John Agnew asked Doug down below:
Why is it that you feel so threatened by reality?
John:
I think that I can answer this for a lot of folks, if not for Doug specifically. My answer is founded in a lot of personal thought and experience and also quite a few years of correspondence with Chris Nicholl, Eric Gage, James Lacey and others who are/were on this forum and who are deep thinkers when it comes to reconciling Christianity with scientific reality.
The last stuff I read of Eric’s (on another board) suggested that he is presently in an agnostic frame of spirituality. You will recall that he had recently broken with his fundamentalist upbringing when he first started posting here several years ago. His spiritual life is a broad arc. He could add a ton to the points I’m trying to make in this essay. I’ll see if I can get an update from Eric later.
In any case, my guess is that Doug must ignore the overwhelming scientific reality of evolution because at a subconscious level he is profoundly afraid that any crack in the monolithic wall of scripture, no matter how slight, will inevitably propagate, split and grow until his entire faith collapses. My guess is that if Doug admits to himself at a conscious level that evolution is valid and Genesis is myth or parable, then how can he be sure that Christ died for our sins, and how he can be sure that he has actually been given the gift of faith and salvation as he described yesterday? In his view, if you give an inch, the next thing you know you’ll be giving a mile. And that leads to doubt, and doubt leads to atheism.
You know what? Doug has a point. To be a traditional Christian and an amateur scientist is not so easy. Obviously I embrace evolution as the mechanism of speciation as much as the rest of you do. I read with fascination the latest cosmological findings. I think the universe is billions and billions of years old. I have never thought that there was literally an ark, or a flood. What about the burning bush and the stone tablets? Well, I guess that is probably myth too. How about the wedding in Canaan, turning water into wine, or the fishes and loaves? True or false? It beats me.
Which obviously gets us to the biggie. The heart of Christianity, (as taught in Church anyway), is that Christ died and rose again. Can one believe that is true if one doubts the loaves and fishes? Can one be Christian if he isn’t sure about a factual resurrection?
You see the pickle Doug is in. If he acknowledges that Genesis is myth, what falls apart next? A lot of Christians, and I would usually have more or less include myself in this group, are happy to accept the Old Testament as parable and myth and the New Testament as basically factual. Still, I’m an analytical and reasonably intelligent guy. I have to admit that this is a terribly arbitrary way to draw the line. The only hard courtroom type evidence I have for either Testament is the texts themselves, so why endorse one as history and accept the other as myth? Uh-oh, is that the goat path I see ahead?
I’ve reached mental détente on these big issues, for now, and this is something Eric Gage and Mother Teresa both had a lot to do with. The answer to the problem for me is:
“Don’t worry about it too much.”
Eric helped, because a lot of his writing showed that the important stuff in Christianity was hardly blind allegiance to the authenticity of scripture. No; the important stuff is living according to Christ’s example. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking probably gets me excommunicated if I mention it to the Bishop.
Mother Teresa helped, because it was revealed in correspondence released after her death, that she was wracked with doubt her whole life. If such an obviously saintly woman can deal with doubt, so can I.
So, to get to the heart of this essay, which really isn’t about Doug after all, I still consider myself Christian because I try to live according to Christ’s example. I have no idea if the New Testament is historically accurate. I am positive that Genesis etc. is myth and parable. More importantly though, I feel God as a presence in nature, in the universe. This, in my view, is a self-authenticating truth as Eric described many years ago. Unfortunately that thread is gone. I am open to the possibility that my heart-feelings are self delusion or simple neural mis-wiring. It feels even more real to me now though, than it ever did before.
I still attend the Church of my ancestors, even though I vehemently disagree with several of the Church’s formal positions. That’s no big deal for me, I’m comfortable there and I don’t make waves in real life.
No doubt, if Doug had read this far, he is thinking that I am damned the same as Gary, Clyde you, (John) or the rest of the atheist crowd. And that in the final analysis is why Doug can not embrace evolution. He is afraid that to do so is the first step on an inevitable path to damnation. So I guess we have to give Doug a break. In Doug's view, the stakes are pretty high.
In any case, if there is heaven, I expect to see you all there because you seem to be good souls. I personally think that God is a “different strokes for different folks” kind of deity, who certainly would not be offended that we use the intellect we have evolved.
Jim
Here is my go at this beautiful object. I might try to re-process to minimize the bright star halos, but I might not. The halos don't bother me much and I don't want to dilute the reflection nebulosity. This is basic LRGB processing with 5 minute subs. A full-sized clickable version is here: