USA Polling Data on Science and Religion

reposted from RichardDawkins.net
by Jason Rosenhouse

Reposted from:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2007/08/polling_data_on_science_and_re.php

Chris Mooney has a link to this analysis of recent polling data. The analysis was written by David Masci. The subject: How Americans feel about science and faith. Mooney thinks the data supports the Matt Nisbet line that people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens hurt the cause. I disagree.

Here's Mooney's main comment:

So here's my contribution: I merely wish to point out a good analysis of polling data over at Pew that strongly supports the broad Nisbet perspective. The gist: The American public doesn't generally perceive a necessary conflict between religion and science; but if you tell them there is such an either-or conflict, guess which one of the binary options they're gonna choose?

Yeah, that's right. White-beard-in-the-sky-guy--or some variation thereon.
The polling data described in the essay is remarkable for a couple of reasons. For example:

Indeed, according to a 2006 survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 42% of Americans reject the notion that life on earth evolved and believe instead that humans and other living things have always existed in their present form. Among white evangelical Protestants - many of whom regard the Bible as the inerrant word of God - 65% hold this view. Moreover, in the same poll, 21% of those surveyed say that although life has evolved, these changes were guided by a supreme being. Only a minority, about a quarter (26%) of respondents, say that they accept evolution through natural processes or natural selection alone.
Are these numbers accurate!? If they are, they would seem to indicate considerable progress in America's acceptance of evolution. I had always heard it was ten percent of the population that accepts fully naturalistic evolution, and that the percentage accepting "no-changeism" was a lot closer to fifty percent. Meanwhile, only sixty-five percent of evangelicals reject evolution? I would have guessed the number was closer to eighty.

There are also some places where I am not persuaded by Masci's analysis:

Moreover, Americans, including religious Americans, hold science and scientists in very high regard. A 2006 survey conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University found that most people (87%) think that scientific developments make society better. Among those who describe themselves as being very religious, the same number - 87% - share that opinion.

Thinking that scientific developments make society better is not the same thing as holding scientists in high regard. I am not surprised that even very religious people like a steady supply of new technology and medical innovations, which is usually what people think of when they think of scientific progress. But that doesn't mean their respect extends to the process that leads to such progress, or the people behind the scenes.

However, these are not the main issues. Instead I recommend pondering this:

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin's theory.

This reliance on religious faith may help explain why so many people do not see science as a direct threat to religion. Only 28% of respondents in the same Time poll say that scientific advancements threaten their religious beliefs. These poll results also show that more than four-fifths of respondents (81%) say that "recent discoveries and advances" in science have not significantly impacted their religious views. In fact, 14% say that these discoveries have actually made them more religious. Only 4% say that science has made them less religious.

I think these are the paragraphs upon which Mooney bases his case. Sadly, they have nothing to do with the issue at hand. That issue, let me remind you, is whether the books of people like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett help or hurt the cause of promoting good science education. Nisbet says they hurt. I say they don't.

The analysis says nothing about moderate religious people being driven over to the dark side by strong rhetoric from Dawkins et al, the point at issue in past flare-ups of this argument. Instead it tells us that among people who reject evolution, the large majority do so for religious reasons, and not based on any sober consideration of the evidence. They don't need Dawkins to tell them that evolution poses a challenge to religion, they have already figured it out for themselves. It is always nice to have hard data, but I suspect absolutely no one is surprised by this finding.

And let us not be comforted by the finding that a relatively small percentage of people perceive a conflict between science and religion. If the data is to be believed, this perceived lack of conflict is not born from any genuine lack of conflict. Rather, it is born from religious people standing with their hands on their hips saying, "Your puny science is no match for my religious biases! I will simply ignore any contrary data you throw at me!"

The data also tells us that more than three-fifths of Americans will accept the teachings of their religion over the findings of science. Reading people like Mooney and Nisbet, you get the impression that in the face of this finding the correct response is just to roll over and cower before the might of people's religious myopia. I'm picturing the scene from Blazing Saddles where Gene Wilder cautions Cleavon Little, who starts to reach for his gun as he goes to deal with the enormous, physcially formidable villain Mongo, "No, no. If you shoot him you'll only make him mad."

The desire to teach creationism in the schools is a symptom. The disease is the attitude of those sixty-four percent of the people who think their invented-from-whole-cloth religious beliefs are more reliable than the findings of science. As long as that attitude persists, there can be no long term victory for the pro-science side of these disputes. All we can do is go running pell-mell around the country, putting down one brush fire after another, patting ourselves on the back every time we manage to get a sane person elected to a red state school board. I don't mean to disparage the importance of such work, but it is not the ultimate solution to the problem.

Those attitudes, and the unflagging respect for religious faith that they entail, must be weakened. Can that be done? I don't know. It certainly isn't easy, but other Western countries have managed to do it.

But I am definitely certain that you can not weaken those attitudes by refusing to attack them.

These polls represent the state of affairs today. What got us here was not the vocal opposition to religion served up by Dawkins and the others. They are newcomers on the scene. Instead, what got us here is years of Republican pandering to the religious right, coupled with Democratic cowardice in the face of increasing challenges to church-state separation (among other factors, of course). As I have written before, it is the nicey-nice strategy of non-engagement endorsed by Mooney and Nisbett that is refuted by these polls.

The strategy where you publicly attack bad religious ideas has barely been tried.

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Some theists have many misconceptions about the non-religious.

reposted from http://freethoughtpedia.com

Some theists have many misconceptions about the non-religious.

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The Rise & Fall of America's Political Right

reposted from http://www.chronogram.com

by Larry Beinhart, April 28, 2007

There is no real name for the movement that took over America six years ago and continues run it. That’s part of the reason for its success. Its very vagueness makes it hard to attack.
In actuality, it is not a single entity.
It is made up of three main parts.

1. Corporatism, which is based on the belief that whatever makes money is good—and should not be restrained.
2. Neo-con megalomania, which is the belief that American power is absolute, irresistible, and always good, and should therefore be used—without restraint.
3. right-wing religion, which is the certainty that this movement’s form of Christianity is God-commanded; therefore it should rule America and, through America, the world—and any restraint against it is opposition to God.
   

To add to the confusion, this movement did not stand out on its own.
Its proponents entered into the existing Republican Party and the old Goldwater-Reagan conservative movement. They brought those people along with them (roughly half the voting population) and ran for office under the guise of being Republicans and conservatives.
Most of what they said they stood for was in the mainstream.

Capitalism is good. Being strong is good. Education, financial security, and trade are good. America is a good, idealistic country. It’s good that America defeated its enemies in the past, like the Nazis and the Soviets, and it’s a good idea that we remain capable of doing it in the future. Faith and belief in a higher power is good. We should be careful about foreign military adventures, though once we are attacked we have to be vigorous in our response and fight them over there before we have to fight them over here.

All that sounds reasonable, appealing, and familiar.
What distinguishes Bushism from old-line Republicanism and reasonable conservatism is not the names on their beliefs, it’s the quality of their beliefs. The beliefs of Bushism are theological.
Theological thinking creates powerful and convincing rhetoric.
There are two reasons for this.
People with theological beliefs don’t mind lying. It’s for the greater good.

This has been combined with the corporate attitude toward truth: “Coke adds life!” It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false, or absolutely meaningless. If it moves the product, that’s what you say.

The result is spinning, which is more effective than straight-out lying. For years, Bush was a master of spin. If you analyze his speeches, it is exceedingly rare to find an outright lie that you can nail to the table. Yet he was able to lead his listeners to conclusions that were absolutely false.
The classic example is in his 2003 State of the Union address, in which he said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The substance was absolutely false. He had been told as much by the CIA. The consequences of creating a false impression were vast, tragic, and intensely stupid. Yet, by putting the opening clause on it, citing the British government—whose intelligence service did, at one time, think there was reason to believe it—it is not, technically, a lie.
People with theological beliefs routinely lie to themselves.
In their theological minds, the theory is always true. Only reality is flawed.

When the CIA stated that there was no substantive link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney disputed their claim and in effect said, “It must be true! Find intelligence that does agree, or if you’re too incompetent, I’ll find it myself.” Bush believes that cutting taxes always increases revenues and creates jobs. Yet year after year, when the numbers came back and it didn’t happen, the response was to insist on more tax cuts, because the theology says it has to happen.
Listening to Bush—and Cheney and their supporters—is exactly like listening to a Marxist explaining away Stalin. And Mao, and the gulags, and the East German secret police, and the madness of Ceausescu.

They were a new force. They believed completely in their cause and that they should have power. They arrived cloaked in old and familiar and reassuring rhetoric, so they encountered little resistance, and conquered rapidly and thoroughly.
What is astonishing is how rapidly their ideas are being revealed as bankrupt.
The war in Iraq has demolished the myth of America’s unlimited power.
Iraq was the neo-cons’ great experiment in democracy and free-market capitalism. The true believers really believed that simply by having people vote for a democratic-style government and sweeping away all restrictions on free markets, a little America would instantly emerge—stable, friendly, prosperous, the envy of its neighbors. Instead, it created a hell on Earth.
Anti-government government was exposed as bankrupt by Katrina.
Prosecutor-gate is revealing, quite rapidly, how the quest for power, fueled by theological righteousness, tossed out all other virtues—like justice, fairness, and honesty.
Economists and pundits are behind the curve, but ordinary Americans get that Bush economics do not work for them. And that what’s good for giant corporations is not necessarily what’s good for the USA.

Religion has been a sacred cow. But the excesses of Christian power and the violent madness of Islamic fundamentalism have changed that. Now atheist books are on the best-seller list. Because it is necessary, it has become respectable to genuinely question why and how and what people believe.
Theological thinking, itself, has been revealed as bankrupt.

It is almost impossible to overstate how disastrous the eight years of Bush are going to turn out to be for the Republican Party and for the right. It is not entirely visible yet, but this tumble downhill is going to turn out to be a fall off a cliff.

The Democrats, and the left, have a great opportunity here. I hope they make something out of it, because those other people are dangerous idiots. If they are going to, they can’t simply fall back on their old rhetoric. The world has changed. It always changes. It will keep changing. They have to come up with something new. Something that combines realism and good, hard-headed American pragmatism with ideals. Then make it sound exciting.

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reposted from Guardian

What God says, goes

The US presidential campaigns will no doubt be littered with references to God and morality, but the two concepts should be kept apart.

Mike Ion

August 24, 2007 10:00 AM |

When candidates for next year's US presidential elections make speeches, few will be able to resist the temptation to make reference to either God or morality.

This is because (despite Plato demonstrating the logical independence of God and morality over 2,000 years ago in the Euthyphro) the belief that morality requires God remains a widely held moral maxim.

In particular, it serves the views of the Christian right who argue that all of society's ills - everything from Aids to out-of-wedlock pregnancies - are the result of a breakdown in morality and that this breakdown is due to a decline in belief in God.

Although many fundamentalists trace the beginning of this decline to the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, most of the American Christian Right trace it to the US supreme court's 1963 decision banning prayer in the classroom. In an attempt to neutralise these purported sources of moral decay, fundamentalists across America have long sought to restore belief in God by promoting the teaching of creationism and school prayer.

According to many fundamentalist Christians, what makes an action right is that God wills it to be done. In other words, nothing is right or wrong unless God makes it so. Whatever God says goes. So if God had decreed that adultery was permissible, then adultery would be permissible. Many would consider this argument to be reductio ad absurdum because it is clearly absurd to think that adultery, wanton killing, raping, stealing or torturing could ever be morally permissible. Moreover, to believe that God could have commanded these things is to destroy whatever grounds one might have for praising or worshiping him.

Leibniz was the first to point out that, if things are neither right nor wrong independently of God's will, then God cannot choose one thing over another because it is right. Thus, if he does choose one over another, his choice must be arbitrary. But a being whose decisions are arbitrary is not a being worthy of worship. What Leibniz ably demonstrated is that the view that morality is independent of God is an eminently sensible and loyal one for a theist to hold.

In fairness, many Christian fundamentalists passionately believe that universal moral standards are required for the proper functioning of society. The problem is that they wrongly believe that God is the only possible source of such standards.

Philosophers as diverse as Plato, Kant, John Stuart Mill, George Edward Moore and John Rawls have demonstrated that it is possible to have a universal morality without God.

Who knows, perhaps one of the presidential hopefuls will have the courage to argue that what American society really needs is not more religion but a richer notion of the nature of morality.

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Poll: For Christians' identity, it's faith first, U.S. second

reposted from CNN

Editor's note: This is part of a series of reports CNN.com is featuring for "God's Warriors," a documentary hosted by CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

(CNN) -- Most Christians are more likely to describe themselves as Christian first and American second, according to a new CNN poll examining religious views in the United States.

A new poll finds that Christian respondents would describe themselves as "Christian" before "American."

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that of the 750 Christians in the survey, 59 percent identify themselves first by their faith, then as Americans, while 36 percent described themselves in the reverse.

CNN's findings are not that different from those in a recent Pew Research Center poll on Muslim-American attitudes. In that poll, 47 percent of Muslims in America say they are Muslim first, American second. Younger Muslims were especially likely to feel that way: 60 percent of them responded they were Muslim first.

CNN's research also found that Americans are now less likely to see the possibility for peace between Islam and Christianity. Of the total 1,029 adult Americans polled, 53 percent say conflict is inevitable between the two religions, up from 45 percent in 2003. Explore Americans' views on religions »

Those polled also said Islam was the religion most likely to use violence. Sixty-eight percent believe Islam is the religion most likely to have followers who would use violence to spread their religion, compared to 11 percent for Christianity and 4 percent for Judaism.

When asked about religion-related violence in the United States, about nine in 10 said they personally would not be willing to kill another person to uphold a religious belief or advance a religious cause. But asked how many other Americans would do so, more than a third responded "many" and "some;" a third said "few" and a quarter said "almost no Americans."

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• God's Warriors
• Charts: Americans' views on religion
• Teen Christians crusade against pop culture

The CNN poll also found that 62 percent say that American society has strayed too far from its religious foundation in the past 50 years, while answers were split almost evenly on religion as a factor in government policy. Forty-five percent said religion should have no influence on government decisions, while 36 percent say it should have some influence, but not the major factor.

When it comes to the Bible, CNN's poll found that 57 percent say they believe the Book of Revelations' description of the violent end of the world, where all but Christians perish. Nearly one in five believes it will happen in their lifetime.

But of the 750 Christians in the poll, nearly eight in 10 said that people of other beliefs could get into heaven, while only 17 percent believe that only Christians can.

The poll was conducted between June 22-24, 2007, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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The bond between God and power

reposted from The Economist

Evangelicals in America, Aug 23rd 2007, From The Economist print edition

Once looked down upon, American Evangelicals have now risen triumphantly to the heights

Eyevine

ON PALM SUNDAY 2002 George Bush and his entourage were flying home from El Salvador. Not wishing to miss church, they decided to improvise. Before long 40 worshippers were crammed into Air Force One's conference room. Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser, led the worship, Karen Hughes, then Mr Bush's counsellor, gave the lesson and the service ended with everybody singing “Amazing Grace” and hugging each other.

In the first half of the 20th century, H.L. Mencken, a freethinker, dismissed Evangelicals as backwoods bigots and Richard Niebuhr, a theologian, said that theirs was a “religion of the dispossessed” (or, as one sociologist put it, of the “disadvantaged ranks of the stratification system”). Even as late as the 1990s there was a widespread perception that Evangelicals were poor, uneducated and easily led.

How did these supposedly ignorant buffoons arrive at the heart of the American power structure? Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University, who has interviewed 360 Evangelicals who have made it into the American elite, including two former presidents, answers this question with a rare degree of skill and learning. The past 30 years have seen a revolution. Evangelicals have almost drawn level with other religious groups in terms of wealth and education. And they have penetrated almost every area of the American establishment. Look at the top of many a professional tree and you can find an arboreal gathering of born-again Christians.

The role of Evangelicals in the Bush administration is particularly notable.

But any European who thinks that they will simply disappear back into their caves when Mr Bush retires is in for a disappointment. Billy Graham has been a spiritual adviser to every president since Dwight Eisenhower.

Bill Clinton cultivated Evangelical leaders, such as Bill Hybels, the founder of the Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. He also mentioned Jesus more frequently in his public utterances than Mr Bush has, at least so far (5.1 times a year compared with 4.7). Over on Capitol Hill politicians of all parties attend prayer breakfasts and Bible classes.

Evangelicals have become much more visible in the boardroom as the South prospered and people became more willing to mingle work and faith. Prominent business figures such as John Tyson, a chicken magnate, and Wayne Huizinga, a serial entrepreneur, now talk openly about their faith. Evangelical businessmen form networks such as the Business Leadership and Spirituality Network. And a growing number of bosses are trying to incorporate Evangelical principles into the operation of their businesses. Chick-fil-A, a fast-food chain, refuses to open on Sundays and holds devotional services at its corporate headquarters every Monday. And Interstate Batteries, a Texan company, helps its employees to go on missions.

Evangelicals are even invading America's two greatest bastions of secularism—Hollywood and academia. Mel Gibson forced Hollywood to wake up to the power of the Evangelical dollar with his formidably successful “The Passion of the Christ”. Phil Anschutz, an Evangelical billionaire in Denver, finances Walden Media, which had huge success with two films: “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “Amazing Grace”. Evangelical colleges, such as Regent University and Biola, support state-of-the-art film studios. Act One, a Los Angeles programme, trains Christian screenwriters and executives (even if the notion of a Christian Hollywood executive seems a contradiction in terms).

Evangelicals have been purged from the ivory tower more thoroughly than any other religious group (and have often made up for the fact by denigrating the life of the mind). But even there, they are now on the march. Evangelical colleges have been expanding rapidly—they increased their enrolment by 60% between 1990 and 2002, a time when the general university population was static—and are trying to improve their academic profiles.

Evangelical high-flyers have been making it into the Ivy League: in a recent year a quarter of Princeton's students were attending Evangelical meetings.

The Pew Foundation has invested money in a cadre of first-rate Evangelical academics, and other patrons have created scholarships for Evangelical students. Mark Noll, one of America's finest historians, is also a proud Evangelical.

Mr Lindsay demonstrates that the arrival of the Evangelicals is changing both the American elite and the Evangelical movement itself. It is bringing the elite much closer to ordinary Americans (Peter Berger, another sociologist, once joked that, if Indians are the most religious people on the planet and Swedes the least religious, then America is a land of Indians governed by Swedes). But it is also creating new divisions within the Evangelical movement between a cosmopolitan establishment and the populist masses.

“Faith in the Halls of Power” is not a perfect book. Mr Lindsay's prose style suggests that he spends too much time reading his fellow sociologists. His failure to discuss the American armed services is bizarre given the number of Evangelicals there. But he has nonetheless written an impressive and admirably fair-minded book: anybody who wants to understand the nexus between God and power in modern America should start here.

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Role of faith in USA politics

source: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR - The Daily Telegram via Atheist Revolution

My highlights in bold.

Friday, June 8, 2007 11:45 PM EDT

Danger of religion

To the editor,

I am writing due to the increased role of faith in politics. Despite the right’s attempt to portray the left as “godless,” there is not one Democratic candidate who doesn’t claim a religion. But aside from the specific religious affiliations of the candidates I would like to remark on the problems faith poses.

As more people are reminding us, we are a country founded on secularism. Our country was founded with the morals and values common to many world religions, including Christianity, in mind. To say that we were founded solely on Judeo-Christian values is to be mistaken. This is what has made us so great. Any person who has traveled abroad in the last five years will know that we are not regarded as great anymore but a country of religious fanatics, more similar to our enemies.

A recent poll shows that Americans would be more comfortable voting for a person of most sects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam over an atheist. This is startling because it shows that it doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you believe something. I don’t know about you but I would rather elect someone who holds truth and evidence in high regard than a person unaccountably taking orders from the supernatural.

The portrayal of atheists as witches is a serious problem and is entirely false. There are a lot more Christian “evil-doers” than atheists. If you don’t think so, look at the data of religious affiliation of prisoners. Data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons show that over 99 percent of the prison population identifies as religious, the majority Christian, with only .209 percent claiming atheism. The number of atheists in the general population is 8 to 16 percent, which may be even more given the intimidation atheists face by people of faith.

The misconception is that religion is required for morality. It isn’t. Humans evolved a sense of morality, apes exhibit some forms of it. In all human cultures murder, rape, and incest are generally regarded as bad. “You scratch my back I scratch yours” is more personally beneficial than being a jerk who terrorizes people. All people, including atheists, can agree on this.

It is religion that gives people divine unaccountability. This is dangerous, because the person who disagrees is not only a dissenter but truly evil. There were no atheists plotting on September 11th, and none so eager to enter a war thereafter.

Adam Lewis

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What I Think About Evolution by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback

In our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not "believe" in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it demands.


reposted from:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1214,n,n
Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/opinion/31brownback.html?th&emc=th

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason.

Faith is the belief in pronouncements made by a supernatural being. Scientific evidence* suggests that in all probability no such supernatural being exists. Therefore Faith is unreasonable.

Indeed we should make strenuous efforts to highlight the falsity of faith by driving wedges between faith and reason.

* Victor Stenger's 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1591024811.

I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.

The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.

Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves. There are aspects of evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him. It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

Biologists will have their debates about man's origins, but people of faith can also bring a great deal to the table. For this reason, I oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion. An attempt by either to seek a monopoly on these questions would be wrong-headed. As science continues to explore the details of man's origin, faith can do its part as well. The fundamental question for me is how these theories affect our understanding of the human person.

The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded.

WASP: This is a religious arguement without any evidence.

I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man's essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.

WASP: ditto

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man's origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.

WASP: Evidence for this 100% certainty? Prouncements of sky-gods are zero evidence.

Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

Without hesitation, I am happy to raise my hand to that.

Sam Brownback is a Republican senator from Kansas.

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