not because evolution is an attack on
religion, but because their particular flavor of religion is deluded.
Ditto
YECs who reject
geology because their religion says that there was a global flood,
Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe that life = blood, Christian
Scientists who think prayer works better than antibiotics or surgery,
the Catholics of Galileo’s time who insisted that the Earth does not
move, and Jews who insist that there was a significant Hebrew slave
population that was expelled from Egypt, to name but a few.