Look at those cavemen go

[prog]

Poll sez that most americans think that Gord created humans in their present form. I... was not aware of this. Anyway, I would not have guessed this.

The news zeitgest tells me that an Inherit the Wind-style battle over teaching evolution is in the making, at a national level. This makes me as nervous as it does you, but I take hope in believing that there is hidden opportunity here for We the Smart to actually gain ground against Them what's Ignorant, by the theory of evolution suddenly becoming a topic of public dialog. I believe this in the same way I believe this is happening right now with issues like stem cell research (née "theraputic cloning") and medical marijuana (née "legalizing pot"): here are things that most people had negative feelings about due to conventional wisdom, but slowly, slowly, more and more of them are being brought around, thanks to a constant bath in the truth as carried by the mass media. (And the truth is there, if couched in some amount of info-junk.)

Counterexample: Global warming. Maybe because it should be "climate change (née 'global warming')".

Do we need to come up with a née for the T of E? Any suggestions?

---

Would you believe that a Catholic priest, of all people, was the one who broke it to me that the first few chapters of Genesis are mythology, in the purest sense? Blew the minds of a whole group of us 7th-graders while we were hanging around a classroom at St. Paul's after hours, for reasons I no longer recall. And here he was, our theology teacher, saying such a thing! An interesting conversation followed.

Up until then I somehow accepted Adam & Eve &c. as the truth even as I learned about and also accepted evolution, taught to me as the best truth we have by these same ordained Catholics, without a moment's hedging. I think that, despite what that one priest said, some of them may have felt the same way, even as adults, but who knows.

I wouldn't count this as hedging: Sister Marie, the principal and -- for a time -- also our science teacher, was reading to us from our textbook, about the very beginnings of life on Earth. At one point, the book speculated on the various sorts of magic that could have happened to zot our first unicellular paleomommy into being from the ol' primordial soup, concluding that we really have no way of knowing what brought it about. Sister Marie paused to look at her pupils and say, "But we know who made it happen, don't we!" Then she resumed reading.

Comments

[necturus.livejournal.com]

IIRC the Roman Catholic Church accepts evolution. It's the Protestants, or some of them, anyway, that refuse to accept it.

[gidiku.livejournal.com]

I had a rabbi and a catholic priest explain it as alegory.
...but if Joe Bubba of the tennessee school district decides to blatantly disregard piles of evidence, then we can conclude that creationisim is valid science.... because the bible says so.... and that's the greatest scientific evidence of all.

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

i remember reading hesiod's "theogany" in college and thinking that it read just like the book of genesis. or rather, the book of genesis reads like hesiod's "theogany."

[dougo.livejournal.com]

More than half of Kerry voters want creationism taught alongside evolution.

Whoa.