Why is natural selection so threatening to Christianity?
 

Ever wondered why evolution theory, particularly its component called natural selection, is so threatening to Christianity? it is not necessarily incompatible with the idea of a supreme creator. I recently read an article in the NY Review of Books that addressed this issue. The article is aptly called, "A Religion for Darwinians?" and is written by H. Allen Orr, reviewing a new book called "Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith," by Philip Kitcher. Orr, a professor at Rochester, is an evolutionary biologist, and Kitcher is a professor of the philosophy of science at Columbia. (Orr earlier this year wrote a brilliant and witheringly negative review of Dawkins' "The God Delusion" in the NY Review of Books.)

I thought this quotation from Orr's article was exquisite:

"Providentialist religion holds that 'the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design'; importantly, this Being is deeply concerned with the welfare of human beings. A providentialist God is a God to whom one might pray. Kitcher believes that providentialist religion ultimately succumbed to the problem of evil. Though theologians struggled for centuries to reconcile the ubiquity of evil with an omnipotent and caring Creator, the problem was exacerbated immensely—and, Kitcher believes, fatally—by Darwinism, wherein evil assumes the form of mass suffering under natural selection:

"'Darwin's account of the history of life greatly enlarges the scale on which suffering takes place. Through millions of years, billions of animals experience vast amounts of pain, supposedly so that, after an enormous number of extinctions of entire species, on the tip of one twig of the evolutionary tree, there may emerge a species with the special properties that make us able to worship the Creator.'"

Orr, despite that he has made a specialty of defending the continuing vitality of "spirituality" in the face of scientific advances, agrees with Kitcher. Do you? (By the way, Kitcher's conclusion is that "spirituality" is possible in the face of the undubitable truth of natural selection.)

Here is a link to the article though I doubt you can access the whole thing:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arti...ticle_id=20496

Why is intelligent design so threatening to atheists?

It's not just threatening to atheists, but to all reputable scientists and lovers of truth for truth's sake including academics like Orr and Kitcher who confess at least to hoping for existence of a God and hereafter. But it's only threatening if school boards want to teach it to children masquerading as science, which it clearly is not. Otherwise it's fine.

1. Some use natural selection as a way of denying the existence of God

2. Some use the claim that God was behind natural selection as a way of countering #1.

Both viewpoints are threatening to certain subpopulations.

What's this? People deny the existence of God so they can have more fun? Because Satan has got hold of them? So they use natural selection as a means to reaching their foreordained conclusion? You're so full of dung.

No, people conclude absence of God largely based on the rationale posited in the quotation from Orr's article I set out above. And, by the way, it has been shown systematically that belief in God does not make one more likely to be ethical. Even C.S. Lewis acknowledged this (he conceded, despite his ardent Christianity, that religious people may well be immoral in greater numbers, analogizing religion to a hospital, but for the soul).

I didn't say any of those things, so who's full of dung?

Maybe so, but in your case we can see the hazards of not being beholden to a Deity.

What discipline were you trained in? If you're using CS Lewis's statement supporting that "belief in God does not make one more likely to be ethical," you've got a serious endogeneity problem.

Why does the "suffering' of speices as they are forced to adapt through natural selection necessarily constitute evil?

I am not a fan of C.S. Lewis. I cited him because I thought you and Indy might be.

I don't bother reading CS Lewis because I get enough excerpts at General Conference as it is. A form of semi-annual Readers Digest, so to speak.