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    At its recent meeting in Missouri, the American Association for the Advancement of Science called out to mainstream Christian denominations to join the scientific organization in condemning the advancement of the intelligent design theorists’ challenge of evolution. In doing so, they really ask those Christian denominations to accept evolution as an established fact and renounce the notion of intelligent design as a belief.
    The problem is that the entire debate over intelligent design versus evolution is oblique to the actual problem that both the scientific and Christian communities face in our modern, so-called enlightened world. The truth is that the debate is really symptomatic of two entirely separate problems, neither of which have that much to do with the debate being argued.
    First, there is the problem that the wider Christian community in the West is no longer exactly sure what it believes. Many Christian bodies- Christian more often in name rather than teaching or practice- no longer believe in the Bible, or in some cases, even in Jesus. The majority of the teachings of these Christian-named groups have become so muddled that they cease to be coherent, leaving them open to unending criticisms of their remaining practices and teachings.
    In truth, the Christian community in the West would do better with addressing its own problems before it tackles the issues of the modern world. If it cannot even decide what it believes, how can it address what it perceives as something wrong in the wider world? Indeed, such attempts to address problems like evolution will be viewed with the skepticism and incredulousness that they are now.
    Second, the scientific community needs to look at itself with the same skepticism and incredulousness that it has currently focused on the Christian community and the intelligent design movement. Despite all of the rhetoric and fanatical loyalty to the theory, evolution is not a theory that is ‘virtually proven’. Whatever one’s position toward evolution may be, to treat this theory like one treats the Laws of Thermodynamics or gravity is plain foolish.
    There are ideas, concepts, and trends of evidence that exist. Do these things prove evolution? In fact, they prove that something exists, but what that something is remains to be seen. The truth is that the scientific community at large is trying to prove a belief that something should be true by a statistical sample far too small to prove anything other than that something happened.
    These two problems do not preclude a wider debate between Christian and scientific groups over science or religion, but they do illustrate the futility of trying to resolve disagreement between the two when there are serious flaws with the positions that each side takes to begin with.
DLH
