Thursday, February 24, 2005

Dawkins and the Pope

This weekend there was an article about Intelligent Design in the New York Times Magazine. While the author doesn't say anything particularly new, one paragraph at the end pretty much sums up my entire position about evolution v. theism, namely that it's not an either/or situation. He writes:

One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that ''truth cannot contradict truth.'' If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.

He perfectly juxtaposes an avowed atheist and an avowed theist in the same paragraph, something that needs to be done more frequently. I'm becoming more and more convinced that we need an organization called "Christians for Darwin" or something like that. Kind of like "Jews for Jesus" only not as cult-y...

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