Where it really gets dicey is whether you believe in the story of Adam being created from dust to exist in a state of grace, knowing no evil or sin, until he and Eve fell from grace by eating the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. But science tells us that humans didn’t fall, but rose up from lower forms of life, inheriting many of their animalistic instincts from the start.

St. Augustine taught that the Bible, including this account, was not necessarily to be taken literally. But certain Protestants, beginning with John Calvin and today the Southern Baptists, have held that we all inherit the”Original Sin” of Adam and Eve, and that Jesus died on the Cross to redeem us from this Original Sin. To them, if the story of Adam and Eve isn’t really true, then Jesus dying on the Cross makes no sense, as Jerry Falwell said once. And in that case, Protestantism collapses.

So the biggest conflict between the Theory of Evolution and religion is with Protestantism specifically, and its own treatment of sin and the death of Jesus.

And polls confirm this. In America, acceptance of the Theory of Evolution is most common among Jews, least common among Protestants. It’s this peculiar linking by Protestants of the Fall of Adam and Eve with the death of Jesus that is most problematic.

I will say this is one of the better forums I’ve found for people who actually have some meat behind what they say. Disagreement and debate is worthwhile if you walk away from it having learned a little something, or if you’ve been able to sharpen and refine your own opinion.

You are light years ahead of these other commenters. They are mostly partisans with no contemplative thoughts whatsoever. They are right and they know it.

You are one of the very few commenters here who has something enlightening to say that isn’t some partisan reaction or some snide dismissal. You are a true scientist IMO because you recognize that there is much more that we don’t know, vs. the pseudo scientists who believe they know everything (or almost everything) and they cite the existence of superstitious people as some kind of proof of their superiority. Unaware that they also suffer from superstitions.

Because the Enlightenment began the emphasis on rational inquiry, nearly to the exclusion of meditative or contemplative inquiry.
In most cultures, mythos and logos are more equally respected as different means to reach different sorts of truth.
Logos, observation of the physical world, can tell you how things work.
Mythos, exploration of the inner world, where deeper human truths are uncovered.
Logos can tell you how to split an atom.
Mythos is where you go to explore the appropriate uses for it.

Once myth got relegated to second-class status, lumped in with fiction, then religion thought it had option but to try to read its myths as science if it wanted to be taken seriously. Thus, the story of Eden, which is rich in symbolism and where a contemplative reader can learn a great deal about human beings, their relationship with each other, their sense of separation from divinity, their sense of being outcasts, their struggle for survival, sexuality, yearning for the innocence of childhood, gender relationships, or about the way early civilizations thought about things, becomes posited as a geographic location with flora and fauna subject to catalogue. So you end up with mail-order Ph.D’s stubbornly insisting they’re doing science by starting with a conclusion and trying to prove it, apparently unaware that if God could be put in a box, disected, calibrated, and measured, it wouldn’t be much of a God.

Fortunately, psychology and science fiction rushed in to fill the void

I’ll tell you why. These same people insist on crafting ‘proof’ of god’s existence in order to de-legitimize atheism and agnosticism. With today’s sci-tech advancements, it’s no longer effective enough for these religious radicals to point moralistic fingers. So they’re trying to drag their ID pseudo-science into it.

I have an acquaintance–I won’t call him a friend since I’ve only minimally hung out with him–who is a faculty member of University of Chicago’s Committee on Evolutionary Biology. He’s also a practicing Christian. He finds no contradiction between the religious and scientific aspects of his life.

Religion simply has no place in science. It equally has no place in government, law or public policy.

I’ll never understand this view. There is no small percentage of scientists who believe in both god and evolution. Before the Big Bang, science has no explanation for how the heck everything started. It’s not a denial of current science to believe that your concept of god kicked everything off, or even that god was a guiding hand to the whole process with humans as the final intended “product”.

So why is it so hard for so many people to accept a place for both god and evolution?

The very second that religious supposition is injected into scientific study, the science becomes invalid. It can no longer withstand scrutinous peer review. So it’s junk. Every scientist in the world worth his microscope knows this. Yet, the IDers don’t ‘get’ why they themselves and their ID theory are dismissed by the scientific community. An informative read:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9452500//

Religion and science are fundamentally at odds with one another: science requires evidence, precise methodology. Religion requires nothing more than belief.

This fact does not inherently foster moral contradiction for people of faith. Many scientists–biologists & evolutionists even–subscribe to a religion in which they personally believe. But the IDers are compelled by their religious radicalism to ‘prove’ the existence of God.

Can’t be done: bottom line, unexplained phenomenon is never scientific evidence of the existence of God.

But sinz underlines the subtext at the heart of all the drama: that morality–moral responsibility–is only born of religion, one’s belief in a higher power. Today, on so many levels, such a concept is unmitigated nonsense.