Actually, I've heard all about Evidence That Demands a Verdict. I'm probably about as interested in reading it as you are in reading The God Delusion.

If I wanted to learn what we can reconstruct about the historical Jesus, I'd look into Biblical archeology.

I wouldn't claim to be one if I wasn't.


Although I do have significant European ancestry, I would never consider myself to be "white" because of my dark skin. I'm about the same tone as President Obama.


Most people haven't. But they do exist.
I basically just converted myself to Hinduism.

Actually, it's a scholarly book, and he was a devout atheist/evolutionist. He explains the problems he had with evolution initially in the introduction. The author of answersingenesis.org was an atheist/evolutionist. He's a biologist. He also runs the Creationist Museum in Ohio I believe.

Actually, I own that book! But I didn't read it. It's right next to "Darwin's Black Box"

Two problems:

1) You're equating atheism and evolution. One is a metaphysical belief; the other is a scientific theory.
2) You claim the book is scholarly although the author, Josh McDowell is a Christian apologetic with a degree in Divinity, not the natural sciences. How was his book received by the scientific community?

And just for fun, 3) "he runs the Creationist Museum in Ohio." If that doesn't scream hidden agenda, I don't know what does.

As a result, there's no incompatibility between religious faith and acceptance of evolution. I haven't always been an atheist, but I've always been an evolutionist. It's just that I had the good fortune to be raised in a religion (and a Christian one at that) which distinguishes metaphysical truth from scientific truth.


That's not exactly a hidden agenda, is it? That's a big honkin' in-your-face agenda. If it were any less hidden, it would have it's own Facebook page.

Out of curiosity, which one?

I was raised Catholic (!) and never had any reason to question the scientific consensus when it jarred with the literalist interpretation of the Bible.
It appears to have several: http://www.facebook.com/search/?init=sr ... ism+museum

The problem with evolutionary theory is that it omits any discussion of the odds of any changes which have allegedly occurred. Could nature have "invented" endothermy in mammals, birds and dinosaurs? That's endothermy developing three times. What are the odds? Another problem is that if you consider viruses to be a form of life you are saying that life began by chance more than once. Surely you don't believe that animals, plants and viruses have the same point of origin.

Why not? All lived in the same environmental conditions. Besides, take into account that all life is related
Again, why not? Four billion years is a long time. I don't know much about abiogenesis but once life starts to develop, it's not beyond the realm of the imagination at all that incremental changes over time would produce the vast multitudes of life forms we know today (which is of course exactly what we believe happened).

I was raised Roman Catholic as well, and for us there was no conflict because our interpretation of the Bible was always contextualist rather than literalist. Or, as one of my high school religion teachers once put it, "The Bible is all true, but it isn't factual." There are scientific truths and there are metaphysical truths, and these are not the same things nor are they arrived at in the same way.

What I really don't get about the Creationist--sorry, Intelligent Design--mindset is why it conceives of the theory of evolution as a diminution of God's greatness rather than an augmentation of it. When I was still theist, it awed me that there could be an intelligence so incredibly sophisticated that it could conceive and execute a divine plan spanning not thousands of years but billions of years consisting of an infinite number of dynamic processes most of which precede too slowly for our dull intellects to even pick up on.

Of all the world's mythico-religious systems, Buddhism and Hinduism strike me as the only ones which truly embraced the vastness of the cosmos from their very inception. Compared to their unfathomable kalpas of millions or even billions of years, the 6,000 to 8,000 years generally presented as the age of the Earth in the Judaeo-Christian tradition looks laughably paltry.


Since birds evolved from dinosaurs, it only counts as two.