Aron Ra begins his series with a nice set up about how the extreme religious tend to frame evolution as being exclusively atheistic. I suppose anything that can be used to flog/frighten people to the cause is fair game for the radically religious.
Your opinions…
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3 comments
September 7, 2014 at 9:36 am
tildeb
The problem is that Ra conflates theistic evolution to be the same understanding of evolution as its scientific understanding: an unguided undirected natural process. This is NOT what theistic evolutionists believe; they simply place the creationist element of their belief somewhere other than god’s pointy figure of Poof!ism 6000 years ago but, at the end of the day, this same element of poof!ism is included in all those major denominations that pretend to agree with evolution.
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September 7, 2014 at 10:42 am
The Arbourist
@Tildeb
Might it not be that Ra is being charitable toward the different sects of religious belief and focusing on the categories of belief that completely (creationists) rather than partially(Catholics, etc) deny evolutionary theory.
Granted there is no room for poofism in scientific theory and unfortunately all religious add the poof to their world view.
It would seem like the video takes into account these cleavages and attempts to highlight the spectrum of assumed beliefs on the behalf of the religious.
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September 7, 2014 at 11:19 am
tildeb
Yes, I understand Ra’s motive and why he uses this approach to argue this specific thesis; however, I think Ra’s thesis that evolution doesn’t equal atheism is true only so far as some nebulous deism is concerned. That’s not his intended audience, so it smacks of some measure of underhandedness because religious believers in creationism really does preclude any understanding of why evolution in its scientific sense is actually true.
But for all the religions he does mention, the brute fact remains that there really is an incompatibility between science and religion in general and evolution and creationism specifically… no matter how deeply buried the necessary intervention of Poof!ism may be. Ra simply ignores this fact.
What needs to be said up front and publicly is that you can’t have it both ways. Ra suggests we can. Many believers disagree and I think have merit to do so.
This compatibility issue is properly understood to be a fatal danger to the proposition that method of faith can be compatible to the method of science. This danger is recognized by any and all who appreciate that, at its core, all religious belief in gods or a god require some measure of faith-based fundamentalism that is contrary to and incompatible with the scientific method and it’s model of how reality works. Allowing a faux-respect of faith-based methodology because it may ‘allow’ some level of a faith-based belief to agree with one adduced by science (as is the case made by Ra about why evolution does not equate with atheism) seems to me to be somewhat of an intellectual capitulation on his part to gain a particular end (convince reasonable believers to accept evolution without feeling they must reject their faith-based beliefs entirely) rather than him upholding a principled approach of means.
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