by Robert Harden

Created on: January 22, 2009

Of course Darwinism and god can coexist. The cause of much of the trouble surrounding evolution and Christianity is the very old association between science and atheism. While is is certainly true that a higher percentage of scientists are atheist or agnostic that the general population, to extend this to blind skepticism of all science is to simply ignore truth. We as a society know that science works most of the time and that it has discovered amazing things about the world, however we believe it got here. All of us now agree that the Earth is round and religious resistance to that idea is not only well documented but generally ridiculed in our presumably more enlightened age.

But no matter our belief system, all people must admit that the universe runs on natural laws that are observable, deducible, and generally knowable by mankind. The debate here cannot be that these laws don't exist, anyone who would claim that clearly hasn't studied the issue and is blindly following dogma. But the origin of these laws is what is important to the relationship between science and religion. Whether or not one believes that thy just happened to occur through chance, or that God created a wonderfully beautiful and elegantly functional universe, to admitting that one just doesn't know is the core of the debate between evolution and science.

But the tenents of evolution aren't particularly debatable with regards as to whether or not it actually happened and is happening. The people who argue in favor of evolution are those who have spent their lives studying the subject, including Francis Collins, a leader of the Human Genome Project and avowed Christian who has publicly debated Richard Dawkins over the subject.

The people who tend to argue against evolution, however, are nearly always laymen and the difference here is that people have turned evolution into a referendum on God's existence and the literal truth of the Bible. Nothing could have been farther from Darwin's mind when he was making his discoveries, he merely wanted to probe the world around him. But people take what is supposed to be a scientific issue, that is, a discussion over what observable facts mean or most likely mean, and somehow turn it into a political and social issue. A scientist at Oxford writing about evolution in a particular organism is not a threat to a family in Texas who goes to church every Sunday, and it is simply absurd to think that the former is an attack on the latter. Scientists do not talk

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