Nic,
I apologize that it has taken me so long to reply to your email, but I wanted to give it the full attention that it deserves.
I appreciate your apology about the group reply. It was so nice to receive. It was much better received than the first reply, which in all honesty did come off slightly bitter and angry. In your third email (addressed to myself and Shawn) I was able to reconcile where you were coming from and understand your musings in more detail. I am hesitant to discuss these issues with you because I believe that opinions are not altered through debate, but rather through experience. No amount of dialog is likely to change either of our minds. Although, if we are sincerely seeking truth as we both insist, then it is possible, but still not probable. Therefore, I would like to make it clear to you that my intent is not to convince you of my conclusions. In your “quest to free all of us former fundamentalist Christians” my beliefs have been called into question and I am going to defend them. While, I do not consider myself a fundamentalist Christian as you have described, I still feel it necessary to explain my evaluations. I hope that you receive it that way. I would never want to barrage you or your opinions which I do respect. I am hopeful that we can have a friendly, sensitive discussion about all things political and religious.
Speaking of which, I do not recall ever discussing my current religious beliefs with you in our recent, but brief correspondence. I was surprised to find that you had come to these estimations about me (I remained brainwashed by Christian High, I am insulated to truth and shun the pursuit of it, etc.) based on an email link to register to vote. I imagine I am not the only person on the receiving end of your reply who was offended to have such judgments made. To make these statements as if you are the only person who graduated from Christian High that has actually been living in the real world for the past 10 years facing disbelief, creation vs. evolution, democrats vs. republicans, skepticism, personal exploration, the pursuit of knowledge, etc. is somewhat ridiculous, don’t you think? The majority of people for the majority of time have been looking for answers and the truth. I hope you are not taking a self-righteous posture here. Assuming that you are not, I am willing to be completely vulnerable with you. I am willing to put all of my beliefs before you and subject them to tireless scrutiny and possible mockery. All I ask is that you disregard the notion that I have not pursued truth outside of my Christian upbringing and have chosen to remain ignorant to the possibility that there is more to know than what my 18 years spent under my parents’ roof has taught me. As you have already stated we have a wealth of information at our fingertips and through self-education can broaden our horizons which I have done. Otherwise, entering into this conversation with you would be something like alphabetizing my garbage. Pointless.
In an effort to bring you up to speed with my current verdict here is the breakdown…
I am a Christian. I believe the Bible is true (all of it) and I believe in a literal creation including that it was finished in 6 twenty-four hour days. I am registered with the constitution party. I made the switch from republican to constitutionalist several years ago because of my frustrations with the federal government (including the Bush administration) disrespecting the constitutional rights of the individual states and their governing authorities. In the preliminaries I voted for Ron Paul whose agenda most closely matched my personal desires for reformed government. In the upcoming election I am choosing to vote for the lesser of two evils, in my personal opinion. I cannot support Obama. I read through all of his proposals for change in January (before he was the democratic candidate) and completely disagree with most of his plans. In fact, I found myself more in line with some of Hillary’s proposals than his. While I disagree with a few of Senator McCain’s plans, many others I find quite palatable.
I too, believe that voting for a candidate because of religious beliefs and only because of them, could put someone in the category of an “imbecile”. In my opinion it is the same as supporting a candidate based on finding their personality affable. I know far too many Americans (democrat and republican alike) who vote like this. However, I must point out that many political matters are moral issues and many moral matters are political issues. Separating the two is impossible. The majority of civilians consider a political candidate based on their conclusions regarding moral issues like abortion and gay rights. I don’t believe you can categorize the “religious right” as the only offenders here. If you say that you are able to completely separate morality and politics you will be the first democrat (assuming that you are a democrat) I have met who has this miraculous ability. To which I might add that I am perfectly content keeping the two intertwined. I see no wisdom in disconnecting my moral inclinations from my political speculations.
I am not choosing to support Sarah Palin because she did not have an abortion. As I understand it both McCain and Obama have abortion-free records, also. J I am choosing to support her because I believe in her politics. The agenda she puts forward is worth supporting and her track record leads me to believe that she will act accordingly. Knowing that I have no control over whether she will follow through, all I can do is vote and hope.
Concerning your earlier statement… “evolution is not a debatable theory goddammit!” J I beg to differ. If so, why is it not called the Law of Evolution? I realize that creation is also a theory. The very doctrines of our Christian churches are called “Statements of Faith”. We recognize that there is a certain amount of faith which must be exercised in order to believe in the Bible. I understand this all too well. A few years ago I read through the Bible and ended up more frustrated and confused than ever! “Really, a talking donkey?! Please.” I had many questions and had to read ALL of the commentary and research some areas even deeper as I struggled to reconcile everything in my mind. That was a long 18 months! As you can see, I understand that believing in the Bible and a literal creation takes a certain amount of faith. However, I have found that evolution takes just as much faith, if not more. There are many unanswered issues…
- lack of transitional forms in fossil records
- Spontaneous Biogenesis has never occurred, not even in a laboratory. To take the idea one step further and say that a random genetic mutation could cause intricate and complex designs has never been documented. In fact, all documented genetic mutation has had a negative result which brings me back to laws and theories. The theory of evolution is in direct contradiction with the second law of thermodynamics.
- stratified rock layers containing fossils which are out of sequence (supporting a geological catastrophe).
Those are just a few of the questions which have puzzled me. With all sincerity (since you cannot see my face or hear my tone) please share with me what your beliefs are founded in. I am open to hearing you all the way out. I hope you will return the favor as we mount a quest together in which we are not freeing each other from anything, but rather taking honest stock of our beliefs and how they came to be. I’m sure it will stretch both of us as people!
With that said, I would love to understand better what things you sincerely believe. Is there a God? What do you believe happens to you when you die? How does the universe exist? Why is the war in Iraq wrong? (Personally, I have mixed feelings about it. My brother, who I deeply respect, began ranting about it and the Bush administration several years ago. This caused me to look into it further and I have sat uncomfortably straddling the fence ever since. I can explain this to you in more detail later.) Are you even registered to vote and with which party? If so, who are you voting for in the upcoming election?
I hope that our conversations can continue in a loving and beneficial manner!
-Paige
It was so nice to get your email. Humbling, in many ways, but in all ways, refreshing, honest and beautiful. I so appreciate it and the clear, wonderful thoughts therein. I have to say that I've been looking forward to a discussion like this for some time. I also must apologize again for my first email, this time for the tenor of the thing. I'm sorry that it felt presumptuous, pretentious and accusatory. I was hoping to get a reaction to start this discussion, and for that reason I'm glad that I sent it (not to your friends, but to those people that I know). I wish now that I had taken more care with my words, as I regret that it made you feel judged. Of course, I did judge you, inasmuch as I assumed you remained a republican and a christian, but I certainly did not mean to judge your character, experience, or intelligence which can only be described as exceptional (ie you are kind, wise mother, the greatest of all experiences).
As I said before, I am bitter about my upbringing and I, quite evidently, have not come to peaceful terms with it. The reaction I had to getting a McCain link was not one of judgment of your beliefs, but rather a reaction to my own experience of republican politics. I am not a democrat. I have no particular antagonistic political feelings toward republicans, but I do closely relate the republican party with the religious and political framework of my past. A past that I experienced as full of fear and imposed ignorance. CHS was the main source of this culture and so getting a republican link from an old CHS classmate was a double whammy on my psyche. It opened up a whole host of thoughts and emotions that I had stored in the back closet of my consciousness. I'm glad that they are out and I'm glad that I am still mad, because I do believe some soul-searching is in order.
While I cannot engage you in a discussion about the particular beliefs of the current presidential candidates because I know little of substance, I will wholeheartedly agree with you that moral issues cannot be separated from political beliefs. I certainly would not argue otherwise. Morality, the ethical culture of a society, shapes the political landscape. Politicians speak about abortion, gay rights and the environment, precisely because they are contentious moral issues in our society. They do not speak about the freedom to murder or steal because everyone in society agrees on these moral issues. Though I am not a Christian, I still believe that there are basic moral virtues that are right and good and proper. I feel strongly about our responsibility as conscious beings to realize these virtues. I also feel that the doctrine and legalism of organized religion clouds the pursuit of these virtues by replacing the natural curiosity of our place in this world with an unnatural faith in the unknowable. To question our place and to search for answers is a uniquely human virtue. We were taught that the answers could be found only in the bible and that all other speculation could be quelled, not through the experience of the natural world, but through faith in an unseen god. I believe we were misguided.
You asked me what my beliefs are founded in. I will first try to tell you what they are. I believe in being comfortable with uncertainty. I do not know how we got here or where we are going; I have ideas and hopes, but I do not know. I think by looking we get closer to the answers and I'm comfortable with that search. I think that life is. Life is the "Great I Am." My life, your life, the life of the plants, even the life of planets and stars, is all the same great being. I think to feel a part of this great fabric of life is to be happy, transcendent and free. I do not know what happens to us when we die, except that I know our bodies go back into the earth. I do not care. We are here now and now is what we experience. To hope for a heaven in an afterlife assumes that it is not here now. I believe that with open study and understanding of life we can transcend the fear that keeps us from enjoying the beautiful heaven that is here on earth. And I believe that the only way to understand life is to look at it.... which brings me to nature and evolution.
First some semantics.... in modern texts, evolution is not referred to as "the theory of evolution,"it is simply "evolution," just as reproduction is not referred to "the theory of reproduction." At one time there were theories of reproduction, just as there were theories of evolution (or the differentiation of the species), but we now have enough evidence to be confident in the mechanisms for both. The unanswered issues that you listed are the same issues that we were taught in Miss Wagner's lectures on evolution. I brought these issues with me to my freshman biology class taught by Stephen Jay Gould, a quite famous evolutionist (I even think that Miss Wagner warned us of him!). He addressed each issue beautifully in his first lecture on the subject and left me both dumbfounded and enlivened to learn more about our collective evolutionary past. I met with him after class and told him about CHS. He said, "Well of course, San Diego is a hotbed for creationism, but don't be fooled, to be christian is not to be creationist, many of my dearest friends and the evolutionary scientists I respect the most are Christians. Christianity and evolution are not mutually exclusive." God bless him! Now I didn't accept evolution that day, but I was on my way.
And on to the issues:
- Lack of transitional forms in the fossil record: This is quite simply not true. There are ample "transitional forms" in the fossil record. There just aren't ample fossils in general. Fossils are incredibly rare as the conditions to create rock from soft living matter don't happen often. But when they do we get really cool plants and animals that are clearly ancestors of today's species. (check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_transitional_fossils ) There are also ample transitional forms all around us as. In fact we are all transitional forms on the way to becoming something via natural selection and genetic drift. But first let me try to conceptualize it for you. Dogs are an example of humans driving evolution by consciously selecting for certain traits. All dogs are descended from wolves, mastiffs to chihuahuas, they all come from the same gene pool. If all dogs except greyhounds and English bulldogs went extinct we might have a hard time seeing how one could be related to the other. Even if we uncovered a fossil of a Yorkie, we would still be at a loss. But there they are, all with the wolf as their common ancestor. Isn't it amazing that all of the different genes needed to make the lean lines of the greyhound and the squishy face of the bulldog are already there in the wolf? This is how evolution works, only the driving force of change is the natural environment. Plants and animals that express traits suited to an environment will survive and make offspring with those traits, only the traits will be expressed stronger. Traits that are useless fade away. If you're a little dinosaur that makes it's living jumping from tree to tree, and you have lighter, fluffier scales, you're gonna jump further. If you mate with another dinosaur with light fluffy scales your babies are gonna have really light fluffy scales, and so on until your descendants have feathers and can fly. It's simple and there is evidence for it everywhere, from the hard fossil record to the tiny strings of DNA in every living thing. - Spontaneous biogenisis has never occurred: The truth is that we've never observed it occur. However, we can make organic molecules from inorganic molecules in a lab, and we are learning about how simple molecules can replicate themselves, which is all we need for evolution. Viruses are pretty unlifelike... many of them are just a protein shell and some DNA, but that's enough get going down the path of evolution. I could expound on this for pages, but I'm gonna leave it at that for now. And just to touch on your point, random genetic mutation is not the driving force of evolution, natural selection for inherited traits is. To be sure, random mutation may, in rare cases, lead to a favorable trait that will be passed on, but you will never find anyone arguing that "random genetic mutation could cause intricate and complex designs." Unfortunately that is only a misleading conceptualization that we were taught as teens and has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. A more modern argument is one of "irreducible complexity," also bunk, but I will leave that for next time.
- Stratified rock layers containing fossils which are out of sequence: I looked online for examples of this, but I couldn't find any. Send me whatever you've got. I will say that the age of rock layers and the fossils found therein correspond just right. We find trilobites in old rocks and mammals in new rocks, and no mammals in old rocks and no trilobites in new rocks which is just what we would expect with evolution.
I don't know if there is a God, but I can tell you that I feel closer to him as I learn more about this universe. There is so much we are learning, so much we still don't know. The religion of CHS discouraged that learning and told us all we needed to know was in the bible. I'd like to know how you reconcile that with your experience, and the knowledge you have gained over the last ten years because I cannot. It still makes me angry.
Thank you so much for engaging me in this conversation. I, too, hope that it can continue in a loving and beneficial manner. Please know that I respect your beliefs and how they came to be. I'd like to know how you came to believe in the literal creation and the absolute truth of the Bible. I certainly will not mock your beliefs and I do not feel any self-righteousness. The opposite is true. I feel rather humbled by your generosity and wisdom.
In peace and love,
-Nic
